Autumn and winter bring us frosty nights, but can also give us some wonderfully sunny days and long shadows.
The bright autumn colours, hills and mountains dusted with snow and crisp clear air can be healthy and inspiring.
Even as the days get shorter, it is a great time for walking and enjoying our landscapes and the wildlife that inhabits them.
A walk will often reveal a wealth of fungi, fruits and berries. These are fed on by many birds and other animals in a rush to build up their condition for either a long migration south or before harsher winter conditions hit in force.
While some animals move south, others move here to overwinter from farther north. So while we lose some summer visitors, we also gain some new winter ones.
Some of Scotland’s most impressive wildlife and spectacular assemblages of birds are also prominent at this time of year.
The red deer, Britain’s largest land mammal, can be seen in most areas of the Highlands, but it is absent from Orkney and Shetland.
They spend most of the summer months in hills and remote glens, but can be spotted on lower ground during late autumn and winter, where food is more readily available.
Stags and hinds live separately for much of the year, but come together at the start of the breeding season, or rut.
It can be an impressive sight, watching them lock antlers and jostle for power with other challenging males.
A winter walk along our coasts may give you good views of grey seals which have their pups from October through to February.
In Shetland, most pups are born in October and November, but farther south, in Sutherland and Caithness, this takes place mostly in November and December.
If you are lucky, you can also see otters feeding among the seaweed around the coastline.
Many greylag geese breed in Iceland and migrate in early autumn to winter exclusively in Britain and Ireland.
In the past, the east coast of Sutherland, Caithness and Orkney were mainly used as a stopping-off point during the migration of geese from Iceland, before they dispersed to their traditional overwintering haunts farther south.
Nowadays, these winter visitors are supplemented by an increasing number of birds which now breed and overwinter in the north.
Some 40 years ago, the greylag goose was a rare bird in Orkney. However, now it is one of the most important areas in Britain for wintering greylag geese.
Numbers have increased from less that 1,000 in the early 1980s to over 80,000 in recent years.
If you see geese flying overhead or roosting on farmland and coastal areas, look out for the less-common Greenland white-fronted and pink-footed geese, as these also migrate through our area and occasionally overwinter here, too.
You may also see the occasional Bean goose, in mixed flocks of geese.
In autumn and winter, visiting waders and wildfowl occur in very large numbers and there are many places in east Sutherland with good vantage points to watch these birds in the autumn and winter.
Along the Dornoch Firth and at Loch Fleet National Nature Reserve (NNR) in particular, you can watch waders, including oystercatcher, curlew, redshank, ringed plover, dunlin, knot and bar-tailed godwit.
Loch Fleet is also rich in wildfowl, including wigeon, teal, mallard, shelduck, pintail and eider. The National Nature Reserve has a bird hide overlooking Balblair Bay and details are available on the NNR website – www.nnr-scotland.org.uk
Offshore, you can find wintering red-throated, black-throated and great northern divers.
Flocks of whooper swan and the less-common mute swan also winter around our area.
If you are out and about, don’t forget the wealth of archaeology and remarkable geology that can become more visible as the plants die back and trees lose their leaves.
The Heart of Neolithic Orkney is a World Heritage Site, which puts it on a par with internationally recognised monuments such as Stonehenge and Egypt’s pyramids.
Geopark Shetland and the North West Highlands Geopark are both internationally recognised Unesco Geopark sites and the trails and visitor facilities at Knockan Crag National Nature Reserve, near Elphin, in Sutherland, are well worth a visit at any time of the year.
Knockan lies within the North West Highlands Geopark and is part of the Rock Route interpretation trail from Ullapool to Eriboll. A Rock Route leaflet is available in the publications section of the SNH website (www.snh.gov.uk).
And even although it does get dark early, take time to look up and admire our spectacular starry skies, discover the constellations and search for planets and shooting stars. On some clear nights, there can also be spectacular displays of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights.