The Important Things

As I grow older and, I like to think, much wiser, so the things which are important in life change. I used to worry about my job, and the house, and the activities for which I volunteered but which perhaps, really, I'd have been far more sensible not to have involved myself in.  I still find some of those things important enough to worry about - like the house - but increasingly my attention is drawn to the small things in life, like the wellbeing of the birds which come into our garden and give us so much pleasure.

At present we have hoards of house sparrows, many of them very stupid - like they can find their way into my patented feeders but not out again - so I watch them with concern because I know that some will become food for the sparrowhawk which shot across our garden yesterday, and more will succumb to the bitter chills of the coming winter.

One thing has been exercising my mind considerably these last few weeks: the absence of a resident robin. There was a time when we used to have two or three vying for the bounty of our feeders, and their rivalries gave us immense enjoyment, but they all disappeared. So I was both happy and relieved when, yesterday, I spotted this young robin on the vegetable garden wall. He definitely has attitude, so I'm hoping he'll move in and give us a winter of pleasure.

Sandwich Terns

We walked along the Sutherland coast this morning under a sky of fair-weather cumulus, the clouds standing over the land as one so often sees when at sea. These are the clouds of the trade winds but of much warmer weather than we're experiencing, the temperature dipping still further as soon as the sun is obscured.

The butterflies and moths really should be out in numbers but they persistently refuse to appear. The ragwort continues to do its best to attract insects, like the silver y moth in this picture, but butterflies we really should be seeing are absent. To give one example, there's a grassy clearing near Dunrobin Castle which is home to a small colony of ringlets but we haven't seen one this year.

We do keep seeing species for the first time, albeit very late. Small heaths are an example, of which we saw two this morning. They, along with three common blues, were the sum total of our report to the Big Butterfly Count - until we discovered that the small heaths aren't included in the survey.

There are plenty of sandwich terns along the shore but few seem to be fully-grown adults in breeding plumage, which have black heads and black crests. The ones we're seeing have as much grey on the top of their heads as black, so they're either juveniles or, if they have a yellow tip to their bills, non-breeding adults.

Butterfly Weather

The sun, a rare visitor in these parts, deigned to make an appearance today and the local butterflies responded, though there were precious few species or us to enjoy, with not one to be seen in our garden even though we have two buddleia in exuberant flower. The butterflies along the coast path were sticking firmly to its preferred source of nectar. So the three small tortoiseshells were flittering between the thistle flowers....

....the two meadow browns stuck to the ragwort....

....and the several common blues - this is a female - when they settled, ffavoured the eggs-and-bacon.

By afternoon the sun was firmly out but a light breeze from the east kept the temperature down to the high teens - but we're not complaining, particularly after a miserable day yesterday.

The Beach

This framed photograph is hung in a prominent position in what is currently our 'snug' but which started off as an office. If my memory serves me right, it was once a calendar, I think in our Kilchoan days, and is now rather faded, yet it has survived the various recent moves and efforts to downsize simply because, to me, it represents a memory and a dream and an ideal, a perfect beach in a perfect climate with no other humans around to spoil it.

It's a memory because these were the sort of beaches we enjoyed as children growing up in Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa, long before the invention of mass tourism ruined so many of them. The boy in the photograph is Tony, a good friend from those far-off days, and I think the beach is Whitesands, to the north of Mombasa.

In our various travels, Mrs MW and I have fortunate enough to find and walk similar beaches, ones which haven't been spoilt yet, both in the Caribbean and East Africa - picture is of our daughter Elizabeth at Long Bay on the east coast of Jamaica. I'm so pleased we did seize the windows of opportunity to make those journeys as I think the dream of seeing one again is fading - our age and our increasing senility preclude any further such adventures.

So I am left with the photographs and the memories they help to preserve - and thank God I have them, for when the sun does come out here, and I sit in the back garden in its welcome warmth, it is the memories of those glorious beaches that play through my mind.

Garden News

The wildlife in our garden has been struggling, for several reasons. The insects are contending with an unusually cool and grey July which has meant that we've been reporting no butterflies in our daily report on the Big Butterfly Count - until yesterday, when two small tortoiseshells and....

