Avoiding the Storm

The day may have started brightly but the forecasts were for westerly winds to be gusting over gale force by mid-morning so we set off early along the coast path towards Dunrobin Castle with a relatively light breeze at our backs, intending to avoid the high winds by returning through the woodlands.

As the year moves on the sun is lower in the sky and shining straight into our faces as we look out to sea, making finding the shore birds increasingly difficult, but a large flock of waders made themselves evident by frequent....

....practises of their close-formation flying.

They were redshanks, over fifty in number. We also disturbed a dozen or so curlews which, after voicing there displeasure, flew away along north along the coast.

A quick search amongst the rough grasses close to the shore revealed the lone northern marsh orchid which flowered here in 2021 and 2022 but not this year. While most of the orchids have long disappeared, this one has grown a rather strange spike.

The 'fall' has started so enjoyment of the return walk through the woods was limited by the carpet of leaves which, effectively, camouflaged....

....the few fungi that are up at the moment. I don't enjoy woodland walking as much as the coast so now there's a further deterrent.

Sunspots

We had a blanket of high cloud across us today, a featureless covering which was thin enough to allow the sun to be clearly visible through it so, out of curiosity and in the interests of science, I took a couple of photographs with my now-ageing digital camera - and was amazed to observe that, even though I had used no tripod, at least four sunspots were visible.

The ones to the right of the image match almost perfectly those on....
 

....one of today's NASA pictures.

The heightened sunspot activity is responsible for the recent auroras which the north of Scotland is enjoying - see AuroraWatch's Flickr photos here. Sadly, their peak activity hasn't coincided with the usual requirements for a good aurora sighting - clear skies, no moon, and knowing an aurora's happening.

Autumn Advances

Autumn is beginning to assert itself, in the trees' changing colours and in the dead grass and the bales of straw that litter the Dairy Meadow, and in....

....the pink-footed geese calling as they fly south, though the skeins we've seen so far have all been small. Other birds are on the move. For example....

....we've welcomed back the increasingly large flock of rock doves, the ancestral line of the city pigeon, which we haven't seen since they arrived in numbers to stay with us along the shore over last winter. Then there are the local birds which are staking out a winter territory, such as....

....a pair of stonechats balancing awkwardly on waving grass stems along the shore.

The sea buckthorn is flaunting a slightly disappointing crop of berries, their ripening usually a sign that the blackcaps will soon be back. 

Yet summer clings on in species which seem delicately toughened against the arrival of colder weather. Campion is one of the earliest each year to burst into flower, and yet will still be thrusting out new buds, despite the falling temperatures, well into October. 

The Rhodesia Letters

A week or so ago I extracted from one of the small drawers in my father's Arab chest the bundle of letters which we wrote to my mother and father during the three years we spent in what was then Ian Smith's independent Rhodesia, and set about reading them. It was an eerie experience for it was as if I was talking to myself from all those years ago, a very definite voice which used strong words like 'shall' and which didn't hesitate to express very decided opinions on everything from the way the school was run to British and Rhodesian politics through to the life and loves of my younger brother.

The letters were, as far as possible, weekly, in the tradition of those I had written from both prep and public school, and full of detail; and watching the story unfold, knowing some of the things that were going to happen, was, at times, very distressing.

This is the first letter, written soon after we arrived in the country in early September 1967, while the last. was written on the thirteenth of August, 1970, as we were packing up to fly back to England a few days later, when I describe myself as very upset. I was: as we drove up the drive from the school for the last time I remember leaning over the steering wheel and crying, for we had intended to settle in the country and our leaving, even though it was for very good reasons, was a defeat.

This letter is one of many which I typed, which made them rather easier to read. Mrs MW often wrote in the letters, sometimes, when I was very busy at the school, writing all the letter herself, giving my parents another perspective on our life there. In many ways it was very affluent: we had a big bungalow in a beautiful garden, with a young man to help maintain it and to work around the house, and we were soon able to buy all the things we needed for a 'modern' life - even though some things were difficult to get hold of because of UN sanctions. In return, both of us worked hard, often doing long hours in the school. But we loved it, and look back on those years as some of the happiest of our lives.

As I have said before, I now bless my mother for keeping the letters, along with those from my school days and from other far-flung adventures like the North Africa trip and our two years in Jamaica. Mrs MW wrote similar long letters to her parents but, sadly, they weren't kept.

Each time I open one of these letters I think of my parents opening it over fifty years ago. I am fairly certain that my father always allowed my mother to do this, and he would read them after her. He also, as evidenced by the occasional mutilation, had a habit of cutting out the stamps for his British & Commonwealth collection. It's a small price to pay for this wonderful legacy.

Something New

It doesn't matter where we wander on our various walks - though it is good, even after four years here, that we can still find a track which we haven't explored before - but each walk is always made by our finding something new, something different, something slightly spectacular. So coming across....

....these little pale green beauties made yesterday's walk a little special. Each 'flower' is less than 10mm across and there was just one patch of them, not more than half a metre in diameter. 

It only took a few moments on the internet to find what they may be - one of the pixie cup lichens. And, to add to our pleasure, nearby we found....

