Red Squirrel

 

Part of our walk to the village shops is along what we call Squirrel Alley, a woodland path which runs between the back gardens of some houses (right) and the Sutherland Estate forestry (to the left). It's an ideal place to see the red squirrels which were reintroduced here about four years ago and their descendants, but we haven't seen one in months, until this morning when....

....this squirrel, which had been feeding at one of the feeders put out by the garden owners, decided to cross the 'alley' via the branches above us, giving us....

....plenty of time to watch and to take some photographs.

The squirrels were reintroduced both here and into the forestry above Big Barns to the north of Golspie, and seem to have done well, particularly as they are the most northerly of Scotland's red squirrel populations. Some have been seen close to Dunrobin Castle, which means they have managed to cross the busy A9 road.

A New Testament

After finding the green book of African game the other day I've been enjoying a gentle wander through our bookshelves to see what else has been hiding there, and came across this little book of the New Testament. It was given....

....to Beatrice May Mitchell, Mrs MW's mother, by her auntie Millie on February 22nd, 1933, her sixteenth birthday.

The reference on the fly leaf to St John's gospel is....

....to this text.

In my experience, most old bibles have small mementoes hidden amongst their pages, and this is no exception, though the sentiment on this little card doesn't read so well today.

Winter Butterflies

It's like winter today - air temperature 8C, a heavy dew, reports of snow settling on the lower bens of Lochaber, and a chill northwesterly blowing, but at least the sun is occasionally out and the promised rain has held off, so we took our usual walk down through the forestry to the village. I had stopped at Roe Corner in the hope of seeing a deer, and even sat down on a log to enjoy the sun, when a movement....

....caught my eye. It was a speckled wood, a bit tatty around the edges, but quite happy to fly in these damp, cold circumstances. However, what surprised me was that it was joined by several others all of which flew up....

....into the branches of the trees, settling there....

....in the sunshine, rather like the monarchs do in Mexico after their long migration south.

So, it appears that winter butterflies are evolving in Golspie to cope with the sunless summers, and the speckled woods are leading the way.

If you don't believe me, all this was witnessed by a small red bird which watched everything from a perch amid the elder berries.

Esvagt Alba

From our sitting room, looking out over the neighbouring rooftops and away across the Moray Firth, she's just a slight mark upon the horizon, yet this is a rare and exciting enough event for me to reach for my camera, the miracle machine which....

....enables me to see her much more clearly and realise that we've met her before.

The Marine Traffic website confirms that this is the offshore support vessel Esvagt Alba - more details about her from a previous post in November 2023, here.

The few ships we see these days are all as distant as this, most coming and going from the oil and cruise port facilities at Invergordon and the Cromarty Firth. Time was we had a far better view of passing ships when we lived right on the Sound of Mull and had....

....all sorts of ships parading close before us.

Coast Path

We haven't walked the coast path north, to the gate beyond Dunrobin Castle, for months so it was good today to revisit familiar territory and to find the usual variety of interest including....

....a dead gannet, worryingly reminiscent of the days of the avian 'flu outbreak - but, happily, this was the only casualty washed up along recent hight tide lines.

At times the beaches exposed at low tides seem to host more birds that belong in fields and woodland than birds that belong on the shore. We saw curlews and oystercatchers, cormorants, grey herons and gulls but the most interesting sight was the first rock dove of the year, feeding with a small flock of rooks; we wondered whether the pigeons would appear in the large numbers seen last winter.

It wasn't only busy along the shore: several of these fox moth caterpillars were taking advantage of the short grass along the path to hurry to.... well, wherever they felt they needed to be on a cold September morning.

The short grass also seems to have encouraged this leggy fungus, perhaps one of the brittlestems.

It's sad that such an enjoyable walk starts at the opposite end of the village to our new house, which means we now have to drive to access it. 

The Little Green Book

This must be about the most unassuming little book in our library, small, thin, with a cloth cover, and only found because I was looking for a book amongst the East African ones about Swahili. But as I pulled it off the shelf I knew immediately where it came from as I can remember my mother buying it.

We'd driven up from Mombasa along the Nairobi road as far as the first entrance gate into Tsavo East National Park, and had gone into the little shop the park rangers ran in the ticket office. We knew our African animals pretty well so were surprised when Mum bought this, 'The Game Animals of Eastern Africa'.

Arriving at the park was always an exciting moment. We would ask the rangers for news - "habari gani?", "what news?" - and they would tell us where elephant had been seen, and rhino, and buffalo, and....

This was in 1960, the date, 17th/18th September indicating that that we spent the night at the park, most likely in one of the cottages at the Aruba dam, and also that this was....

....right at the end of the holidays, when Richard and I would have been finding life increasingly difficult as the date for our flight to the UK loomed towards us. That day, with its miserable farewells, must also have been dreaded by our mother for, although we knew that it was she who was so keen on us receiving a British prep/public school education, there was an emotional price to pay for it.

I have no idea why the two stamps are there, but the pencilled 6/50 at the top means that Mum would have paid six shillings and fifty cents for the book.

In the event the book was pretty useless, being far too detailed to be of any use in the field; and, as I said earlier, we were already pretty good at identifying most of the animals we were likely to see.

The book must have stayed in East Africa with my parents, and probably came with us when we made our next annual Tsavo pilgrimage - on that occasion, in 1961, for the last time. Then it came to England with my parents when they retired, and I probably picked it up from my mother's flat in Hastings when she moved into a nursing home, since when it has stood neglected upon our bookshelves.

Gossamer

With the forecast once again for mist and fog we decided that perhaps the best walk to do was to join in the celebration of all things dank by heading for the darkest and densest woodland in search of fungi - which turned out to be extremely disappointing as the Backies plantations, usually the home of the most varied fungal collection, had very few to show us, although these few...