....a very smart red admiral made appearances during a brief spell of sunshine, the latter on our black knight buddleia which is in exuberant flower. However, although today has seen wall-to-wall sunshine, we were only able to report a single tortoiseshell.

Happily, the low number of insects doesn't seem to have deterred the house martins and their nesting efforts under the north gable of the house. They didn't nest last year, and the previous year their efforts ended when the nest and its contents fell to the ground, but this year....

....they seem to have done well, with at least two young at present being coaxed out of the nest.

That we currently have a building site next door and constant disruption from heavy machinery, may explain why our bird numbers are seriously down. In particular, we haven't seen a single robin these last couple of weeks and regulars like the tits - this is a coal tit - are only appearing in small numbers. There is, of course, one exception: it would take more than a few diggers, dumper trucks and noisy men walking around in plastic hats to deter the house sparrows from visiting our feeders.

To Backies for Eggs

On yet another grey morning, with the temperature hardly above 15C, we set off to walk up the quiet, single-track road to Backies. It's a steady uphill all the way until one reaches this section of road, part of the Sutherland Estate's 'Queen's Drive' named for Queen Victoria who was a not infrequent visitor to Sutherland in her time.

The house on the corner was a post office, witness to the days when Backies was a thriving crofting community. Today the community's neatly mown verges are evidence of a gentrification of the crofts. However, this house is part of the working croft which is the source of our eggs of which, happily, there were some available. Not unsurprisingly, in view of the weather, the chickens aren't laying well while some have gone broody.

Some things, like the wild raspberries, seem totally unaffected by the weather, and we continue to harvest a bumper crop in our garden. There are also an increasing number of fungi to be found, some....

....like these golden chanterelles, good for eating while....

....this one is probably best left in the ground, not because it is poisonous - my app identifies it as a blusher which, if properly cooked, is edible - but because it is easily confused with very poisonous Panthercap.

Golspie Glen

The Golspie Burn was running whisky-red yesterday when we walked up the glen, finding, along its banks....

....a rather beautiful tableau of fungi which were immediately identified by an app as Galerina marginata, funeral bell, a name which well describes its reputation.

The only local occurrence of common spotted orchids - only a half dozen of them -  is in the glen, a little past its best now but good to find once again. We were also on the lookout for butterflies for the Big Butterfly Count but the only species we saw was....

....speckled wood, several of them, each fluttering round in the dappled shade of its private clearing, while....

....in a slightly larger clearing we found several emerald damselflies sunning themselves on wet blades of grass.

As can be seen from the pictures, yesterday was the sunniest day in a very long time, the temperatures high enough for us to sit in the garden for lunch, but today has reverted to leaden skies and a cool northerly breeze and, despite keeping a good lookout for them, not a single sighting of a butterfly.

Littleferry Butterflies

We drove to Littleferry this morning to visit it for the first time in almost a month, to find the bell heather just past its best, the ling hardly started, and no sign at all of the northern marsh orchids which must have died back quickly after our last visit.

While we were there we carried out a survey for the Big Butterfly Count, not helped at all by the weather which featured a stiff northwesterly and a temperature which struggled to get above 16.5C. Despite this, and in the occasional sunny interval, we identified a total of three common blues and seven small heaths (above) - unfortunately not a species included in the Big Count - a disappointing variety of species considering the time of year.

Perfect Fruit & Veg

We only have a small area of ground in our garden on which to grow a few vegetables and fruit bushes, the main crops at the moment being raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, courgettes and kale. Today's harvest included a large bowl of raspberries, probably about 5 pounds in weight, most destined for jam, and....

....eight kale leaves.

While I was preparing the two offerings I realised that neither contained a single item of wildlife. Usually, kale has caterpillars or eggs on its leaves, and good raspberries always used to have a scattering of maggots which, in my youth, I quite happily ate with the fruit.

