Summer Flowers

The sun has gone to Wimbledon to watch the tennis so we’re left with a grey, damp and chilly murk, weather which the Scots so beautifully term drecht. It isn’t pleasant but it’s what we signed up for when we moved to northeast Scotland so we, like the summer flowers, just have to put up with it - or, if it’s at all possible, enjoy it.

On Wednesday, while still waiting for a new router to arrive to replace the one fried in last Thursday’s lightning strikes, I walked in the direction of Lochlundaidh and was amazed by the wealth of wildflowers in bloom along the verges. Almost all the flowers of summer were there - the ones I haven’t seen are those, like the common spotted orchid, which, locally, are confined to just one site which I haven’t visited.

The ‘old friends’ included fragrant orchids (above)…

….heath spotted orchids, most of which are very pale bluey-pink….

….several thistles including the classic Scottish spear thistle and….

….the much more common marsh thistle.

Not everything was flowering in shades of pink and purple, for example yellow vetch and….

….one of my favourite plants, not least for its name, bog asphodel.

The weather may have been unhelpful but at least some insects, if not many, were out and active enough to take advantage of the feast available, while….

....I had to decide, on a track which winds gently and seemingly for ever through the damp hills, at what point it would be expedient to turn back and see if the router had arrived.

Two Hunters

Walking through Speckled Wood on Monday morning the excited twittering of small birds drew my attention to....

....a silver birch in which what I took to be a young tawny owl was perched. I was so close it must have been aware of me but for some minutes it ignored me, after which it gave me....

....a withering look before flying off low through the trees.

We found the warning chatter of small birds very useful during our years in Rhodesia because the noise often drew our attention to the presence of a snake, usually a boomslang as these snakes spent most of their lives in trees and bushes.

It's not often that one looks up from reading the newspaper to see a raptor just below the sitting room window tearing the feathers from a dead blackbird, but that's what happened yesterday afternoon. The raptor was a female sparrowhawk, perhaps the mate of the male who died so tragically a fortnight ago - see story here.

One or two birds, notably a male blackbird, made attempts to chase her away but she simply ignored them.

When she'd finished she flew off with the plucked corpse, hopefully to feed some young.

While the male sparrowhawk was a fairly frequent visitor to our garden this was the first time we'd seen the female.

Storm

Last Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday morning, ir rained heavily enough to cause the local burns to flood, if only for a few hours before the thirsty soil sponged up the precious water. The rain was very welcome but the accompanying vicious lightning and thunder was not, the strikes putting out the lights and knocking out much of the village’s broadband for several hours. Our broadband seems to have been one of several in the community affected for we lost our router, and the 4G network here is so poor that we were unable to use it unless we sat in one of the better spots - which in our case was the balcony. Hence, with apologies, the sudden lack of posts on this blog.

The rain, about 24mm of it, has done wonders for the garden, and our resident rabbits - yes, we now have rabbits rather than a solitary rabbit - have been making the most of it. We now have a larger rabbit, presumably the mother, and….

….two smaller ones, presumably her teenage children.  The family seems to have made a home in the marsh grass surrounding our small pond.

Life isn’t easy for our rabbits. They are constantly being stalked by two cats which belong to the house below us, though I’m not sure that either cat is big enough to kill a rabbit, even a juvenile.

Since the storm we’ve been under the influence of a west to south-westerly airstream bringing occasional but not heavy showers. In the sunny intervals a few butterflies have been out. There are plenty of speckled woods in Speckled Wood and we have more painted ladies than any other species: on this morning’s walk I counted four in a distance of less than a mile.

Otherwise, we have the occasional individual of a species - for example a fritillary and a small copper - but the total number of butterflies coming into our garden, full as it is of the sort of flowering plants which butterflies love, totals less than six in the last three days.

I keep saying how worried I am. This lack of butterflies is unnatural.

A Coast Path Walk

For today's walk we joined the coast path at the north end of the village, crossing the Golspie Burn which is currently running very low. Unlike the rest of the country, we're forecast some rain today, rain which we badly need.

The track runs close to the sea, along a narrow strip of meadow land which has always been good for wildlife, and today didn't disappoint as, despite the overcast, we spotted....

....half a dozen painted ladies....

....the first common blues of the year, some of them....

startlingly blue, and....

....a few six-spotted burnet moths.

We also found this butterfly. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps a grayling or a rather worn painted lady..

The Bar

I do like a beer at the end of a day, particularly at the end of the sort of long, hot African safari day we used to enjoy when we'd encountered plenty of interesting wildlife, seen some magnificent scenery and, at sundowner time, met some like-minded people who also enjoyed exploring a fellow-traveller's world. So it might sound odd that we used the bar very sparingly at Etendeka, our favourite camp during our stay in Namibia in 2009.

We weren't being parsimonious, nor were we feeling unwell, it was just that the more one drank at sundowners and after the evening meal the more likely one would need a pee during the night, and to get from the tent in which we slept to the toilet involved going outside.

It wasn't the antelope that crowded close to the tent all night that bothered us, because we understood why they were there: they knew that human proximity deterred the carnivores. From our point of view though, we'd have preferred them not to hang around our tent attracting the carnivores so we could then have had a drink or two more at the bar.

A Fine Weather Walk

This morning's walk, in very welcome fine weather, provided a new 'first' of the year, the first time I've seen deer in the rabbits' field above the house. They were well aware of my presence but seemed unconcerned, allowing....

....me to approach close enough to see that the one on the left was a buck while....

....the doe was accompanied by what might have been last year's young.

The second 'first' of the year followed shortly afterwards, a first dragonfly which passed me too quickly to identify it beyond saying that was a hawker. However, a few minutes later....
 

....as I passed the small pond formed by a seep which runs even when the weather has been dry, I saw the first damselfly of the year....

....a large red. More followed, some of them....

....paired up.

Today's butterflies disappointed - but then, it's been a very disappointing year for them. I saw what was probably a painted lady, one white, and three small coppers (above).

The bell heather is just coming into flower, as is the cross-leaved heath, joining....

....the northern marsh orchids in a fine display of shades of purple.

A Walk to the Village

Much of the early part of our usual walk through the woods to the village is through mature Scots pine plantation, the forest floor now almost totally invaded by bracken. Despite this, on this morning's walk we found....

....a patch of chanterelle fungi. Normally, one would notice them and pass on but at the moment there is hardly a fungus growing in the area due to an almost total lack of serious rainfall over the last few weeks, so the plantation floor is very dry.

Just beyond the fungi, and still in the plantation, we almost trod on....

....what I think was a wood mouse - also called a field mouse. Since it was in the middle of a mountain bike track we persuaded it to move away into the undergrowth.

From the pines our path enters Speckled Wood, so called because, in normal times, it is an ideal home for a large population of speckled wood butterflies - but times are not normal, and we hadn't seen a butterfly here from some weeks.

Happily, that changed....

....for we found a good dozen of these very understated butterflies on the wing, mostly chasing each other - I assume to catch up on what must be a very late breeding season.