A Cold Winter

I don't often think back to my days at Glengorse, a prep school near Battle in Sussex where I spent the years from 1954 to 1958, mainly because I was deeply unhappy there. One of the few things that kept us boys going were the friendships we made with fellow-sufferers. The boy on the left is Roger Soole, to whom I owe a deep debt of gratitude because he was the only boy who, during a half-term break, asked me to come home with him to the farm near Welwyn Garden City where he lived with his parents and older sister. Not having parents in the country, most half-terms I stayed alone at the school, free to wander the fields and woodlands and be treated kindly by the resident staff.

One of my abiding memories of the school was how cold it was in winter. The dormitories weren't heated so frost formed on the inside of the windows on very cold nights. The only 'warm' rooms were the classrooms and common rooms where the boys spent such little free time as we were allowed. By modern standards we weren't really dressed for the cold: in this picture I'm wearing a woollen singlet under a flannel shirt, a long-sleeved wool sweater, and a tweed jacket. I must have felt reasonably warm at the time as my left hand is gloveless!

We kept warm by exercising: on a cold day like this one we'd have been out running around during mid-morning break, and out again in the afternoon for some sort of sporting activity. Usually, if there was a good dump of snow like this one which meant we couldn't play rugby or soccer, the staff organised the boys into two teams, each with a citadel on a small hilltop, upon which we built a fort out of snow which we then defended against the attacking team.

Few homes in those days were fully centrally heated. Even into the 1990s we only heated the rooms in which our family needed to be comfortably warm. Although the central heating could be turned on in the children's bedrooms, for example to allow them to do their homework, I think we may have erred on the chilly side: our children complain that they remember being cold.

Age has changed me. Now I'm cold even on days when other people are walking around in shorts and tee shirts. I tell myself that it's because I was brought up on the East African coast where the temperature rarely drops below 20C, a temperature which, these days, I consider to be an absolute minimum for comfort. As I keep telling people, humans, and me in particular, should never have migrated out of Africa. It's where both I, and we as a species, were born, and it's where we should have stayed.

Small Bird News

The goings-on amongst the small birds in the garden has, of course, been dominated by the intense and ceaseless warfare between what we think is at leat four, and may be several more robins vying for what must be prime robin territory for the coming winter. Featuring in the photo is, I think, robin#4 with a few more of its baby feathers shed. This one may appear to be the most junior but it's extremely aggressive - at the time the picture was taken it was fighting with fully-grown robin#1.

If we have too many robins we certainly have a garden-full of blue tits. I lost count through the summer months of how many broods the parents reared but the result is a massive hit to our peanut budget.

In fact, the tits generally have done well, with both great and....

....coal tits aplenty.

The main loss to the garden recently has been its blackbirds: we haven't seen a single one in several weeks yet earlier in the year there were two pairs arguing over the bird seed. We have no idea what's happened to them: I do hope they're taking a well-deserved holiday somewhere nice.

Other species which haven't put in an appearance recently include the siskins and the goldfinches: the niger in their special feeder continues to go down steadily but it's house sparrows which are eating it, probably because they are pushed off the main feeders by hoards of other house sparrows.

We have the occasional greenfinch visiting us and usually they tolerate no nonsense when it comes to the feeders but the sheer volume of other birds does seem to intimidate them.

The sparrowhawk continues to frighten the assembled mob but they also have the black-and-white cat from the house on the other side of the field calling, though we do our best to 'discourage' him.

Having this heap of birds in the garden is a great pleasure but we know that, as winter comes on, many of them won't make it and the few that are left will become increasingly precious.

A Farlary Walk - 2

Our walk at Farlary yesterday was much sunnier than this picture suggests, certainly sunny enough to bring out my favourite insects - the dragon- and damselflies - in impressive numbers. Around this small lochan, formed when the developers were digging out aggregate for the wind turbine bases, we found good numbers of....

....black darters. We didn't see any males of this species last time we visited but this time they outnumbered....

....the females, both sexes seeming to spend most of their time basking on the warmth of the rocky paths.

The emerald damselflies were all over the place, dancing over the surfaces of the lochans and relaxing on the tips of the ling.

This is the smaller of Farlary's two lochans but the more crowded with dragonflies. I was thrilled to....

....catch this fleeting shot of a large dragonfly but, after sitting watching it for some time, it finally came across and landed near us.

It's a male southern hawker, one of the most spectacularly-coloured of the hawkers and a species we've not seen at Farlary before. However, we have seen it in the Golspie area and what is so pleasing about the local males is that it they are all a relatively rare blue form of the species.

