A Walk by Loch Brora

We drove to the crofting community of Doll this morning to walk along the western side of Loch Brora, parking just up from the ford and following....

....the track through Sutherland Estate forestry to be confronted by....

....a notice which.... welcomes walkers. How heartening, for we are recently returned from an England where discouraging walkers is the order of the day for landowners.

The track leads out through a gate - which has a kissing gate for walkers - onto the open moor where the ling is now at its best.

Just up from the track - see map at top - there is a well-preserved hut circle. This picture looks in to it from what may well have been the doorway, but what struck us was that this dwelling was sited conspicuously on a small knoll, suggesting that the peoples who built it did not feel the need to hide from attack, but also that....

....they, like us today, enjoyed a good view from their veranda.

A little further on we climbed the hill to visit a broch, marked with a red arrow on the map, whose walls were....

....beautifully picked out by the flowers of the ling, the centre of the building being filled with bracken.

In one place the void between the outer and inner walls of the broch was clearly visible.

Although the broch may have been on a knoll for defensive purposes it also gave its inhabitants a fine view across Loch Brora.

Small Bird News

Feeding the small birds continues to cost a king's ransom. At present we have crowds of house sparrows: I counted 17 in the front garden this morning but the sparrowhawk came through, low and at great speed, causing them all to dive for cover.

We feed the small birds - and, indirectly, the sparrowhawks - throughout the 'summer' even though some expert opinion is against it because, for our money, we do receive hours of amusement. Some of it is obtained by changing things - like covering this small feeder in the front garden with mesh but leaving a very clearly marked hole for the small birds - but hopefully not the greedy blackbirds - to get in and out. For some time none of the sparrows could work it out but, as happens so often, once....

....one of them caught on, the rest rapidly followed. Sadly, the bird which is best at problem solving continues to be the jackdaw, particularly....

....one semi-resident jackdaw which has managed to work out how to get at the food protected by this wire cover. It can't reach it all - I add strands of wire each time it develops a new trick - but it keeps catching up.

I feel bad about the wire covers, of which there are more and more in the garden, as they keep out some of the rather gentle birds, like this constantly-nervous collared dove, which would otherwise be very welcome to a quick snack.

For some time we were without any woodpeckers and we worried that this was because we were seeing so much more of the sparrowhawk, and dreaded finding red feathers scattered across the lawn - but the woodpecker was back the other day, always on the same feeder.

The sparrowhawk is very welcome to a few of the small birds as long as he doesn't take the rarer ones, like....

....the coal tits, which are only just back in the garden after a summer spent doing important things like raising the next generation.

It's good to see some of the next generation in the garden. This is a young greenfinch which we hope will stay with us through the coming winter.

For some time there seemed to be only one robin in the garden, one of this year's with a barely-developed red breast, but now we have at least two others, both adults, and as a result the conflicts have started. This is good as we can now look forward to an autumn and winter of watching the robins sort out their territories.

Up into Empty Forestry

We walked up into the higher forestry below Beinn Bhraggie summit today, into dark, silent pinewoods almost devoid of life even though....

....the ling is in full flower for the insects and....

....there's a feast of blueberries for the birds and for any human that....

....cares to spend a few minutes picking them.

The only butterfly we saw was a lone spotted wood, the one species which seems to have done fairly well this year.

Perhaps the lack of insect life is because the weather has turned cooler but I don't think so. It does just seem to have been a bad year for them even though, in the last few days, we've seen reasonable amounts of pleasant sunshine. For example, our dark purple buddleia, which would usually be covered in butterflies, hover flies and bees, has almost finished flowering with very little showing any interest.

Only the fungi seem to be doing well, colonising every available spot and, in the absence of everything else, giving us plenty of pleasure.

Mid-August Fungi

We have never, ever seen so many fungi as were growing here in the middle of this month. They were bursting out all over the place, in varieties of colour, size, shape and, very likely, level of lethality. The ones in these pictures were found before August 24th: since then we've found a heap more.

I do like to identify them but, with the majority, all I can do is hazard a rather uneducated guess. The one in the picture above looks like one of the pores, perhaps a bolete, and it may be slippery jack, which is supposed to be good eating.

This one is the size of a golf ball and, at first, I had great difficulty in identifying it, but I'm now fairly sure it's a young fly agaric, of which there are....

....some real beauties in the woods, particularly in the conifer plantations.

This look like a brassy version of fly agaric but I don't think it is. It's either panthercap, Amanita pantherina, which is poisonous, or it's grey spotted amanita, Amanita excelsa, which is edible - which is why I would never trust myself to identify a fungus with the certainty that I would risk eating it.

This is the same fungus except fully developed, showing a white skirt but....

....this very similar one remains a mystery, except that it's possibly a bolete.

At first this one stumped me but I'm now fairly sure it's an uncommon version of the common puffball. It's the first fungus I've come across where the stem is wider than the cap.

This fungus demonstrated the group's ability to push up through even a very hard surface, in this case a gravel track compacted by the passage of mountain bikers. I'm willing to hazard a guess at this one: it may be oak milkcap, Lactarius quietus.

