Hawkers Ovipositing at Balblair Wood

A couple of a hundred metres from the car park the track through Balblair woods reaches the Culmaily Burn along which the trees have been cut back to allow the passage of two power lines. The burn is crossed by means of a sturdy wooden bridge, where we always stop to peer down....

....into its peaty waters. The burn rises in Loch Lunndaidh, falling quickly before running under the A9 and draining the flat lands of Culmaily Farm, whence it passes through Balblair woods to end its short journey in Loch Fleet. Normally there isn't much to see in the burn but today....

....with the burn still low after the dry weather we spotted....

....a large dragonfly hovering over the water to deposit its eggs. It was one of two, both constantly dipping in and out of the water but....

....not all of the eggs were placed in the water, some being....

....pushed quite deep into sand.

The rapidity with which the eggs were laid was such that, in the shadows of the burn, it was difficult to get a good pictures but, from what I can see, I would guess this was a common hawker.

Barasa

Ouma was our cook for the ten years we spent in Mombasa, and a very good cook he was.

Because he was a Jaluo from the shores of Lake Victoria he didn't have a home in Mombasa, unlike Saidi who was a local man, so Ouma was accommodated on the premises, in a single room. He shared a small kitchen and a shower room with toilet with Kitetu and Mlalo, who were also from out-of-town.

For most of the time his wife and family stayed on their small shamba, or farm, in their home district but every now-and-again they would travel down to Mombasa by train to stay with Ouma, which is how we came to know Ouma's oldest son, Barasa. I think I'm right in saying that Barasa was between Richard and I in age.

Ouma had high hopes for Barasa, and was very proud of his progress in school. My memory of Barasa is of a very quiet, nervous boy but, thinking back, this doesn't surprise me as he must have been overawed by  two very arrogant, self-confident white boys. Nevertheless, Ouma encouraged his son to play with us though, to be honest, he must have hated it. I suppose Ouma felt that it would be good for Barasa to learn to deal with white people but also that his son playing with us gave the boy some kudos.

After our parents left Mombasa they made an effort to keep in touch with the four servants, sending them money when it was needed; and when they visited Mombasa in 1967 they went out of their way to meet up with them.

Ouma continue to keep in touch. In a letter written in July 1967 he says, "One thing which I think will surprise you is that my son Barasa left school before he qualified so he is just at home jobless." The word 'surprise' can hardly have described his feelings, for this must have been a bitter disappointment to him not only because he was proud of Barasa but also because a young Kenyan with no qualifications had few prospects.

I do wonder what happened to Barasa. Richard and I had all the privileges that life could offer while he had few, and what chances he did have seem to have slipped through his fingers. Nevertheless, I hope he had a good life. Perhaps in its simplicity it may have been a happier and more fulfilling one than we had.

Harriet Plantation

Harriet Plantation is one of many areas of woodland around here which is maintained by Land & Forestry Scotland and is freely accessible to the public. We visited it last weekend for a very pleasant walk which included some of my favourite features - like, there was plenty of history, including....

....the remains of an early 13th century motte and bailey castle, Proncy Castle, and....

....a typical hut circle. Both, as is so often the case with these settlement sites, have fine views, here southwards to the Dornoch Firth. However, the highlight of the walk was the discovery of....

....an osprey nest from which....

....we inadvertently disturbed three ospreys, one of them carrying something. Now that we know where the nest is, in future we'll be able to creep up on it and observe its owners in residence.

Birds Along the Golspie Shore

Today's morning high tide along a grey, cool and drizzly Golspie beach brought in the usual sad reminders that....

....the H5N1 bird 'flu outbreak is still very much with us. This is a young gull which may have died of other causes but the other two corpses were guillemots, the species which seems to have taken the brunt of the epidemic locally.

Happily there are still seabirds along the shore, including a pair of ringed plovers camouflaged against the seaweed: they need to be as this is prime dog-walking territory. We also saw....

....some of the mallard which inhabit the mouth of the Golspie Burn - it comes into the sea just beyond the low point. Along the rocks on this section we noted something which seems increasingly common, the way that....

....what are considered land birds - wagtails, house sparrows, pipits - are taking to foraging along the tidelines.

Just off the mouth of the burn a lone eider paddled anxiously back and forth. The eider have been nesting inland - we haven't been to visit them this year but last year several pairs were rearing their young along the margins of Loch Fleet - and will shortly start to appear along the coast where they will winter.

