An Unwelcome Visitor

Our garden, which we began planting about a year ago after we'd taken possession of our new house from the builder, is designed to be as Nature-friendly as possible while, at the same time, enabling us to do what we so love - growing vegetables and fruits for the table. At the moment we're enjoying cavolo nero, kale, lettuce and strawberries, and we're bringing on broccoli, leek, onions, spinach, beetroot, raspberries, blackcurrants and potatoes.

All were doing quite well until we noticed that something was eating the broccoli. We steadily eliminated pigeons, caterpillars and slugs as the culprits, which left us very puzzled - until we saw a small, brown, fluffy animal with long ears at the end of the garden - it's visible at bottom right in the above picture.

Yes, we have a rabbit in the garden. It's a young one, and it seems to spend much of its time grazing on our grassy paths - but what it's NOT to do is to eat our broccoli. So today, reluctantly, I gave it a bit of a fright, and was pleased to see it running away in the direction of the road, where all its relatives graze quite contentedly on our neighbour's front lawn.

Red Squirrels

Walking along Squirrel Alley on our way to the shops this morning we met....

....a young squirrel with a cob nut in its mouth, almost certainly provided by one of the households along the track which continue to feed the squirrels through the summer.

After a brief encounter with a roe deer, we watched the speckled woods dancing in the sunny glades of Speckled Wood then returned home along Squirrel Alley, where we played....

....hide and seek with a squirrel which....

....wasn't at all shy....

....posing for its photographs before....

....finally making its way out of sight.

As if two sightings of the local squirrels wasn't enough, a third one put in a brief appearance, one with a very fine tail.

It was good to see so many of these beautiful creatures, particularly as I was told that one of the estate's gamekeepers had seen a pine marten at this end of the woodland, attracted, perhaps, by the prospect of a squirrel snack.

Butterflies

Other than the occasional red admiral and the more reliable speckled woods of Speckled Wood, this has been a miserable few weeks for butterflies. Not that one can blame them for staying somewhere snug when we have a wretched westerly blowing and temperatures which rarely deign to rise above 18C.

That said, in the few sunnier intervals we have seen some common blues on the wing and, unexpectedly....

....some ringlets. This one was in our garden and two more were up the forestry track, a big change as, before now, we've only seen this species in a limited, grassy area just beyond Dunrobin Castle.

The only other butterfly to put in an appearance was this one, which may have been a ringlet which lacked the 'eyes' on its wings or, I suppose, a new species confined to the Golspie area.

Adder Again

I don't walk this half-mile section of track very often for the simple reason that I have never found much along it but today that changed. For a start....

....I found three small colonies of heath spotted orchids, but tucked so much into the undergrowth at the back of the verge that I decided to mark each of them with a small rock so I could find them again. As I did this....

....I came to this point where, fortunately before I stepped off the track, I spotted something lying in the grass - it's at bottom right in this picture.

It was an adder, probably about 2ft 6" long, bigger and rather darker in colour than the one we saw on our way to Loch Lunndaidh back in early May - link here. It lay absolutely still which was annoying as it was impossible to tell which end was the head and which the tail until, perhaps as it became used to my presence, it moved enough....

....for the head to be visible at the right-hand end. That the tail wasn't visible may have been because it remained down the hole where the snake had been sleeping. Certainly, the adder was almost comatose, not bothered that I moved around a fair bit in order, finally, to get....

....a picture of its head, its eyes watching me.

I love this sort of encounter, with something wild and dangerous, something which raises the pulse rate. I've been close to enough snakes to remain very wary of them but I also respect them. They're beautiful creatures, part of the wonderful natural world that we're doing our best to mess up.

Brora Beach

Yesterday might have been winter, with a vicious westerly gusting over gale force and the temperature struggling to reach 14C - this while most of the country complained of the heat and not having enough factor 50. The conditions didn't prevent us taking a walk dressed, as befitted the occasion, in full wet-weather gear, which indicated its displeasure at being used at this time of year by leaking.

By this morning the wind had dropped so we were able to take a pleasant walk along the immaculate, and almost deserted sands at Brora. Perhaps because of the recent weather, there was little to see beyond a seal, a couple of cormorants, three pied wagtails, some gulls and....

....along just one short section of the beach, large numbers of sea potato tests.

However, there is one highlight to walking along Brora beach at this time of year, the presence of a colony of rather special terns. While we see terns along the beaches at Golspie, they tend to be sandwich terns whereas Brora boasts an active colony of the much more famous arctic terns, the ones which fly over 40,000 miles each year in a migration which takes them to Antarctica.

The Coaster

If you'd asked my father, a shipping man, what a coaster was, his immediate answer would have been a small merchant ship which plied its trade along a coast. However, asked if the word had another meaning he might have pointed to....

....this, the other, and rather strangely named sort of coaster, something placed under a glass or mug to prevent it marking the table top.

This was my father's coaster. It's wood, probably ebony, turned on a lathe. It's the one he used for years for the glass of whisky he enjoyed, in the evening when he was in East Africa but at sundowner time when he retired to England.

The coaster is only 7cm across so it's far too small to take a glass of beer, and most wine glasses are too big - but it suited my father very well because he drank his whisky in colonial style - that is, very weak with lots of water and, therefore, from a large glass. Any true-blooded whisky drinker might be appalled at this but there was good reason for it. If, in the tropics, you drank whisky neat or near-neat in the 'normal' way, the effects would have been quick and fairly catastrophic.

