July Dragons & Damsels

One of the problems of identifying dragonflies is that there are sometimes different 'forms' within a species - which basically means there are variations in both the colours and the patterns. These can be extreme enough to make identification of some individuals quite difficult, as happened with this hawker, seen clinging to the trunk of a gorse bush by the side of a track in Backies.

It doesn't look like any of the 'normal' hawkers but it seemed most likely to be one of the three hawkers recorded from this area, the azure, common and southern. It was very like some forms of the azure and common but the yellow costa on the wings - little bars of colour at the front of the wings near their tips - suggest it's a female common hawker, of the 'blue' form because of the colour of the spots along the abdomen.

This means we have now found two of the three local hawker species. This one was spotted last August, also at Backies: it's a southern hawker, a male of the 'blue form'. Now we've just got to find an azure....

If the hawker posed a bit of a problem it was nothing when compare to this damselfly. There is nothing on the internet or in the very good book 'Britain's Dragonflies' which looks anything like it. However, once again I was helped by there being a limited number of damselflies this far north, the blue-tailed, common blue, large red, emerald, and maybe azure and northern, and once I started searching for an immature form I found it. This is almost certainly an immature male common blue.

It's not been a great month for dragonflies. It's been fairly warm, by local standards, but dragonflies do like a little sunshine, which has been in short supply. Here's hoping for a sunnyAugust.

A Crisis?

I took a brisk walk along a low-tide Golspie beach for a couple of hours this morning, finding it very crowded - I counted eight people and six dogs in the time - but almost deserted of wildlife. I keep going on about the lack of sea and wading birds and the almost total absence of anything washed up along the tidelines except....

....the occasional crab, but I do wonder whether there's something rather serious going on. The sort of thing I notice is....

....the terns which were busy flying up and down the beach but I didn't see one dive down to the water to feed. If there's no small fish washed up I wonder whether there are any out there for them to eat.

It's certainly an odd summer. After a long period of almost 'drought' conditions we had a spectacular thunderstorm on Tuesday night followed by torrential rain which continued for most of yesterday. There are still heavy showers around today but the temperatures haven't recovered: it was just 15C when I left the house this morning, and Saturday's maximum is forecast to be a miserable 13C.

'Hunter's Tracks'

I'm back reading another of the books that's followed me round all these years. It's the second book written by JA Hunter, an aptly named Scots white hunter who's first book, 'African Hunter', I wrote about here. This is a rather better-written book - he had a writer to help him - but is full of the sort of African adventure stories which I so loved.

The inscription is interesting. This is my father's writing so I would guess that he had been detailed off to go to the Mombasa Book Shop in Kilindini Road, buy it, and get it in the post to reach England by sea mail in plenty of time for Christmas. Richard and I had been out in Mombasa during the summer of '57, when we had the beautiful Hoey House on the beach at Nyali built, appropriately, by another white hunter, Cecil Hoey - post here. I note also the 'best wishes' - my father loved us dearly but would never have written the word - and his use of 'Jon' rather than the 'Jonathan' I would have expected.

I cannot remember who we were spending Christmas with but the chances are that it was my Aunt Noel in London.

It's a very dated book so one has to read it in the context of its time. So, for example, on the one hand Hunter writes so admiringly and so knowledgably of the elephants, then on the next page he's out at night with someone holding a torch while....

....he shoots half a dozen which have been marauding a farm belonging to a friend of his. Sadly, this was his job as the Kenya Game Department employed him as a control officer, which meant he shot animals which were either causing trouble or to clear them from areas designated for farming.

It's dated in other ways. He describes the vast numbers of animals which inhabited the plains of Kenya and refers to the magnificence of Kilimanjaro, but look at its snow-capped summit in this picture compared to....

....how we saw it from a 'plane a few years ago.

A Painted Lady

We had a great start to the day with a visit from a greater spotted woodpecker. It's not the first time one has enjoyed our peanuts but we wish they would come more often.

Our morning walk took us the length of the strip of woodland which runs to northeast and southwest of Dunrobin Castle. It's showing the effects of our lack of rain, particularly in the brittle brown grass in the clearings, where a few speckled brown butterflies were dancing in the light.

We came back along the coast track which runs below the castle, concerned to find very few insects on the wing. Usually the thistles at this time of year are covered in all sorts of bugs, butterflies in particular, but we only saw....

....the occasional bee, and the only butterflies were....

....meadow browns uninterested in the thistles and far more anxious to lie on the path and soak up the occasional appearance of a watery sun. No other butterflies, that is, until a flash colour caught our eye and we spotted....

....a lone painted lady. Painted ladies migrate up from North Africa, breeding as they come, and this is by no means their northern limit - they cross the sea to Orkney and Shetland. It was very lethargic, clinging to a grass stalk, and not unhappy....

....to transfer to my finger. Worryingly, the poor thing was shivering violently and leaking a thin, orange liquid - but look at the glory of its patterns and colours! Only this morning an expert speaking on Radio 4 was warning that we are losing much of our insect life. How can we risk our children and grandchildren not being able to see and wonder at such a butterfly?

July Fungi

Fungi are autumn weather lovers, aren't they? Not around here, for we're finding a wide range of fungi in mid-summer. I don't enjoy finding them because of the difficulties of identifying them so had been hoping for a fungus holiday, but we keep stumbling across them. This is an example, growing in the gravel track of one of the mountain bike trails below Backies. At least it was easy to identify, being a very definite green: it's green brittlegill.... I think.

