Casting Clouts

Folklore dictates that one should "never think to cast a clout until the month of May be out" - a clout being a garment of some sort - on the basis that it's not uncommon for us to suffer some miserable weather in a month in which people are anticipating the start of summer. The proverb is, of course, partly true, but it's also true - in our experience anyway - that May can be beautiful. In fact, if anyone asks us which is the best month in which to visit the Highlands we always say, "May," for there are many days in May when, if you didn't, "cast a clout," you'd boil.

The other thing about Highland weather is that one just has to go out into it, whatever it may be. So, this morning, in the face of gusty winds, hail, snail (snowy hail), rain and a temperature that refuses to scramble above 8C, we enjoyed a walk in weather which made itself interesting by changing by the moment.

We weren't the only ones out. There were plenty of rabbits busy on the serious business of enjoying the succulent grass....

 ....in fields where none of the sheep was lying down - supposed to be a warning of the sort of wet weather which, if any of the sheep had looked up from their meal, they would have seen heaving over the hill towards them. They were also too busy eating to notice a few small bird swooping between them....

....our second sighting this year of swallows. Now if anyone has some justification for complaining about the weather, it is these recent returnees from the sunny warmth of sub-Saharan Africa.

At Home

Tsuro the Scottish rabbit has made himself very much at home in our back garden. While he wanders all over the area shown in this picture, he's most often to be found in the pond, usually in front of the marsh grass on the far side where.... 

....he sits very comfortably, protected from the weather. There's little chance of him being bothered by the pond filling: it's been so dry here that it would take some extremely heavy rain for its water level to rise.

Tsuro spends a fair amount of time washing himself. Rabbits are cleanly animals which spend time preening their fur. They also have toilet areas away from where they sleep.

Tsuro's fortunate in that he has some very useful neighbours. The wood pigeons, from their vantage points on top of the fences, make excellent lookouts.

So Tsuro has settled in well.  There's only one problem, the inevitable one, and....

....I suppose we're going to have to learn to live with it.

It isn't just the aubretia, we've also seen him....

....having a go at three other plants, though his main diet does seem to be grass.

So Tsuro's welcome to graze on a few of our flowers - as long as he doesn't invite all his friends and relatives to a party or, worse, to come and live with him.

The African Rabbit

Rabbits have always been special to me, this association dating back to the Geraldine Elliot books which my mother read to my brother and I when, as small boys in the second Mombasa house we had in Cliff Avenue, we were required to join her on her bed during our compulsory afternoon siestas. I have written about these books before - here. One of their main characters was Kalulu the rabbit, who was the trickster in Bantu folk lore, whose stories were transported to the Caribbean and Americas by slaves from West Africa, in which he became the character Br'er Rabbit. So, from an early age, I learned that rabbits were clever.

In fact, the African rabbit isn't a rabbit but a hare. My first recollection of seeing one 'in the wild' was on one of those miserable days when I had just boarded an aeroplane departing from Nairobi airport on my return to school in England after a summer holiday in Mombasa. As the 'plane taxied out onto the runway to take off, I recall seeing a 'rabbit' feeding on the grass a short distance from the 'plane, this noisy silver monster not bothering it in the slightest. It was one of those occasions when I swore I would never forget the moment: and I haven't.

My next encounter with rabbits was on the lawns at the rear of Telham Court, the building which housed my prep school, Glengorse. The boys weren't usually allowed access to these lawns but, one sunny summer's day, the headmaster, who took us for Art, permitted me to go on to the lawn to sketch some rabbits which were happily feeding there. I managed to crawl very close to them, and produced some rather pleasing pictures.

Tsuro remains with us, having taken up residence in the marsh grass which surrounds our pond. I do rather worry for him as there are some large crows coming in to the garden to feed on the small birds' food, but he seems very capable of looking after himself. And he is behaving himself: he seems quite content to eat the grass and not our plants.

