Wildlife on Bute — seals at Scalpsie, otters at dawn, harriers over the moor.

The colony below Scalpsie Bay is Bute's wildlife set-piece. A signposted viewpoint on the A844 between Straad and Kingarth looks down over a sweep of sand and low skerries where both common (harbour) seals and larger grey seals haul out to rest and moult. On a good day you can count dozens.

Timing matters more than luck: come on a falling or low tide in daylight, when the rocks are exposed and dry. Calm, bright weather brings out the biggest groups; heavy rain and high water leave you looking at empty sea. Binoculars turn the visit from 'grey lumps' into faces, yawns and squabbles.

Watch from the viewpoint or the upper beach. If heads start lifting and animals shuffle toward the water you are too close — step back and they resettle within minutes. Dogs on leads here, always.

Buzzards are everywhere — mewing over the farmland along the A844 — and ravens work the higher ground. On the central moor above Loch Fad and around the West Island Way, hen harriers hunt low and slow in spring and summer, and short-eared owls occasionally do the same in daylight.

Loch Fad and Loch Ascog are the freshwater draw: greylag and Greenland white-fronted geese in winter, whooper swans passing through, little grebe and tufted duck, and reed buntings in the margins. Winter is genuinely good here, when the visitor numbers vanish and the birds arrive.

In the estate woodlands at Mount Stuart and Kean's Wood you get treecreepers, great spotted woodpeckers and — because Bute has no grey squirrels — red squirrels, which are far easier to see here than on the mainland. St Blane's in the south is a reliable spot for hovering kestrels and, in early summer, cuckoos calling across the glen.