Our Butterfly Count

The Big Butterfly Count asks us to sit for fifteen minutes in a day and count the number of each species of butterfly we see but here, with so few around, the biggest count has been of two butterflies, and on two days we saw none. So, just as an experiment, we decided to count how many we saw on a walk, one of our favourite walks up the glen of the Golspie Burn and then round through Backies. It's a good walk for the experiment, as it took us through a great variety of habitats including bracken-invaded fields, along field margins, and through both thick pine forestry and the mixed forestry....

....of the lower glen, the last with plenty of open, sunny glades. The weather helped, giving us cloudy moments but also plenty of sun.

We walked eight kilometres in two hours and, including....

....the very pretty small tortoiseshell which now seems to be resident on our garden's verbena, we saw 42 butterflies. Eight were whites of some sort, the rest were ringlets, speckled woods or meadow browns. Statistically, we therefore saw 5.25 butterflies per kilometre or, another way, 0.35 butterflies per minute.

I'm not sure that this is of the slightest use but seeing plenty of butterflies cheered us up no end; and it was a lovely walk.

Signs that H5N1 is Abating

This morning we walked the same stretch of beach as we did a fortnight ago when we saw scene that I described at the time as 'carnage', with both dead and sick sea birds scattered along the tideline - see earlier post here. Happily, today there were many fewer with only six corpses to be seen. However, the main victims....

....were, once again, the guillemots followed by gannets. It does seem as if certain species have suffered far worse than others - locally, the guillemots. Although there are reports of dead gulls we've only seen one, and there were plenty of them in their usual spots along the shore.

On the much more cheerful side, we saw a number of sandwich terns on rocks exposed by the falling tide, many of them in company with young black-headed gulls.

As we walked further along the coast beyond Dunrobin Castle we spotted about ten seals hauled out on the rocks, varying in size from quite small ones through to.... 

....this exceptionally large one. One wonders how he got himself onto that rock: perhaps he just lay on it and waited for the tide to go out.

A White MGB

All sorts of curious things come in to the charity shop where we work on two days of the week. This is an example, and it's part of the fun of the place that I can spend some time finding out what it is. It's about 20cm long, and a bit of research on the internet showed that it's the seed pod of Banksia grandis, a tree which is native to Western Australia.

In some ways such an object is rather sad as there's obviously a story behind it, but it's not part of our job to ask the person who has donated it, usually in amongst a load of other miscellaneous objects of more or less value to us, what the story is as it might have painful associations.

A metal plaque came in today, the sort of thing one might screw to the wall in a workshop, showing a very smart MGB sports car. It's a good example of how objects have associations for it brought back memories of our time in Jamaica because a very dear friend of ours owned this little white gem of a car.

His name was Bob Morris, he was an American, and he was part of the fun of being out there. However, like so many friends, we left him bobbing around in the wake of our continual movement, so we have no idea what happened to him. All we can do is hope he had a fulfilling life and made many other people smile as much he did us.

Swifts

This is a view looking across the playing fields to the northern end of Golspie where many of the houses are Council owned or were bought from the Council. They cluster round a small supermarket, a Spar, which kindly keeps a daily newspaper for us. In walking across to collect it this morning we noticed that the air was full of....

....swifts, a dozen or more, shrieking in excitement as they zoomed around below cloudy skies.

Only a fortnight ago I wrote a blog entry about the possible loss of our swift population yet the next day we saw about four above the promenade and now we've seen many more above the village. All of which goes to prove, I suppose, that my feelings of doom and gloom over the state of our wildlife may sometimes be a bit premature.

After collecting the paper we walked up the road towards Golspie Tower where a big house which has two perfectly-designed gable ends is once again hosting a small flock of house martins. I really am sure that there are fewer of this species as they used to nest in our gable end but didn't last summer and have given it a miss again this year.

Worms

There's a very pleasant little picnic area on the east side of Loch Fleet where NatureScot, the government body which cares for Scotland's natural heritage, has sited benches, a picnic table and a couple of 'interpretative boards' which describe the wildlife which might be visible out on the loch.

Benches have become increasingly important to us as welcome places to ease our old bones after a walk through the woods and along the Littleferry beach, but I find myself increasingly depressed when I sit beside the loch as there is so little wildlife to be seen.

These pictures were taken yesterday, looking out across the exposed mudflats of low tide to the bird hide on the north shore, when the main wildlife on the mudflats was....

....worms. Well, not the actual worms, but the casts the worms push to the surface as they work their way through the mud.

