Apologies

Sincere apologies to those of you 'out there' who are followers of this humble blog for the sudden loss of service - but then I'm not too sure how many of you would have been interested in the views I've been enjoying for the last few days, for this is the view from one of the downstairs wards in Raigmore, the big Highland hospital in Inverness where I suddenly found myself.

Hospitals are pretty dismal places at the best of times but what depressed me further was that all the wards in my area looked out into enclosed courtyards where, in the old days, patients could have taken themselves on a fine day to enjoy the sunshine. This, for health & safety reasons, can no longer happen.

So these courtyards have no purpose except to bring very limited natural daylight into the wards. Except.... As you would expect, something sees our misfortune as an opportunity, and the 'something' in this case was a very smart male blackbird which, judging by his very full beak, had found a wonderful place to catch insects for his brood.

Sun! Sun! Sun!

Sun.... we have some sunshine at last, with blue skies, light winds and a rising temperature, a perfect day for a very slow wander through the countryside near our house, with lots of time leaning on stone walls or sitting on logs just looking out for whatever might pass.

That said, the first thing of any excitement wasn't moving and was found by chance. In Speckled Wood the speckled wood butterflies were still far too cold to fly, so I was lucky to spot this one which had found a convenient twig on which to sit while it soaked up the sun, and, incidentally, enabling me to get very close....

....for its portrait - and what a beautiful little butterfly it is.

Then I noticed this rather fearsome and quite large fly with its very distinctive pale yellow spot which, I expected, would make it easy to identify on the internet. Sadly, it wasn't, so I don't know what it is.

This great tit with its rather feeble black bib is, I think, a female. She spent some time on a branch immediately over my head scolding me, but not so seriously that she had a brood nearby but, oh dear....

....I did get very severely shouted at by this willow warbler which very obviously had young nearby.

A Cold Littleferry

The links at Littleferry are a mass of wildflowers at this time of year but, as always, our main reason for going there this morning on a cold, overcast day, was to....

....enjoy the uplifting feeling of finding the spectacular northern marsh orchids that abound there. They, too, are not enjoying this weather as....

....although there are plenty of them, most are small. Of far more serious consequence, we found worryingly large numbers of....

....bumblebees comatose or dead in amongst the flowers, victims, presumably, of the chill 11C still-air temperature. Bumblebees are having a hard time, suffering from the scourge of pesticides as well as loss of habitat. A prolonged cold spell, which is what we're in at present, is about the last thing they need.

We walked briefly in the woods at the back of the links to check progress with the other resident orchid at Littleferry, to find that the creeping ladies' tresses hadn't grown at all since our last visit on 1st June - see earlier post here. Presumably they're holding on in anticipation of summer arriving.

We also walked along the beach, and spent some time sitting looking out across the low tide and hoping to see some wildlife. We were rewarded with a dozen or so gulls, one small flight of what might have been oystercatchers, and....

....a high-flying skein of geese.

Starlings!

A hummingbird in British Colombia shows how to hover while taking dainty sips of sugar solution from a dispenser. Back home....

....the local starlings, of which, at present, we have a plague, use the same technique to sip at fat concealed in an earthenware cap.

We're inundated with starlings at the moment, with harassed parents being chased around by screaming children. They descend in gangs on our feeders, terrifying the tits and siskins and cleaning out the food almost faster than we can put it out. And, in their desperation, they've learnt how to get round every obstacle we've put in their path - like, they used to perch on the fat ball until we put it in the cap, so they learned to hover like a hummingbird.

Smart birds, starlings!

A Summer's Day

It's another grey, cold, breezy and showery day here, another day of typically Scottish 'summer', but none of this deters us from our almost-daily gentle walk down to the village shops along paths which wander through the woods and along the edges of fields.

I enjoy stopping in places where there is a view and, preferably, something to sit on, but this picture was taken leaning on a drystone wall. I enjoy being patient, just waiting to see what comes along. Mostly I am not rewarded but I was again today, with....

....the same roe doe as we saw on Saturday in almost the same place - which make me even more certain that her fawn is somewhere close by.

She was so close she must have seen me but I don't seem to worry her - which I take as a considerable compliment.

A little further on two juvenile pheasants crossed our path with....

....their mother watching anxiously from close by.

This is the first slime mould we've seen in some time, perhaps the beautifully named dog vomit slime mould. 

M/S Meri

We don't often see ships anchored in the Moray Firth off Golspie but we spotted the Meri yesterday in the fleeting rays of the evening sun. She's registered in Finland and is described as a 'heavy load carrier'. Owned by Meriaura Ltd and launched in 2012, she's designed to work in high-latitude, difficult conditions. So, for example, she is designed to run ahead in open waters and astern in ice.

The angle of this photo makes her look fairly short. In face she has plenty of deck space for cargo, being over 100m long.

The Meri has a claim to fame: she's the first cargo ship in the world to be run on biofuel.

A Roe Deer Encounter

On our walk to the village this morning to collect a daily paper we spotted a roe doe in the field just by Roe Corner. She evidently had't seen us, even though we were only about thirty metres from her, and....

 

....even when she did see us she at first didn't seem too concerned. However, perhaps because we didn't 'move on' as probably most people walking the path do, she suddenly....

....ran to our left and towards us, as if she might jump the fence into Speckled Wood, but changed her mind and returned....

....to where we had first seen her. She now looked much more alarmed, and again....

