The Story Behind A Picture

The photo of my parents, accompanied by my brother's dog, Susie, was taken in the front drive of the last house we had in Mombasa, which was located almost at the end of Cliff Avenue and had a superb view out across the entrance to Kilindini Harbour. They are standing in the drive with Cliff Avenue beyond them. The tree with the red flowers is a Uganda flame.

It's an unusual photo in that it's in colour. We never had a camera that could take colour pictures so this was taken by someone else. It may have been my aunt Dorothy- she was known in the family as Dolly -  who visited them in the early months of 1959, as I know she had a colour camera. Further, in her 'Life' of my father my mother writes, "Dolly took a lot of snaps of our visit and these we have amongst our transparencies."

Further still, my father would have been 57 then, and my mother 47, which looks about right.

The picture was taken either on a Saturday or Sunday as my father is in shorts. He often went to the office on a Saturday morning, being much involved with sport at the Sports Club through the lunchtime and afternoon. Only very rarely did he go to work on a Sunday. My mothers frock also suggests it is Saturday: had it been Sunday she would have been a little more formally dressed as she would be going to church.

It's a disorganised picture, which suggests it was taken almost as an afterthought, perhaps when my aunt, if it was she, was leaving to return to England. The car would have been parked to the left of where the photographer is standing, or it may be that they were waiting for the company driver, Gabriel, to bring the car from the office. He would then take the ladies to the port - Dolly sailed 'home' on the BI ship SS Kenya - and then dropped my mother back at the house when she'd seen her sister-in-law off.

I think that most people who are taking such a photograph would make some effort to organise their subjects. That they aren't organised again suggest that Dorothy took it as she was a retiring and somewhat nervous lady, the sort who would never boss anyone around.

Elsewhere in her 'Life' of my father, my mother wrote that Dolly was in Mombasa for the Queen's birthday, which was on April 21st.

So, I would guess that this picture was taken in April of 1959, on a Saturday, the day the photographer, Dolly, was to board the SS Kenya for passage 'home' through the Suez Canal.

Coast Path

It was some weeks since we last walked along the coast path north of Golspie so we decided yesterday to return to what is one of our favourite walks.

Over the years we have been visiting it the beach has changed considerably. For example, along this section there used to be sand, which made for pleasant walking, but the sea kept taking it away so there's very little left now.

We had the pleasure of encountering some shore birds, like this superbly camouflaged ringed plover....

....this juvenile black-headed gull, and....

....a dozen or so redshanks.

Out in the firth gannets were diving - an adult in the foreground and two juveniles further out.

While walking north to the castle with the wind behind us was fairly easy, it was gusting so strongly that we had to return through the protection of the woods where....

....we found this rather fine fungus, perhaps a parasol mushroom.

Wildlife News

We're being subjected to a constant and rather depressing west to northwesterly wind which gusts to almost gale force, along with grey skies and occasional showers. While the air temperature struggles to reach 18C, it feels cold outdoors.

This weather is having a miserable affect on the wildlife. The meadow between our development and the A9 is a mass of wildflowers yet the only butterfly I saw despite sitting, looking for a quarter of an hour, was a white. It's the same in our garden where....

....this tortoiseshell has put in a regular appearance, while a white and....

 ....this rather battered painted lady have been the only other butterflies seen over the last few days.

The one place where one can find butterflies in any numbers is in Speckled Wood where the speckled woods are doing their best to fly in challenging conditions.

The sound of birdsong continues in the woods, though not at the same exuberant volume as a few weeks ago, most of the birds concentrating on feeding their young. As well as contending with the weather they also have to worry about.... 

....the resident female sparrowhawk. She killed a small bird yesterday morning on the roadway in front of our house and then flew off with the pathetic little corpse before I could take a picture. Then she was back in the late afternoon....

....hunting for more.

We haven't seen a male replacing the one that killed itself in our garden a few weeks ago so can only hope that her activity indicates that, despite the loss of her mate, she has been able to rear a brood.

Privileged

I feel very privileged to live in a place where I can walk out of my front door, as I did this morning, and, within a couple of minutes, be watching....

....a wild animal such as this roe buck in the Upper Rabbit Field next to our house. 

In some ways he isn't really 'wild' in that he lives here for his commercial value to the owners of the fields as sportsmen will pay for the privilege of shooting him; and he isn't really 'wild' because he is quite accustomed to people like me being fairly close; and he knows how to deal with the dogs which accompany the humans.

I had the feeling that he wasn't worried by me standing fifty metres away watching him; he was more irritated that I disturbed him. So, after he'd stared at me for some time he....

....turned away and stalked off along the edge of the field before disappearing into the undergrowth.

Buddleia Visitors

On Friday we welcomed the first butterfly to come in to our garden since the previous Friday, a tortoiseshell which spent its time contending with the bees that were massed on the marjoram flowers.

Then ,yesterday, we had the pleasure of seeing the first butterfly on one of the many buddleia which are bursting into flower, where it was joined by....

....the tortoiseshell, which was the one butterfly I was able to submit in my entry for the Big Butterfly Count.

Today is grey again and there's a gusty north-westerly wind blowing so, sadly, we're unlikely to see much in the way of butterfly visitors.

An Explosion of Creeping Lady's Tresses

We drove out to Littleferry this morning to follow one of our favourite walks. It goes from the Golspie-Littleferry road to the beach through several different habitats, starting with a mature pine plantation which has a ground cover predominately of grasses and heathers. We usually walk through this quite quickly but we were stopped, first by....

....three roe deer - one of them this young buck feeding in the farmer's field - and then when we noticed that, pushing up in and between the heathers....

...there were.hundreds of creeping lady's tresses.

Previously, we've regularly found a few of these delicate little orchids in one particular place which is close to where the path reaches the beach, but we have never seen anything like....

.... the abundance of this, in our experience, rather rare flower.

We are absolutely certain that this explosion hasn't occurred in previous years as we walk through these woods often if iregularly, so something has encouraged these orchids which have been dormant for years to leap into exuberant life. It may be the weather, which remains cold - 15C when we set off on our walk - and dry.

When we came out onto the links we were quickly cold, as a fresh north wind was blowing and the sun had yet to put in an appearance. Consequently, we saw just one butterfly, a small heath, and the only other one we saw was....

....a ringlet when we came back through the woods.

In this peculiar. weather there are other winners and losers on the links. The Scottish bluebells are doing well but the northern marsh orchids have all begun to die back, so the landscape is dotted with their dead flower heads.

What we hadn't realised until we came out onto the beach was that we had chosen to arrive at the lowest point of an exceptionally low tide. As a consequence, the few birds we could see were far out on the exposed sands and weed beds.

We didn't stay long. The wind was too cold and, although we walked for about a quarter of an hour along last night's high-tide line, we found nothing of interest except a single dead bird.

The Seep Again

Yesterday we had another day of rainless grey skies caused by a persistent haar brought in from the sea, but with the weather today at last showing some improvement I was up at the seep again looking, mostly, for the butterflies which still refuse to visit our garden, despite the buddleia and verbena which are just coming into flower.

There were several species of butterfly on the wing, though few of each - including small heath, painted lady (above, drinking at the seep)....

....this fritillary, which I think may be a dark green....

....a meadow brown....

....and a specked wood. However, the find of the day was...

....this golden-ringed dragonfly which was busy laying her eggs in the shallow water of the seep.

We've seen this species at the seep doing the same thing once before.

For her sake, as well as for our gardens, I hope we have some rain soon, and then some good sunshine.