English Holidays

To my brother Richard and I, this was a beach - miles of coral sand backed by ranks of palm trees, lots of rock pools to explore at low tide, and warm waters, all under a balmy trade wind. However, every three years my parents went 'home' on leave and we had to contend with....

....days on English beaches, mostly ones like this one at Dover, or....

....this one at Hastings. That we were in Hastings on a leave in 1949 is interesting because one wonders whether my parents took a liking to the place then, for they spent most of their retirement in houses in or at the back of Hastings old town.

These south coast beaches were pebbly and, in those days, often covered in tar which came ashore when passing ships cleaned out their bunkers, but....

....this is the long sandy beach at Great Yarmouth where the family came every leave to spend time with my father's relatives, most of whom lived in Yarmouth or Caister. It also gave my father a chance to enjoy a beer or several in The Ship Inn in Caister, a pub which had large photographs of trawlers and drifters on its walls, many of them featuring Hayletts.

Later there were leaves which occurred during Richard and my summer holidays when, instead of flying out to Mombasa for our annual reward for putting up with ten months in miserable boarding schools in England, we spent them in places like Launceston: this picture was taken at Tintagel Castle.

I well remember that Richard and I insisted that my mother brought with her the bush jackets we would have worn had we been in Africa, which we wore over a sweater; on our feet are wellington boots.

South Beach

We walked Golspie's south beach under glorious blue skies this morning but the lack of a cloud cover last night meant that the temperature plunged, so the maximum and minimum thermometer gave us yesterday's daytime reading at nearly 20C and an overnight reading of just 4C.

There were one or two unhappy sights along the beach. This is the first dead ray we've seen washed up in ages, a small cuckoo ray stranded by the falling tide. In some ways we were quite pleased to see it: at least there is some life out in the Moray Firth. Rather less unexpectedly we also came across....

....yet another guillemot with what pathetic flesh it had pecked out by the gulls.

The oystercatchers were on the beach as usual, some standing on one leg, as were a few redshanks, while offshore we saw two gannets diving for fish and several cormorants, one of them being harassed by gulls. 

One of the returners to these shores is the curlew, back from the hills where it breeds in summer, stalking the mudflats below Golspie's promenade.

Do You Remember....

....arriving in the car park and hardly waiting for the car to stop before you were out of it and heading for the path that led through the long grass, hearing your mum shout to stop a minute because you needed to help carry the picnic but you couldn't, you really couldn't because through that gap was the beach and the sea and a day of pure heaven?

A Big Bag of Nyjer

We've been given a huge bag of nyjer. I'm very grateful for it and so should the birds be but the problem now is to persuade them to eat it: we've only just finished the small packet of nyjer we bought back in April.

Anyway, things got off  to a good start with a male chaffinch sampling the food and he was quickly followed....

....by a couple of sparrows. We've had sparrows on the nyjer before but it didn't catch on as a 'must have' sparrow food.

Next at the feeder was a very smart blue tit but he didn't stay long. However things looked up....

....when a goldfinch arrived, one of the birds which is supposed to particularly like nyjer.

It's a start but things better warm up as otherwise we'll still be putting out nyjer in fifty years time.

The Season's Changing Wildlife

Hundreds of bumblebees, honeybees and flies of various ilks were frenetically busy on the michaelmas daisies first thing this morning, encouraged by bright sunshine and a warm southerly wind. It's as if they know that the weather isn't going to hold: the forecast for today was for a maximum of 20C: tomorrow's midday is for 12C and the week gets colder.

Once again, sadly, nowhere was there any sign of a butterfly. It's as if they've given up on the year, and are hibernating in the hope of something better next year.

With such a glorious day promised we set off for Ferry Woods in the hope of seeing one last dragonfly of the season but, although we visited the rather overgrown Loch Unes twice, we didn't see one. It should have been plenty warm enough as....

....other insects were still on the wing, but perhaps dragonflies have other triggers that announce the end of the season, like day length.

We reached the beach at about an hour after low tide, stopping to watch a small group of gannets, many of them juveniles, attacking some bait fish a hundred metres or so off shore. They, along with....

....cormorants - this view looks across the mouth of Loch Fleet towards the small village of Embo - oystercatchers and eider duck were the only species in any numbers.