The reason for this 'perfection' isn't difficult to find: I haven't seen a butterfly in the garden for ages, and there are very few moths around. Whether this is simply the present weather - we've just had another day of low cloud, drizzle and temperatures in the mid-teens - or whether the lack of insects in Golspie is down to something much more sinister, I do not know.

Toadflax

Such knowledge as I have of wildflowers has been learned - and much of it more quickly forgotten - over the last ten years or so simply by finding a flower, photographing it, and then wanting know what it was. So it was with this very pretty plant, first found - or, rather, noticed - at Littleferry some three years ago. It was easily identified as common toadflax, Linaria vulgaris. The name 'toadflax' comes, apparently, from the toad-like mouth formed from the two-lipped structure of its flowers and the plant's narrow, pointed, flax-like leaves.

In my ignorance, until recently I made no connection between it and a 'weed' which suddenly appeared and, over a period of time, increasingly colonised our garden. I liked it because of its brilliant purple colour variations, because it required absolutely no attention at all, because it happily self-seeded, but more because, even in the cool, damp weather we have at the moment....

....the bees love it.

When I finally got round to identifying it I discovered it was purple toadflax, Linaria purpurea, a non-native perennial plant often found growing in waste ground and roadsides. It's a native of Italy, introduced into the UK a couple of hundred years ago.

To add to is attraction, it started turning up in shades of pale pink, a not uncommon variation of purple toadflax which is equally attractive to....

....the local bee population.

We're hoping to start creating a new garden in the next few months, a wild garden dedicated to birds and insects. One of the species which I hope to transfer to it will be Linaria purpurea.

The Butterflies Appear

Each day, almost without thought, we take the same walk, crossing the A9 and the Golspie Burn and then wandering along the coast, with the beach and sea on one side and, on the other, a narrow strip of wild grassland separated from a barley field by a fence; and each time we walk we stop to sit on the same bench, looking out....

....across the same view, of the Dornoch and Moray Firths with the north coast of Easter-Ross hidden, today, under piles of threatening cumulus. 

We had company as we enjoyed the view, a single swallow which seemed determined to sit on the gate close behind us while the rest of its family, along with some house martins, hunted low across the barley and grasses.

The bench is one of the places we're using for our Big Butterfly Count surveys. On the first day we saw....

....four common blues, a species which favours the white clover flowers, while yesterday we counted three and today....

....we added two meadow browns to three blues. After the fifteen minutes allowed for the survey were up we also spotted two red admirals, a tortoiseshell, and four more blues.

One associates masses of cumulus and distant thunder with hot summer days but the temperatures here remain stubbornly low: as we set off for our walk this morning the air temperature was 16C, but with the wind slight it seemed much warmer than yesterday, which is probably why the butterflies were out in bigger numbers.

Wildlife Along the Shore

The shores of the North Sea may be unseasonably bleak but at least the temperatures are better today, with 18C showing as we set off this morning to walk along the coast in search of old acquaintances. We found some shore birds, including cormorants, herons, eider and terns along with....

....several noisy oystercatchers - this one so unconcerned by our approach that it remained standing on one leg.

It was good also to see this ringed plover, a species which has been in short supply, particularly when we spotted the reason for its unwillingness to fly away........

....a single youngster making little effort to conceal itself amongst the rocks. 

We're taking part in the Big Butterfly Count and didn't expect to find any on the wing that early in the morning and in quite a stiff breeze but were pleasantly surprised to spot four common blues along the path at the back the beach.

Hot & Cold

The ports we visited during our holiday in the western Mediterranean had lunchtime temperatures in the very acceptable mid to upper twenties. We now have to adapt to life on....

....the bleak coastline of eastern Sutherland where we're thrilled if the mercury hauls itself above 16C, but at least this area seems to have escaped....

....the avian carnage along the beaches of Aberdeenshire to the south of us, where over a thousand dead seabirds have been collected for disposal in the last few days. On our local beach we found just one, this sad gull. On the positive side too we're not facing the prospect of runaway temperatures of the sort being experienced at the moment in places we visited in Spain and Italy only a few days ago, where people are broiling in temperatures over 40C.