This one was in full bloom by the track that leads up Golspie Glen. Each fungus is large, about 4 - 6" across, and, again, I'm willing to have a go at its identification: branched oyster mushroom, Pleurotus cornucopiae.

The gate in the background here is the railway crossing at Dunrobin Castle station, one of those lovely 'halts' where you have to hold out your hand to stop a passing train. The fungus is a bracket, which may be the conifer-base polyphore, Heterobasidion annosum, or the southern bracket, Ganoderma australe. Maybe.... maybe....

The Groundnut Scheme

I have once again dug out and re-read an old book, one which belonged to my parents. It describes one of those all-too-common and best-forgotten projects into which, despite clear warnings, governments pour millions of pounds and which, inevitably, go horribly wrong - events far from here at this present time are a fine example.

This one involved a good idea - to grow peanuts on a vast scale, some 5,000 square miles, in Tanganyika, a little-developed part of our Empire, to provide vegetable oils desperately needed in places like Britain and, incidentally, to develop the local economy. At the time, 1947, the UK was still rationing food following the end of the war and wanted to be more independent of the US for food supplies. The first of three areas to be developed was near Kongwa in the centre of the country.

The machines to be used were a good example of the multiple problems that arose. In my father's 'Life' my mother wrote, "The first tractors [old US army bulldozers] arrived from the Philippines on a ship into Dad's African Mercantile Company and the captain wirelessed in that he wanted a Lloyds' Survey as several of the machines had broken loose in the hold. The captain told Dad that the tractors had been taken off the invasion beaches, painted yellow and shipped, and some were so rusty he doubted if they would be of any use - he was right."

The problems multiplied. "They were very doubtful about the proposed area as rainfall was a problem and it had not been surveyed properly. When the clearing started Wagogo villages were found and had to be relocated. The area was thickly forested, partly with baobab trees which proved most difficult to uproot. To speed things up chains were stretched between tractors - see picture - and they drove through the trees uprooting the easier ones. Ploughing turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated as the soil had a large amount of mica in it and this wore out the ploughs very fast. Dad had a very worrying time...."

Huge workshops had to be built and equipped out in the bush. Over a thousand men came from the UK to work on the scheme and they, along with more thousands of local staff, had to be housed, fed and paid. Communications were primitive, the port at Dar-es-Salaam became hopelessly congested, and the rains, as predicted, failed. Management was poor: no-one was sure whether it should be military or civilian style, and it was managed from afar - London. Also, "Supplies of food became difficult in Dar with the great influx of people, milk being one of the big problems and only people with children got fresh milk, from Temeki Dairy. Vegetables were another problem."

By 1949 the scheme was admitted to be a disaster. £36 million (£1 billion in today's money) had been spent and fewer peanuts produced than had been shipped out as seed. The land was handed over to local African farmers who set about growing tobacco and cashew nuts, and herding cattle.

Information Boards at Littleferry

Well done to the rangers at NatureScot for this simple but inexpensive idea, a series of small information boards about pollinators on a short circuit around the links at Littleferry, starting at the main car park. They've managed to site them....

....in a variety of habitats so, in theory at least, as people go round they'll see different pollinator species. This one was even sited right next to an example of its subject, ragwort.

The information is good, too. The board about gorse had several tidbits of information which were new to me.

I'm hoping they'll take this a step further by changing the boards with the seasons. Boards about pollinators aren't going to seem very relevant in the depths of a wintery January.

On the subject of pollinators, here are some of them at work at Littleferry. If I have my identification right, they go by the lovely name of marmalade hoverflies, Episyrphus balteatus.

The Changing Season

We probably walk the ancient coast path that runs northeastwards from the village, passing below Dunrobin Castle, more than any other walk, particularly on days like today when there is hardly a cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind....

....so the sea is flat calm. It's a gentle walk with several places to stop. This picture was taken from the gate at the end of the forestry, where the path emerges into open meadows, a gate we lean against to enjoy the views and the wildlife; but we pass most time on a bench nearer the village which, at this time of year, is close to a mass of thistles which....

....the butterflies adore. It hasn't been a good year for butterflies and, even in this bright, calm weather, there aren't many on the wing: a few tortoiseshells, looking fresh minted, a common blue or two, the occasional 'cabbage' white, and....

....a surprising number of this tiny butterfly, a small copper, here sharing the thistle feast with a selection of flies.

The goldfinches also enjoy the thistles but a little later in their cycle, when the seeds are set. This was one of a 'charm' of goldfinches feeding near....

....a rather neglected terrace of Sutherland Estate farmworkers cottages.

Another sign of the changing season is the number of berries on the rowans, usually taken as a sign of how severe a winter we can expect: judging by the rowans' forecast, not too bad.

However, the classic sign of this changing season is the gathering of the swallows ready for their long migration south. These ones were basking in the sun on a goalpost set up by children against the stone wall surrounding Dunrobin Castle's vegetable garden. As I say to them every year, how I wish I were flying south with you, back to Africa to escape the cold tentacles of our coming northern winter.