This little lochan was also home to a very contented frog which, judging by the brazen way it floated around, can't ever have heard of or seen a heron.

Mrs MW spotted this common lizard just as we returned to the car. I was thrilled as we used to see so many of these, in their browner or greener forms, in our days on Ardnamurchan yet this is the first we've seen here.

A Farlary Walk - 1

It does seem that, every time we drive the few miles inland from Golspie to the Farlary croft where there are some wonderful walks laid out for our enjoyment, a superb wildlife experience starts with raptors. Last time it was a red kite, today we had a fleeting view of a small raptor flying very low and fast across the heather. It might, just might have been a merlin: if only it had stopped long enough to have its portrait taken!

Almost the next thing we saw was....

....this unusually-marked bird, almost certainly a buzzard, perhaps a juvenile, circling above the heather.

What followed in the next few hours was a joyous walk through varied habitats which gave us sightings of one beautiful creature after another. Having moaned about the dire state of the butterflies in our garden we did see some....

....butterflies, including a tortoiseshell and several peacocks of which this was the finest, but they were hardly out in any numbers. We also....

....reacquainted ourselves with some beetles including this one, which flew across and landed at our feet on the path. I think it's a dor beetle, one of several British dung beetles.

We came across this large caterpillar as we crossed some open, ling-covered moorland. While it looks like the caterpillar of the fox moth this species doesn't usually have white patches along its side. It was lying in the middle of the path so we moved it to the safety of a heather bush.

We have seen the first normally-coloured fly agaric of the year but this looks like an orange version, sadly slightly past its best.

I have no idea what fungus this is. It's a good 4" across and looks damp. I'm fairly certain it's a pore - the only way of being sure would have been to break one off, which I wasn't prepared to do. Whatever it is it's rather beautiful, nestling contentedly in the heather.

The Migrations Begin

We wandered the beach to the north of us this morning, happily finding no victims of avian flu along the tidelines, but today's news that the sea eagles on the west coast, particularly on Mull, have lost chicks to the disease is very upsetting.

We're coming to the time of year when....

....many birds are on the move, and this will no doubt help the spread of the disease. These are pink-footed geese, the first skein of the year seen today moving south. We had hundreds of them resident locally last winter, and enjoyed watching skein after skein flying north and south over us through the early winter months, and wonder, because the disease has affected them badly, what their numbers will be this year.

The sandwich terns, sitting on the rocks just off the beach, were in a vocal mood this morning, their excitement perhaps suggesting that they, too, will shortly be setting off south on their epic annual migration. I think there must have been about twenty of them: I do hope these beautiful, delicate birds manage to return to us next year.

In the garden the michaelmas daisies are, at last, in full bloom but they're not attracting the butterflies as they usually do. This was their only butterfly visitor yesterday, a  very handsome red admiral. Today we've only see two, a white and a common blue. People in other parts of Scotland are reporting good numbers of butterflies this year: what is happening here?

The Garden's Robin Population

We knew that the robin population of the back garden consisted of an adult and, we thought, two youngsters - until, that is, I spent an hour today sitting very still indeed with my camera at the ready and a small dish - an ex-ashtray - filled with bird seed a few feet in front of me. The result was....

....the identification of not two but possibly four juveniles. I say 'possibly' because numbers 2 and 3 may be the same.

It now occurs to us that there may also be more than one adult. The juveniles are difficult enough to tell apart, the adults even worse, but, in the interests of science, I really ought to have a go at counting them.

The Gentian Mystery

Back in 2020 the links at Littleferry at this time of year were home to a mass of gentians, about which I was very excited because, instead of being the usual rich purple colour, the flowers were an unusal white.

Some purple flowers did appear but they were few, rather stunted, and pale in colour.

Then, last year, we found few gentians, none was purple, and all looked brown and dried out. Some research suggested that gentians are frequently biennial, that is, they only flower once every two years, which seemed to explain what we had noticed.

This year started better with some fresh-looking white gentians but matters quickly went downhill. We only found them in two closely-spread locations and, as time passed, they looked more and more unhappy - the above shows the best gentian we found on Friday.

Many of these plants are either skipping two years, perhaps looking for the perfect conditions in which to grow and flower, or the local population is in trouble.

The Single Parent

Over the past few weeks, while walking along the beach immediately below Golspie's promenade, we've noticed....

....a lone ringed plover moving ahead of us along the lower beach, calling. It's exactly how a plover would behave if it had a nest at the back of the beach but, with humans constantly walking their dogs along this very public section of beach, and with little cover between sand and the promenade, we couldn't believe that the bird was trying to draw us away from a nest.

