Sunrise

It's so good to be in a place like Dar-es-Salaam, Zanzibar or Mombasa, where sunrise is always punctual, varying by only a few minutes either side of six throughout the year. It's natural. It's.... as things should be.  It's so important that, in Swahili, the day starts at six, so seven a.m. is saa moja, one o'clock. You can set your watch by the sunrise.

This is so unlike the complexities of the UK where sunrise varies with the time of year and with the continuing incomprehensible changes to the clock twice a year. Sunrise, here in Golspie today, was at 4.26am - not that I saw it.

This picture looks east from the coast of Zanzibar, across an ngalawa, a local fishing boat, to a wonderfully calm Indian Ocean.

Blackbird Disease

It poured with rain here this morning but that wasn't a good reason for one of the local blackbirds not to take his bath. Nor did he seem to mind being watched by siskins, goldfinches and chaffinches.

His enjoyment contracted starkly with a blackbird we saw later in the day which....

....appeared to be dragging its wing, but a closer look revealed....

....what might be some sort of skin infection. It was obviously bothering him as he kept flicking his feathers and seemed loath to fly away when two jackdaws approached.

Blackbirds are a source of concern at the moment because of a disease which comes from South Africa and has been working its way northwards to appear, now, in southeast England. It seems to particularly affect blackbirds so the British Trust for Ornithology is asking people to assist in monitoring usutu's spread - more about this here.

First Northern Marsh Orchid

Last year we reported the first flowering of a Golspie northern marsh orchid on 26th May - see post here - so this year's first, found today, is a day later. It's the same one, growing beside the exit road from the Dunrobin Castle visitors' car park, so northern marsh orchids are both reliable and punctual.

As with last year, we carried out a thorough search for other northern marsh orchids around this one - there are usually around twenty scattered along the grass verge - but didn't find any. One wonders why this individual is programmed to flower before any of its neighbours.

We wouldn't have found it had we not, having walked to the castle with the wind on our backs, decided to return through the rather calmer woods. In the blustery conditions there was little to see along the shore - a few oystercatchers, seven cormorants, and sundry crows and gulls - of which only the gulls seemed to be enjoying the conditions.

Morning Walk

We're in the happy position that Nature often comes to us - witness, this morning, a buzzard contending with the gusty winds of the day, watched from our kitchen sink - but we try to make a point of taking a daily walk, its usual purpose being to see something that fills our soul with joy.

So, today, we set off....

....through the forestry below Bheinn Bhraggie, mainly to keep out of the wind, but finding....

....some parts of the woods bright with St John's wort growing along the sides of the paths.

Unfortunately, pretty as it may be, this rhododendron is beginning to colonise this part of the woods. Where this picture was taken, this was the only one - and it needs removing before it throttles all competition.

At one point on the path a small bird started cursing me, flying from perch to perch as it did so. It was obviously a warbler, but warble it did not - the sound was an angry chattering. Happily, it gave me plenty of time to deploy Merlin, which told me it was....

....a chiffchaff.

These birds build their nests quite low down so one is far more likely to disturb them.

The return part of my walk took me along the forestry track that passes the aggregate quarry where a seep of water fills three small depressions (bottom left), the only place we know of where....

....tadpoles have survived the long dry spell.

There was much, much more on the walk, even though it was only about half an hour long, but it provided a perfect start to the day.

Merlin

 

Sometimes I'm not so sure about this Merlin app. Don't get me wrong, it's a miracle of modern technology which I use almost daily but it has a serious limitation.

We have the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to thank for its development but there are times when it's intensely frustrating, like today when....

....passing through some dense woodland we heard a call which we didn't recognise so we deployed the app, which quickly informed us that there were two birds calling near us....

....one of which was a bullfinch.

We haven't seen a bullfinch in ages and, at this time of year in their mating finery, they should be a spectacular sight but we could not, for all our searching, see him. He was very obliging, singing away while we moved around trying to locate him - to no avail.

Not every bird is as helpful as this blackbird which made sure he remained in clear view even though I moved very close. So I suppose the next development for the students who work on the Merlin app is to invent some way of having the app locate the bird. Now, there's a challenge.

There's much more about the app on the Cornell Lab website, here.

'Butterfly Emergency'

We've just ended a long spell of fine weather with 10mm of much-need rain falling overnight: our garden pond, in which I had hoped one day to see dragon and damselflies, dried out weeks ago leaving a crusty, cracked surface across which masses of buttercups are growing. It'll need much more rain before it can recover.

Such a spell of warm, almost summer weather in May should have seen the butterflies out in numbers but they've been worryingly absent. The garden of our new house, which we started planting just over a year ago, is designed for butterflies. There are masses of flowers which they should be enjoying - currently available are clover, lupins, pansies, aubretia, marigolds, daisies, verbascum and more - yet butterfly numbers have been dismal. Yesterday, on a day spent largely in the garden, I saw one white and one small copper.

It's the same on the walks we take, be they through forestry or more open landscapes. The only place where we see butterflies in any numbers is in what we've named Speckled Wood, an area of relatively newly-planted deciduous trees which is home to a healthy population of....

....speckled wood butterflies.

It's not just the numbers. The variety of species has been limited. So far this year we've seen peacocks, whites, orange-tips, red admirals, small coppers, small heaths, and a small blue.

The situation is so bad that a leading charity like Butterfly Conservation is declaring a 'Butterfly Emergency', stating that, "....more than half of our UK butterfly species are now in long-term decline."

Our contribution is to plant our garden for our butterflies but I have the feeling that, for many species, we may already be too late.