The tide had been running in for well over two hours by the time we returned to the car, from where there is a good view across Loch Fleet to The Mound, yet the incoming water had only just reached the main basin of Loch Fleet. Masses of gulls, the first wigeon of the season, a few oystercatchers and even fewer curlews were working the rich muds of the tidal flats when they were joined by....

....several small but noisy flights of greylag geese.

The seasons are changing: the butterflies, the dragonflies, and summer visitors like the sandwich terns, have gone, and the winter residents are arriving.

Some September Fungi & Moulds

I still don't know whether it is that this year has been exceptional for fungi or whether it is that we have simply become much more aware of them but we continue to find superb specimens in the woods around Golspie. Some are notable simply because they look pretty, like these sulphur tufts growing on a moss-covered log, some because....

....they are a rather gorgeous colour. This is a fly agaric, a species which is usually bright red and the classic fungus of fairy stories and emojis, but this was an unusual and very rich yellow-orange.

The trouble with fungi is that there are so many thousands of species and considerable variation even within a species, that any identification a pathetic amateur like me makes, except in classic cases like fly agaric, is very unlikely to be right.

This is a good example. It might, just might be curry milkcap, Lactarius camphoratus, which would be easy to confirm if we were collecting fungi to eat, which we definitely are not. As it begins to dry, it delivers a rich smell of curry powder, and we'd be able to confirm that it is a milkcap as this refers to the milky latex released from the gills under the mushroom cap when they are cut or torn which, again, is something we avoid doing.

One of our main interests in these fungi is simply their elegance so the fact that this may, just may be trooping funnel, Clitocybe metachroa, is very incidental. Doing justice to their elegance can be difficult: the picture is embarrassingly out-of-focus.

This one might be Amanita virosa, the destroying angel, which is a rather irrelevant piece of information if you've eaten one as it is, as its name suggests, very poisonous.

This is a terrible picture and wouldn't normally be allowed to lower the tone of this blog but it's included because it shows the biggest fungus yet, the large one being about a foot across. It was at the bottom of a steep, scrub-covered slope which I didn't dare descend. I think it's a parasol mushroom.

Lastly, this picture illustrates the frustration of this fungus-finding game. There are two tiny species here, the ones at the back being about 5mm long. The one at the front which is a bit out-of-focus resembles white caviar, and is quite different to the one at the back. I don't know whether they are fungi or slime moulds, related or unrelated, but I might have had a better idea if, on the two occasions we returned to the site to find them to take a better picture, we had been able to locate them again.

The white caviar one may be Tapioca Slime Mould, Brefeldia maxima, its tiny white balloon structures being described as, "slightly bigger than a pinhead."

I struggled to find anything on the internet which resembles the more distant one, the nearest being 
Honeycomb Coral Slime Mould, Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa.

A Palisados Beach

Anyone who has followed this blog will know that I think beaches are peculiarly special places, places where land, sea and air mix in a constantly changing environment; so it's not surprising that we spend a great deal of our time walking, increasingly gently, along the various beaches to the north and south of Golspie.

Every beach, wherever it is, has its personality. This beach lies to the northeast of Golspie, between the village and Dunrobin Castle, and....

....if there's anything special about it, it is that it often hosts waders such as these redshanks. It's one of a particular type of beach, a beach which doesn't boast clean, smooth and extensive sands but is narrow, dark, and, because it's slightly.... grubby, isn't a popular beach with humans - though this one, as can be seen in the top photo, once had a jetty or landing stage or some such construction formed of wood.

This is another of these lonely beaches, the beach at Lazy Lagoon near Bagamoyo to the north of Dar-es-Salaam, the photo taken soon after sunrise. It's a beach with bundles of personality, a beach where we watched fishermen working a long net from the shore, where, as at the Dunrobin beach, there were often flocks of waders, and a beach which was extra special because we found three species of quite rare cowries there.

However, the classic example of this sort of beach is Palisados beach on the sea-side of the long spit which forms Kingston harbour in Jamaica. It's a pebble beach, a very grubby beach with all sorts of rubbish washed up including, in this picture, a small cargo ship. We never used to swim off it because the undertow was too dangerous but we did dip baby Katy in it, almost feeding her to a passing shark.

That was what was so special about this beach: the fishing. Jackfish, snook, shark, barracuda and many other species could be caught if you knew how to fish it - on a still early morning, on a rising tide, and with a spinner or plug. We fished it often, never caught much, but loved it for its peace, solitude and spectacular sunrises.