The bright colour of this one, found in Ferry Wood, was also helpful. I've identified it as the aptly named hintapink brittlegill, but.... it may well not be.

With this one, things start to get complicated. It was growing in a heap of what looked like chippings and small branches at the top of Golspie Glen. Its colour isn't very helpful but the radial marks on top of the cap....

....the chocolatey gills and the distinctive 'ring' - like a skirt - around the stalk have helped. I think it may be Agrocybe rivulosa, the wrinkled fieldcap. If it is, it's quite exciting as, to quote First Nature, it was, "Unknown until 2003 and added to the British list in 2004, this fieldcap has since become fairly common in southern England, where its spread has been entirely due to the practice of mulching flowerbeds using wood chippings," and is only, "recorded occasionally in Wales and Scotland, where it is most often seen on heaps or on deep layers of woodchip...."

This one was found in Beinn Bhraggie Woods and is fairly certainly identified as a bolete from the cap formed of pores rather than gills, as in a mushroom. Which of the many boletes it is proves far more difficult. 

However, I'm quite pleased with this one as I'm almost certain of the identification: it's an orange birch bolete, Leccinum versipellis.

This large fungus would have been very easy to identify if it had been a rather more brilliant sulphurous yellow, in which case the identification of chicken of the woods, Laetiporus sulphureus, would have been almost certain. As its name suggests, however unappetising it looks, it's cooked as a vegetarian alternative to chicken.

Walking with Oystercatchers

Usually when we approach oystercatchers along a beach they, rather reluctantly, take off when we come uncomfortably near, often landing a little further along the beach or behind us, but today at Littleferry, as we approached this small group of six, one of them....

....detached itself from the others and walked purposefully towards us, soon joined by a second, and the two....

....came right up to Mrs MW, one pecking at her boot.

Even when we started to move away they followed, walking so close they threatened to trip us up, so we had to accelerate to leave them behind.

I have no idea what prompted this extraordinary behaviour, though I note that both the birds which came close to us had been ringed and that they were young. Have these birds been reared and released along the beach? What I do hope is that it's not that they are desperately hungry.

There were few other birds along the beach, with the exception of the usual convocations of gulls, another, larger, group of oystercatchers, and a noisy collection of terns, above. I still haven't been able to get close enough to take see what species they are but we didn't have this many along the coast last year.

Inland from the beach the links are desperately dry, some of the plants showing considerable distress. One of the few species which seems to tolerate lack of water is....

....the Scottish bluebell, which is out in numbers in the long grass, though....

....pickings looked pretty thin for this fox moth caterpillar.

Duchary Rock

We've been very fortunate in the wide range of walks we've been able to enjoy over the last year or so, most of them straight from the house, but we've been slow to look for new challenges; so today we took the car to the crofting township of Doll, just this side of Brora, and walked up through woodland until we came to a gate beyond which....

....lay miles of open moorland and, almost as important these days, a rough track for us to follow.

Everywhere, amongst the other wildflowers - tormentil, bog asphodel, heathers, cross-leaved heath - we found heath spotted orchids in a range of colours from almost pure white through to rich shades of royal purple.

Every now and then, through the haar rolling in off the sea, we had glimpses of Loch Brora, an elongate loch divided into four sections by sediment brought down by the burns draining the surrounding hills.

This was our objective, a ridge called Duchary Rock on the OS map. It's seen here end-on - the path skirts it to the left - at the far end of which....

....there are the broken walls of what was once a quite substantial hill fort.

The fort gave us a panoramic view of Strath Brora, though it was disappointing that the haar never quite cleared to allow the sun to come out.

So we have a new walk to enjoy into the future, and at least two other walks from the spot in Doll where we left the car. I don't think many people walk this way as this roe deer, spotted in the woodland as we returned to the car, seemed both surprise to see us and very reluctant to run away.

Loch Lunndaidh

It's some time since we last walked the winding Estate track from Drummuie to Loch Lunndaidh and had forgotten what we so love about it: the heavy silence of the wild, open moor. Little moved, just a few pipits, small, pale moths and, as the temperature rose, a scattering of butterflies. 

Most of the trees that were planted last summer seem to have survived the winter but the mounds formed on which they were planted are now very visible, the dark, peaty soil having been washed. away to leave piles of pale stones, like small graves.

The silence seemed to deepen as we walked the rough path which follows the loch-shore. The water was very low - we've had no rain for days - but in the few damp areas along its margins we found....

....heath spotted orchids, most almost white, only the second colony of these delicate flowers we've found in the Golspie area. We also stumbled across....

....two of Britain's three species off sundew, the round-leaved one at bottom right and one with longer leaves at left. There are two long-leaved species but distinguishing them is beyond my capabilities.

All are carnivorous, as was amply demonstrated by this plant. In the past we've seen quite large insects caught in the sticky 'dew', the largest being a damselfly.

Birds Along the Waterline

On a still morning, warm under an overcast sky, on a walk along the shore between Golspie and Dunrobin Castle, we were amazed at how many seabirds were crowded along the waterline, mainly....

....common gulls, black-headed gulls and oystercatchers, most either asleep or preening themselves, along with a few....

....noisy and combative terns, possibly the sandwich terns we found here last year. All, like this tern pair, were in company with their young....

....these being, I think, juvenile black-headed gulls.

Closer in to the beach, amongst the rocks and seaweed, we found....

....dishevelled young oystercatchers and....

....half-a-dozen young ringed plovers, far more than we expected, so the few nests seem to have had a good year.

Just off the rocks, beyond the gull crowds, we spotted what might be a red-throated diver, a rare sighting.