First Cameras

These days we take hundreds of photographs, not only on cameras but also on our mobile 'phones. On a good walk around here I may take well over fifty often, as in the case of this heath spotted orchid, just to make sure that I have one good picture. By contrast, when I was a small boy, most people hardly took any, partly because of the cost but also because the quality was often disappointing.

The first camera I remember my family owning was a Kodak box camera but I first used this one, the family's Kodak Brownie 127. It had the advantage that anyone could operate it - all you did was point it in the right direction and press the white button. It was also better than the box Brownie because one lifted the viewfinder to the eye and it was therefore easier to compose the picture.

Having the film processed was relatively expensive so we tended not to use the camera much, though on the rare occasions we remembered to take it with us we seemed to go mad, taking several pictures of the same thing.

Unless in the hands of someone who knew how to compose a picture, the results were poor - one often had great difficulty in seeing the object of the picture. For example, this one was taken in Tsavo National Park and shows an elephant - if you can find it - in typical Tsavo bush land.

Despite their limitations, the pictures went into the albums Richard and I had, which accompanied us to England when we returned to school each September. They were meant, I suppose, to bring back happy memories of home, but I never looked at my album as the pictures hurt.

The first camera I owned was one I bought in Aden in 1963 when the Uganda, the BI ship aboard which I was travelling back to the UK after spending several months in Southern Rhodesia, called at Aden. Aden was famous for cheap electronic goods so I could afford a rather serious machine, a single-lens reflex camera made by Kowa. It was a stupid buy: I didn't know how to work the speed and exposure so, although some pictures came out well, many didn't - the one above, of the entrance to the Suez Canal, was one of my better efforts. Worse, the film and getting it processed were expensive - and then the camera began to malfunction. As a student, I could neither afford to replace it nor to buy a new one so I went without for some years, without it worrying me unduly. Today, if I'm without my camera, I worry that I might miss that one in a million picture which will make me.... famous? 

Hunting the Cuckoo

For the last four weeks a cuckoo has been calling intermittently from the ridge that runs behind our house, a ridge which rises to form the summit of Bheinn Bhraggie, so yesterday I took a little-used estate track to see if I could find him.

At first he was calling very occasionally but as the morning progressed he called more frequently, and moved from the high forestry to the more open land to the left in this photograph. Disappointingly, but not unexpectedly, I didn't see him, but that we have a resident cuckoo for the summer is better than last year, when we heard one on a couple of days early on, and then not again.

If the lack of a cuckoo sighting was disappointing, the walk was made well worthwhile because....

....on the side of one of the ditches which, despite the lack of rainfall, still had some water running in it, I found....

....eight heath spotted orchids, much darker in colour than the ones we found on the Loch Lunndaidh track ten days ago.

The weather, along with the small seep of water in the ditch, also seems to suit the common butterwort which, for a flower which normally seems to keep its own company, is suddenly blooming in dense masses.

Cotton grass is a common plant of most areas of the Scottish moorlands but we see relatively little of it here: in a two-mile walk I found just one patch.

I ran out of energy after less than an hour's steady uphill walking. The view from the point I reached looked across the mouth of Loch Fleet and the small village of Embo to the Moray Firth but I wish I could have climbed higher, to the summit of the ridge. I might then have seen the cuckoo.

Ospreys on the Nest

We drove to Balblair Woods on Sunday in the hope of seeing the ospreys, which we did, fleetingly, seeing one of them soaring above the plantation while the other one was....

....on the nest.

Apparently, while the parents share the incubating duties, it's the hen that spends by far the most time on the nest.

Crow Wars

I don't object when the crows visit our feeding stations for a drink of water, particularly in these drought times, but I....

....start to worry when they turn up in gangs, and even more so when our visitors are rooks as....

....these intelligent birds are soon moving on to the seed and fat feeders where, in no time, they've....

....worked out how to dislodge them so they can eat their contents.

It's a constant war, with me trying to think of new ways of protecting the small birds' food, and the crows quickly finding a way round my defences.

They've even invented the crows' version of a take-away, which is when, having dislodged them, they take the feeders home to the wife and children.

The Picnic Bench

There's a pleasant little picnic area where the road to Littleferry passes close to Loch Fleet, and three picnic tables have been provided for visitors to the Loch Fleet National Nature Reserve. This one is closest to the water and has the best view but when we came to sit at it yesterday we found....

....a little present left on one of the benches.

I can't imagine what was going through the mind of the person who deposited the dog bag except it seems to be a common practice to leave them beside paths, but to leave it where children might be sitting to eat totally beats me. Why couldn't they just throw it into the bushes or, better still, take it home with them?

Dog bag not withstanding, we sat for a good half hour at the bench. With the tide low and acres of worm-filled mudflats exposed one would have expected hundreds of waders and other shore birds to be working them for food but there were disappointingly few. The main interest was when....

....a roe deer appeared to our left and ran across to the opposite side, watched by a grey heron.

Some Early Firsts

We sat in warm sunshine for some time this morning looking at this view across the deserted beach to the north of Littleferry, deserted not only of humans but also of most life, there being nothing washed up along the tide line and hardly a bird in sight, so we gave up on the beach and....

....walked along some of the maze of paths that criss-cross the links, finding....

....this tiny butterfly which is, I think, a small blue, one of the rarest of the blue family and a species we haven't seen since June of last year. Mrs MW also spotted....

....another small butterfly, the first small heath of the year.

We then left the links and walked up into Ferry Woods where this lochan, Loch Unes, is one of the best places for dragon and damsel flies - and we found that the first of the damselflies was already out....

....with several large reds sunning themselves on the paths. This is early for them as, again, we didn't see any of this species on the wing until June last year.

Loch Unes is steadily being choked by bog bean with its very pretty flowers, and some sort of horsetail. Despite this, it remains one of the best places locally for dragon and damselflies.