....ran back towards the trees, standing to watch us for a couple of minutes before returning, yet again, to where we had first seen her - at which point we, slowly, backed off and headed for the shops.

However, on our return, she was back close to where we had first seen her.

I wonder if this is the same roe doe as we saw with her kid a couple of weeks ago - see earlier post here - and that she has moved her young one from the field by the railway to the rather more suitable field by Roe Corner. This would explain her returning to the same spot, which is probably where the fawn was lying up.

A Chill June

On Monday the weather was briefly warm enough for a small white to be on the wing, though it was very much alone as....

....even though there were occasional sunny intervals, the speckled woods and orange tips were conspicuously absent from the relatively young plantation of deciduous trees which we have, for fairly obvious reasons, called Speckled Wood.

It's been miserably cold these last few days. The air temperature has struggled to reach 12C on any day, the west to northwesterly wind has been gusting above twenty miles per hour and bringing in sharp showers, some of them as sleet. Worse, there's no sign of this weather letting up for almost another week.

The cold doesn't seem to have discouraged a few fungi from making an appearance. We found this patch of chanterelles in the coniferous plantation this morning on our way to collect a paper from the village. I wish we had the courage to identify whether they are false or true chanterelles so we could enjoy what is supposed to be a very good meal.

We use the Merlin app fairly frequently as we walk through the woodlands and this morning it picked up six different bird species singing all a one time. The interesting one was the blackcap but, try as we might, we couldn't see him. Instead we had the pleasure of being roundly cursed by....

....a very irate wren parent which was doing its best to tell its young that sitting and....

 ....watching humans approach probably wasn't a wise thing to do.

Three Worts

On a recent walk we found three wild plants which are all 'worts', their names being connected to early beliefs in what use they had. So this very beautiful little wildflower is butterwort, its name coming from the belief that rubbing a paste made from the plant onto the udders of cows would protect their milk from evil intentions.

Butterwort grows in acidic and nutrient-poor environments so it has evolved to be insectivorous: it traps insects in a sticky paste on its leaves, and absorbs the nutrients released.

Similarly, milkwort's name comes from the belief that if cattle ate it, their milk yield would increase, as would that of nursing human mothers.

There are two very similar species of milkwort that look like this. This one is common milkwort as its leaves alternate on either side of the stem, while heath milkwort's leaves are opposite each other on the stem. This rather lovely rich blue is milkwort's common colour but it also occurs in pink and white.

The origin of lousewort's name comes from the belief that, if livestock ate it, they would get lice. Obviously this isn't true, but lousewort is semi-parasitic, connecting its roots to those of nearby plants and extracting water and nutrients for its own use.

It's quite difficult to pin down the meaning of the suffix 'wort' except that it seems to be used for plants which, like these three, have specific uses, and so could be called herbs.

Bait Fish

We spotted a shoal of bait fish off the beach the other morning, something we see far too rarely, and it had attracted a mass of gulls and other birds. One of the cheering sights was that there were a number of guillemots - just visible as dark dots in this picture and a species we haven't seen in some time - and....

....several gannets which were performing their spectacular dives alongside....

....a few terns - most likely sandwich terns.

Heath Spotted

Summer comes quickly in the Highlands, witness the appearance in a matter of days of the third of the five orchid species we've found round Golspie. It's best seen along the track that runs from our house steadily uphill towards Loch Lunndhaid, growing in small colonies, mostly along the right side of the road, though there's the occasional single one and a few have managed to migrate across the road.

This is the first heath spotted of the year. I have mixed feelings when I find that 'first' of each species: pleasure in finding it, and knowing we'll see it through its season, but also regret that the excitement of that first find is already passed for another year.

Heath spotted orchids are very understated, appearing in a few, muted colours, including plain white.  As their name suggests, they're found out on the open muirland, in boggy places or on the sides of ditches. 

This is about as colourful as they get, but to some extent they make up for their lack of excitement by being the most abundant of the local orchids. Like all the orchids, they occur in certain favoured places so, unless one knows where to look, finding them can be a matter of luck. We know of only two places in the immediate Golspie area where they occur in any numbers: along the Loch Lunddhaid track and near Golspie Tower.

Mystery Tracks

This is a track we found while walking along the sandy beach at Littleferry, and what made it is a bit of a mystery. The photo is about 4' from left to right.

I think it may have been made by an otter. The footprints are about the right size and the scrape marks may be its tail being dragged across the sand.

Has anyone any suggestions?

The Newts Return

Following the forest track which winds up from our house has been quite depressing recently as it takes us past the small quarry where, in removing rock for aggregate, the local estate filled in a small pond which was home to some palmate newts - see earlier blog post here. The digger driver did form some small pools just below where the old pond had been but they looked too shallow and small to offer a home to any of the newts which had survived, but then....

....we found that a few had survived. The pools are very bare, and the water is cloudy but they seem quite at home.

This is particularly happy news, not only for the newts but also because this walk, being the easiest to access from our house, is one we follow fairly frequently.

Littleferry Insects

Yesterday's Littleferry walk was made special by the insects we encountered, starting with this little butterfly found on the links. It's a small blue, not a common butterfly and difficult to spot due to its size. Not that there were many butterflies about - we had a chill easterly blowing at the time - but that didn't prevent....

....this small copper from finding a sunny spot in which to enjoy the flowers of a broom.

Near Loch Unes the damselflies were out, including this large red and....

....this blue tailed, along with the first....

....four-spotted chaser of the year.