The Westerlies

Every year, despite my warnings, Mrs MW insists on growing sunflowers. The variety she plants grow a good eight foot tall and take all summer to mature enough to form their extravagant flowers which, in the fading days of autumn, are a cheerful reminder of summer's sun, but also....

....an immediate target for the first westerlies.

The local version of the westerlies isn't the warm, wet one we became accustomed to on the west coast. Here, travelling across the Highlands these winds seems to pick up the cold of the high hills so by the time they reach the east coast they're bitingly bitter so....

....for our daily walk we tend to take advantage of the shelter of the local forestry, walking along the coast track and watching out for any interesting sea birds.

Today the cormorants obliged. There were more of them than usual resting on the rocks off Dunrobin, several of which, like the one on the left, were juveniles.

We came back through the woods where there was a pleasing selection of fungi to keep me amused, but the highlight of the walk was when....

....Mrs MW spotted a passing dragonfly. This one is late in the season to be on the wing and, usually, these large hawkers are the devils to photograph because they rarely perch, but this one did, sadly some ten metres up in a tree, which makes identification very difficult. At a guess, it's a female common hawker.

Autumn Equinox

The autumn equinox is tomorrow, the 22nd September. It is one of two days in the year when the lengths of day and night are equal, irrespective of where you are on Earth. I suppose that the length of day is measured as the time the sun spends above a featureless horizon, like at sea.

It can be seen as the start of autumn though, at our latitude, the outriders of autumn are well advanced. While the leaves on many trees are still green, the sycamores are already shedding theirs in the forestry around Dunrobin.

Autumn has its attractions, amongst other things because the fungi give us something to search for on our walks, but the walking itself will come more hazardous as the frosts and snow come on: I have recently bought spikes to screw into the bottom of a pair of walking boots to wear when the going becomes slippery.

One of the few attractions of winter are the auroras. During the summer months, when the sky is light all night, they become invisible, but this event was perfectly timed as a reminder of what may come, the first red alert for many months. Needless to say I missed the maximum, realising that something was happening shortly after ten. The northern sky still glowed a milky green but the dancing lights were masked behind cloud.

It is the winter cold which I dread, the cold and the long, dark nights. We are fortunate that we can fold ourselves into the centrally heated warmth of our houses while most of God's creatures are shivering outside, but even so the chill still seems to seep into our rooms; and up here, at latitude 58N, the daylight hours are desperately short and the winter long.

We were never designed for this. Homo sapiens should have left the high northern latitudes to the woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger and stuck to where we belonged....

....the all year round warm savanna-lands of Africa.

An African Menu

My good friend Tony Chetham has sent me another gem, a lunch menu from the Victoria Falls Hotel dated May 1948. The range of food available is astonishing, bearing in mind that this was shortly after the war when Britain was still suffering from rationing, so anyone from 'home' seeing the menu could have hardly believed their eyes.

The chef may have been able to source some of the delicacies by using the Imperial Airways flying boat service which, on its way to and from Johannesburg, landed at the falls.

The Solent BO103 and BO104 services stopped at Victoria Falls for the night, so passengers would have been able to enjoy the menu.

We once visited the hotel, with my parents when they came out to visit us at Bernard Mizeki College in 1969. We had lunch there but, such are the vagaries of my memory, I have no recollection of the meal. What I do recall is that my father flatly refused to come on the boat trip up the Zambezi which we had booked for the afternoon, preferring to spend it in the hotel bar. See earlier post here.

Life & Death at Littleferry

We drove to Littleferry this morning for a walk in the Ferry Wood where we found plenty of fungi, most of them, I suppose....

....benefitting from the death of something else.

However, we are always drawn to the beach where a high tide was bringing heavy waves onto the shore and....

....a sad collection of dead seabirds. Our noticing so many guillemots amongst them is part of a national picture of a serious problem with some of our seabirds: the Guardian - here - reports similar stories from Northumberland to Orkney.

We also came across this death dolphin which had obviously been on the beach some time.

Much more happily, as we walked along the shore of the tidal pool just inside the narrow entrance to Loch Fleet we noticed a mass of seabirds on two sandbanks. The darker ones to the left....

....were oystercatchers while, carefully segregated to the right, were as many.... 

....ringed plovers.

Finally, as we approached the car, we had to give way on the path to this caterpillar, possibly that of the fox moth.