Worm casts aren't terribly exciting things to watch but the one thing that did impress me was their sheer numbers: there must have been millions of them. Yet the number of birds feeding on them was pitifully small. In this close-up view there are three gulls and a curlew, of which only the curlew has the bill to probe for worms.

Where are the other waders that one would normally expect to be feasting on this banquet? Is it normal for there to be so few at this time of year? Someone please tell me that I'm worrying unnecessarily.

Small Bird News

Close followers of this blog will have been sorely missing its Small Bird News feature, for which I can only apologise and plead lack of anything really exciting happening in the small bird world in our back garden, inundated as it is by what must now be at least the third brood of the resident house sparrows this year. This cheerful, chattering hoard appears as soon as breakfast is served on the various feeding platforms and consume almost everything, leaving very little to....

....the other residents like the robin. We've been quite worried about the robins as we'd seen little of them, unlike in previous years where there were, at times, as many as three pairs arguing over their territories. One finally put in an appearance along with its young, which was joined under the crow-proof netting by....

....what I'm fairly sure was a young dunnock. Dunnocks are one of my favourite birds mostly because they are so unassuming, minding their own business and never causing anyone any bother. I've often thought of them as the bird equivalent of a small, very energetic mouse.

Hardly anything exotic has come in to the garden, this pair of goldfinches being one of the few exceptions, not even stopping for a bite to eat and moving on pretty quickly.

We do still have both great and blue tits in the garden, possibly because some of the bird feeders have been designed to be tit-accessible and sparrow-proof, but the coal tits have, rather worryingly, disappeared. We've also seen....

....a greenfinch in the last couple of days, a sight which would not have been too remarkable a couple of months ago. His strategy was to appear long after the sparrow's bedtime, when he had all the feeders to himself.

The crows have been as much of a pain as always. We've had some invasions of rooks, which terrify everyone, but the main problem has been the very intelligent jackdaws. One pair dumped this young one in our garden and it's since taken up almost permanent residence, despite some very firm 'discouragement' from us. The small birds hate him as he's a devious bully - you'll probably remember the sort of thing from your school playground.

Geckos

When I was a boy in East Africa geckos were a part of my daily life. These small lizards, typically around 10cm in length, appeared at night and, because of the amazing suction system on their feet and their superb night vision, spent the dark hours hunting insects on the walls and ceilings of our bedrooms.

In the hot season my brother and my beds were moved out onto an open, upstairs veranda for coolness, and there the geckos were in gecko clover because the lights above our beds attracted a storm of moths and other insects. Then the geckos would not only hunt insects on the walls but also on our mosquito nets, so I might be lying in bed reading to be disturbed by a small 'thump' as one of them performed an acrobatic two-foot jump from wall to the netting to chase a particularly succulent quarry.

The geckos I remember on the East African coast were the common house gecko which was originally native to SE Asia. It's a boring pale brown, its only really interesting feature being that, if it approached a wall light to grab an insect, I could see its innards. Some of the geckos of Mauritius, by comparison, are day geckos and stunningly coloured. The island, small as it is, has five resident species of which the one at the top of this page is, I think, the ornate day gecko Phelsuma ornata.

A Backies Walk

It's still far too cool here for mid-July, and we're pestered by occasional rain showers brought in by the persistent westerlies but at least the wind has dropped to a breeze. Walking up the road towards Golspie Tower this morning, the gorse flowers have all died away leaving....

....the cock yellowhammers exposed - if not enough to stop them calling to each other “a little bit of bread and no cheeeeeese...."

The largest gorse patch is home to a family of roe deer. This male was less than ten metres away but wasn't in the slightest perturbed by our arrival, simply watching us intently until we removed ourselves.

We walked up to the Backies croft where they sell their beautiful brown eggs but found the cupboard bare, so returned via the soft woodland of Golspie Glen, sitting for a time on this bench to enjoy the occasional sunny intervals and....

....to watch the speckled woods that own the clearing.

We saw four species of butterfly on our walk but the quarter of an hour we spent in the garden at lunchtime for the Big Butterfly Count produced not a single butterfly.

We stopped again to look for dragonflies along the margins of the skating pond, happy to find a few in flight, all of them large reds.

The temperature today probably won't struggle much above 16C but the forecasters are threatening us with  21C on Tuesday while England is promised something around 35C. Sometimes, just sometimes, and certainly not very often, I think I prefer the Scottish weather.