So here is my father's favourite whisky glass, reunited with its coaster. The glass is 12cm tall, made of very thin glass, and patterned, and....

....here is my father with it, in the last years of his life, still enjoying a very weak whisky.

One more thing.... The derivation of the term 'coaster', as related to a drink, is described as follows by Wikipedia: "The first coasters were designed for decanters or wine bottles so that they could be slid (or "coasted") around the dinner table after the servants had retired. They were in common use after about 1760."

The Signpost

I like this signpost. It stands just off the track which leads from the council offices at Drummuie to Loch Lunndaidh and it gives a clear choice of direction....

....left to Culmaily, straight on to the loch, and back the way to Golspie. I like it because it's made of wood, and because it gives its distances in the old currency, and for the way its bearded lichen prove that the air that washes around it is beautifully clean. I also like it because whoever raised it didn't seem to worry too much about how many people might avail themselves of its information: very few people pass this way, perhaps three or four on a busy day, and few of them, because most live locally, need its information.

The only thing I don't like about it is that it seems lopsided. For the sake of symmetry, it should have had a fourth arm pointing to the right. Of course it would have been a waste of wood to add an arm that showed no destination, though many of us go through life without feeling the need for one. However....

....the last time I was up there I checked to see if there was a path going to the right - and found one. It's very ill-defined, and obviously rarely used, but the men who planted the conifers left it clear, which they wouldn't have done had they not been told to.

So where does it go? For some time I had no idea because, sadly, by the time I reach the signpost on my walks I've managed about as far as I can go, so I haven't been able to explore it; and the OS map shows no track and no potential destination, except some prehistoric hut circles. Yet purpose it must have had.

Then a man whom I met upon one of these walks offered a suggestion: it's a drove road, one of the ancient ways along which cattle were driven to market in places like Falkirk. Old maps do show a drove road running close to the coast of Sutherland but they're too vague to prove that this is it - but, I like the idea.

The High Moors

There's hardly a tree on the high, windswept moors of eastern Sutherland, a bleak-looking place which, for its brief summer, surprises by concealing a wealth of wildlife species, including....

....lapwings, two pairs nesting close to the shores of this loch, whence they look across the waters to the nests of three pairs of greylag geese.

In the protection of folds of the hills, where the burns have cut steep-sided glens, there is even more to find, particularly....

....dragonflies. This is Britain's largest, a golden-ringed dragonfly whose magnificence....

....is even better appreciated close up.

Common blues live up to their name in numbers, though the colours of the male are uncommonly rich.

The flowers come late in a place as hard as this, with only some of the millions of bell heather coming into bloom, while....

....less prolific flowers, like this green alkanet, can only be found in the sheltered glens.

Life is here but this year is being unkind: lack of rain means that many of the trees and bushes are burnt, even the sphagnum moss suffering, and....

....plants which, a year ago, were abundant are now scarce.

The Bottle Opener

Late afternoon to early evening, at sundowner time, I enjoy a beer. I've drunk a beer at this time for many years, the beers varying according to my location. So, when I lived in Essex, the beer was a bitter which Mrs MW brewed, forty pints at a time, and very good it was too. In Suffolk I enjoyed Adnams' Ghost Ship, in Jamaica I enjoyed Red Stripe, in Rhodesia Lion or Castle, on Tanzania holidays I drank Tusker, a beer I remember from my youth, and now, here in Scotland, it's an IPA or a 'gold' from one of the Scottish breweries, currently....

....Trade Winds from the Cairngorm brewery. This comes in a bottle with a crown cork, so I need a bottle opener.

Happily, some years ago Mrs MW brought home this one which she found in the charity shop where she worked. It's made of metal with a now rather worn copper coating and celebrates a country which no longer exists under its colonial era name of....

....Swaziland. Instead, in 2018, it was renamed Eswatini. It's a small kingdom with a rich history, a landlocked country surrounded by South Africa.

I love my bottle opener. For a start - and most importantly - although it's slightly crude, it does a very effective job in removing a cap. I also love the elephant, which reminds me of the excitement of watching those magnificent beasts in the game parks of Tanzania and Kenya. And every time I use it, it re-establishes a small link back to the colonial era which I experienced in my early years in Africa.

As with so many old objects like this, I'd love to know its story. Who bought it? Who was it for? What was he/she doing in Swaziland? Who has owned - and, presumably, used it - in the years since?  And what caused someone to bring it to the charity shop? All, of course, and sadly, questions which can never be answered.

Small Small Bird News

Perhaps because we had such a fine May the small birds seem to have had a prolific breeding season. Most of the young have now fledged and are pursuing their parents around the area in large groups, causing....

....some strain both on our feeding stations and our household finances.

The fat cake we buy comes from ASDA and the blackbirds are becoming such coinesseurs that they turn their noses - or should it be their beaks? - up at anything else.

Not that we begrudge the birds their food as they give us so much pleasure, particularly when we suddenly spot a 'new' bird like....

....a house sparrow. Until recently we didn't see a single sparrow in the garden, perhaps a symptom of their fall in numbers. Now they arrive half-a-dozen at a time.

Some of the small birds are very independent and refuse to be tempted into people's gardens. This includes the wrens, whose children are every bit as noisy as their parents, and....

....the warblers, some of which are still feeding young in the nest.