However, today, when the plover began to do the same thing, we noticed another plover higher up on the beach, and this was definitely a juvenile, lacking the distinctive dark collar around its neck. Soon after we saw that....

....there were two others, slightly more mature, with the same adult doing the same diversionary tactics as before.

We've never seen a second adult so can only assume that this one has brought up at least three chicks, alone. It's an amazing achievement.

Sparrowhawk

The back garden was suddenly rather quiet this morning. It took a few moments to identify the problem - despite the usual vast quantities of birdseed having just been put out, there wasn't a small bird in sight, the reason easy to spot at bottom left in this picture.

We've known it's been around for some time, not least from the evidence of a pile of feathers on the lawn the other day, but this is the first recent sighting of our resident sparrowhawk, and a real beauty it is.

I am fairly sure that this is a male as he has grey upper parts and orange-brown stripes on his breast; that he has only a hint of orange around his cheeks and neck may indicate he's a young male

A New Robin on the Block

We have three robins coming in to the garden at the moment, an adult and two juveniles, but it's this very pugnacious youngster who is now dominant and in a good position to have our garden as his little kingdom for the coming winter. Of course, it's early days, and we do have a very active sparrowhawk, but young robin has already learnt to be prepared....

....for when I come out first thing in the morning to put out the bird seed and has become such a favourite with Mrs MW that she now....

....puts him out his own exclusive bowl of seed right at our feet when we eat lunch outside.

The Sandbanks of Loch Fleet

We were at Loch Fleet this morning under grey skies to watch a falling tide expose the sandbanks on which the local....

....harbour seal population hauls itself out to rest, chat and quarrel. What surprised us was the number - on this nearer sandbank alone I counted 130 seals, with s further 30, minimum, on the more distant sandbank and yet more on the sandbank on the farthest side of the loch - so I would guess....

....that there were minimum of 200 seals in Loch Fleet. This must say something about the local fish population, despite the fact that we haven't seen the usual swirls of bait fish this summer, and certainly no gannets circling to attack them.

Otherwise, these extensive areas of exposed sand were sparsely populated. Half a dozen cormorants were preening themselves on one bank, with a dozen or so merganser making a slow passage beyond them, while.... 

....probably the most common, and certainly the most noisy bird was the oystercatcher, several of which can be seen in the distance in this picture. The identity of the ducks in the foreground is a bit of a mystery. There were several female and young eider in the loch but these may, possibly, be gadwall.

Another Memory Picture

I was standing at the sink this morning doing the washing up and wondering why the small birds seemed to have given up their near-constant competition for the feeders when I had a sudden, very vivid vision of....

....a view not unlike this one except in colour. I have no idea why these memory pictures, as I call them, explode on me, or what triggers them - I had no particular reason to be thinking of our three years at Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia all those fifty or more years ago. It's as if my brain suddenly generates a random number and then sends some electrical pulses off to collect whatever memory is in that box, and then slams it in to my consciousness.

The picture is always still, in colour, very sudden, very real, followed by a slow fading. I don't mind them, which is just as well as they are becoming more frequent, though they leave me feeling a little upset because what lingers is a wish that I could wind the clock back to those days and because - and this is another feature - they are almost always of a place where I was very happy.

Occasionally the picture is a reaction to something I'm looking at, a bird or a shell on a beach, a skyscape, a flower, and the memory is usually of something similar but better, like a much bigger or more exotic bird.

Maybe the memory pictures happen because my mind isn't as busy as it used to be and, therefore, has more scope for doing what it wants: and cheering me with recollections of past happiness can't do any harm except.... I so wish I could live those experiences all over again.

Littleferry Again

We walked the beach at Littleferry again this morning, an absolute pleasure as the sun has finally emerged to give us some warmth, but there was little to see in the way of wildlife along the shore despite the low tide, while....

....the links that run behind the beach, separating it from the conifer woodland, were full of colour and interest.

We found common puffballs all along the paths, some of them almost the size of tennis balls, accompanied by....

....large numbers of these blackening waxcaps. We haven't seen many of them since 2019 so they've taken a couple of years rest. They start life in this brilliant yellow, change through orange to brown, and end their lives black. 

As we returned to the plantation we found this fungus which I'm fairly sure is, for obvious reasons, the beautifully named plums and custard. Also in the woods, sitting on ling, we spotted....

....this small skipper and, by the shores of Loch Unes.....

....masses of damselflies and this female black darter.