....this specimen of orange peel fungus, something we have come across before but not so perfect and, somehow, so incongruous, sitting by the side of the path as if it had just been dropped there.

Red Admirals

It was heartening this morning, after the coldest night so far this autumn, with the temperature dropping to 5C, to find two red admirals in our sunny front garden, both making use of plants which we have put in over the last three years, lupins....

....michaelmas daisies and....

....a very dark-flowered buddleia, all of which were equally popular with a mass of bees and hoverflies.

As anyone who has been following this blog will know, it's been a miserable summer here for butterflies, quite at odds with the general finding of the recent Big Butterfly Count which reported that most species weren't doing too badly. At least in one thing we agree: the butterfly which has prospered most is the red admiral.

Four Birds

It has been a good day for spotting birds - or, rather, it was a good day until the fourth came along.

The first bird of interest was this dark greyish bird which was competing with the sparrows for food that had dropped into a rather overgrown vegetable bed - hence the rather poor quality of the photo. I think it may be nothing more exciting than a juvenile blackbird but we're already watching out for the Scandinavian incomers, the redwing and the fieldfare.

Setting off on our morning walk along the coast towards Dunrobin, as we crossed a rather full Golspie Burn by the footbridge we spotted one of our resident dippers. They've been away all summer bringing up young a mile or so upstream, so it's good to see at least one of them back.

The walk along the beach, with the tide low, wasn't altogether enjoyable as the number of dead guillemots and razorbills has risen from yesterday's seven to thirteen. However, as if to make up for this, ten of these pretty waders arrived, making themselves at home amid the rocks of low tide leaving....

....one of their number as a lookout. I like the way it stands on one leg, like a Maasai. They're turnstones, already in their winter plumage.

Our enjoyment of our local birdlife was marred by Mrs MW finding this under the sun room window. It's a goldcrest, a bird we haven't seen all summer, which had evidently flown into the glass with sufficient force to kill itself - this despite it only weighing six grammes. That it has some orange along the centre of its yellow stripe indicates that it is a mature male. Oh dear....

Is Bird Flu Back?

On a grey, chill day with a south-westerly wind bringing showers and the tide low, I walked north along the coast path this morning, leaving it when I spotted.... 

....what turned out to be the corpses of two guillemots washed up along last night's high-tide line; and as I wandered further along the beach I began counting finding....

....the usual guillemots with their sharp beaks - four in all - but almost as many....

....razorbills, which are very similar in size and looks to the guillemots but are auks, with a very distinctive beak.

While we did find sick and dead razorbills along the shore the last time there was a serious outbreak of bird flu, back in the summer of 2022, they were outnumbered by guillemots and gannets.

In all, I found seven dead divers along a kilometre stretch of beach: only a few days ago, when we were last along this beach, we found only one.

Letter Writing

There was a time when the art of writing a good letter was taught in schools, usually as part of the English curriculum - so, for example, pupils were taught when a letter should be formal, in which case it had to end with either "Yours sincerely" or "Yours faithfully". However, I started to learn to write a proper letter not as an exercise but 'for real' at the age of nine, at my prep school, Glengorse, where, on a Sunday morning before we walked down the hill to morning service in Battle church, we were all sat down in our common rooms and instructed to write home. The letter was checked and corrected by the master in charge, and re-written again and again until it was right.

The above letter was written in October 1955, over a year after I joined the school, so you can imagine how awful my letters must have been in January 1954 when I joined the school.

Once I had moved on to public school at the age of 13 there was no requirement to write home but, by that time, the habit was ingrained, so I continued to write to my parents weekly, in increasing detail. I didn't tell them everything that happened - by that time I had learnt that there were things you definitely did not tell parents - but the letters provide a fund of information about life in a British public school in the late 50s and early 60s.

I continued to write each time we took a contract abroad, so this is a letter to my parents in April 1968, from Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia where Mrs MW and I were teaching. As far as possible, the letters were weekly so, once again, I have this wonderful record of our life there.

My parents could so easily have thrown the letters away but my mother kept them; and, every now and again, I retrieve them from the small drawer in the Arab chest where they live, and re-read them, blessing my mother for her foresight in keeping them.

Coming, Going, Gone

It has been both much wetter and much colder here the last few days, with over 20mm of rainfall in one day and overnight temperatures down to 6C, so, very reluctantly, we've turned the central heating on. Out in the countryside the barley harvest is largely in, while a rapidly increasing number of trees have leaves which are turning; and with those changes, like a changing of the guard, we have creatures arriving for the winter, like....

....the greylag and pink-footed geese, and those who are either....

....staying to survive, die or hibernate, like the dragon- and damselflies, or....

....leaving to spend the northern winter months in the balmy climes of countries nearer the equator. So a few sandwich terns....

....swallows and house martins are still here preparing themselves for their long flights to Africa, as are....

....the pied wagtails, who may choose to hang around for the winter rather than move to southern Britain, while their cousins....

....the grey wagtails, who have spent the summer bringing up their young on the stretch of the Golspie burn above and below the footbridge, are long gone, some travelling as far as North Africa to escape the cold.

If I had the choice, I'd already be on the wing southwards.