....did include the first fly agaric of the year, much chewed over by slugs and snails.

However, the lack of fungi was more than made up for by a spectacular display of gossamer which particularly coated the branches of gorse, broom and pine in the clearings where the dew had been able to form.

We searched in vain for the spiders which had created this strange wonderland but found none until we realised that....

....there were two types of gossamer, the much more common denser clumps - seen at the top of this picture - and the more 'standard', but less prolific web-like structures.

We searched in vain for spiders in the amorphous clumps but in the....

....web-like structures we found their owners, a small, brown spider species which was tame enough to allow a very close approach for a picture.

Which leaves open the question of who builds the amorphous gossamer. Is it a different spider or is it the same spider as creates the web and, if it's the latter, why does the spider go to such huge lengths to build the gossamer masses?

A Giant Fungus

"Mist and then fog" the forecast promised for this morning so, when we walked through the woods on our way down to the village for a paper we were on the lookout for the group that most favours those sort of damp, dreary conditions - the fungi. However, what we stumbled across just off this path to the left in the picture was....

....one of the largest fungi groupings we've ever found. That it was in such beautiful condition, and the fact that Mrs MW had passed this way on Wednesday and not seen it, suggested it had only just appeared.

Of course the fun in all these discoveries is in the identification. This picture proves it is one of the gills but, beyond that, I'm stuck, despite spending some considerable time 'surfing' the internet for large, brown gill fungi. But then, as I keep telling myself, it's not the artifice of human classification that matters, it's the wonder of finding something which, in its own way, is beautiful.

A Chill September Walk

On a day when the still-air temperature of 14C felt more like ten in the easterly breeze the only butterfly spotted on the wing during today's walk was this red admiral. It was intent on feeding, but not on the coppery-coloured dead-heads of the bog asphodel which was crowding a small pond in the marshland above the plantations. No - the flower whose nectar-rich blooms it preferred above those of several other wildflowers, including the three heathers, a flower which is hidden under its extended wings, was devil's-bit scabious.

Back in the forestry the rowans show signs of having failed to agree on how harsh a winter we are to expect: some were loaded with berries, others had hardly any.

Above the Trees

If we walk far enough up the forestry track which passes our house we can escape from the pine plantations onto the open moor which, did we have the energy, would have allowed us to climb Silver Rock and given us fine views down onto Loch Fleet. As it is, it's a pleasure to be out into a very different habitat, one which encourages....

....the least-familiar species of the three heathers, cross-leaved heath, as well as....

....devil's-bit scabious. There's also something very special about this bleak and wind-swept environment, a sense of freedom, of escape from the pressures of our human world into land which very few people care to visit.

We were up there on Saturday, in exceptionally sunny weather which had brought out....

....a small copper, one of several of these delicate and locally not-so-common little butterflies we've seen this year.

Swallows

I don't like it when the swallows start perching on vantage points like the telegraph lines and the tops of the builders' scaffolding. It means they're feeling a change in the air - cooler, longer nights, a heavy dew across the fields at dawn, glistening spiders' webs blanketing the gorse bushes.

The summer of 2024, with such warmth as it has brought, is ending. Autumn is at the door and, here in the north, the cold will come soon. The swallows, along with the martins and swifts, have a different season to find, either the summer season of the southern hemisphere, if they go that far south, or the equinoctial regime of equatorial lands.

As a small boy in Kenya I used to see the swallows in the months either side of the new year. This is the season of the Kaskazi, the NE trade wind, which includes a hot, dry season between December and March. So, later, between the ages of nine and sixteen, while I spent the winter at school in England, the swallows were enjoying Kenya's warmth.

I'd see them again when they arrived in England in the spring, knowing that this was a signal that I would soon be tracing their tracks south to spend the eight weeks of my summer holiday on the glorious Kenya coast.

Now, each year when they leave, I wonder whether I will see them again in the spring.

Memory Flashes

We spent the last night at the end of our 2009 trip to Namibia at a small lodge close to the airport. It was probably the least impressive of the places we'd stayed yet, for reasons unknown, it's been flashing back into my memory over the last few days. I'm reminded of the walk we took on the last afternoon, one during which I took photographs of the African bush, to remind me of its colours, its heat, of the battering shriek of the crickets....

....and of its wildlife - though there was nothing more impressive than the ant hills built by those energetic creatures during the excavations for their nests.

In the late afternoon we sat in the lodge's hide, overlooking a waterhole whose one reward for our patience was a black-backed jackal. However, we were treated to....

....a wonderful farewell African sunset.

The Namibian holiday was our first, very tentative return to Africa following our retreat from Rhodesia in 1970. It made us determined to go back again, which we did in subsequent years, each time to Tanzania. Those holidays provided us with hundreds of photographs which, with time on my hands, I now enjoy going through.

But the memory flashes are different, for with them I am, for a few moments, immersed. I not only see a scene, I hear its sounds, I feel its heat: it is real and, yes, I wish I was back there living that time again.

Fungi

Last autumn, for some reason, the fungi didn't perform very well. This year they're doing rather better, be it on the links where, in amongst the tall autumn grasses, we have plenty of....

....blackening waxcaps which, if one follows them through life, go from yellow to orange to red to brown to black. There is also an impressive display of....

....puffballs, this one almost perfectly mimicking a golf ball though many are bigger than a tennis ball. Also scattered around are....

....their exploded remains.

In the pine plantations the brittlegills are appearing, some the size of a saucer.

I rather dread each fungal season. I keep telling myself it really doesn't matter whether I identify these fungi or not, yet I feel it's untidy to have taken the trouble to photograph them if I'm not then going to make some effort to identify them.