The Unexpected

We left home this morning to drive to Littleferry with the thermometer registering a blistering 8C. Fortunately, the northerly wind was light but the low temperature suggested that the objective of our visit - to see if the first wild orchids were showing - was unlikely to be achieved. That said, we almost immediately found....

....a small colony of what I have identified as marsh cranesbill, a geranium variety which may be an escapee from one of the local gardens. If the cranesbill was a little unexpected this early, the....

....two small jellyfish found stranded along last night's high tide line were even more so. We hardly saw a jellyfish last summer so perhaps they're making a timely start this year.

Leaving the beach to walk back to the car along the paths which criss-cross the links, we found something even more unexpected in such cool conditions....

....a small skipper; and then, to make it quite clear that this was not a one-off, a second, both of which stayed very still while their pictures were taken.

Rather as we had anticipated, we didn't find any orchids but, as if to make up for our disappointment, the dainty viola pansies were out in force; and when we.....
 

....returned home, Tsuro was here to greet us.

The Colours of Spring

Above the sea of yellow created by this year's prolific flowering of the gorse, the small birds are finding places to sing - like....

....this song thrush which could, if it wished, have used a much higher tree to weave its wonderful song but chose to be surrounded by flowers, or....

....this male yellowhammer which, perhaps because he would have been so much less conspicuous in the gorse, chose a branch near the top of a willow tree.

Meanwhile, the bluebells in the woods are reminding us that they come in several colour variations, including pinky-bluebells and....

....whitebells, of which there seem to be many more this year.

Other old friends are reappearing. like cuckoo flower (or lady's smock) with its delicate colour shades, and....

....campion, which will continue to flower all through the summer. It's one of my favourite flowers because I can remember enjoying making sketches of it in art classes at my prep school.

The one thing missing from this feast of early spring life is the insects. In the last few days I've seen a white butterfly and a peacock, and a few large bumblebees. Perhaps this paucity of insects is easily explained by blaming the weather - the midday temperature has been struggling to rise above 10C, and it has been breezy - but I do wonder....

Tsuro

A rabbit has moved in with us. It's not a very big rabbit, perhaps a few weeks old, but it seems very confident in the way it has taken over the garden. We bump into it occasionally and, although it runs away, it doesn't go far.

Yesterday I spent some time sitting in the sunshine watching it. Happily, at the moment its main food seems to be grass, and it's welcome to as much of that as it wants. It has yet to have a go at any of the other plants - as far as we can see - so I'm not sure how we're going to react if we find it has eaten our vegetables or a rather precious ornamental plant.

I've decided to call it Tsuro, which means rabbit in Shona, one of the languages of what is now Zimbabwe. When we were in that country - between 1967 and 1970, when it was called Rhodesia - I used to....

....run the school's farm club. Our most ambitious project was to rear rabbits for use in the school's kitchen, and to sell to a local butcher. The scheme went horribly wrong, so we lost a fair amount of money, but I came away with the nickname Tsuro, which I rather liked. What I didn't miss was the killing and dressing of as many as fifty rabbits each Wednesday afternoon.

I learned a great deal from the rabbit fiasco. I'm just sorry that the 'business' involved the murder of so many rather pretty little animals.

I have other good reasons for feeling rather affectionate towards rabbits, of which more anon.

Another First

It doesn't matter hugely that these are the first bluebells of the 2026 spring except if one allows oneself to wonder whether these might be one's last 'first bluebells of spring', at which point they suddenly become rather more important and more worthy of a moment or two's close attention.

I feel so fortunate to be able to have these deep thoughts as I wander the footpaths and tracks around this small village, and to be able to notice the changes as they happen. For example, the rabbits are back in the two extensive pasture fields just above our house, with one or two being visible at any time of day. This rabbit has taken possession of the warren which, last summer, was crowded with rabbits of all ages. It seemed unworried when I approached. Perhaps it is that the buzzards, through a lack of rabbits a month or so ago, have disappeared having, hopefully, found enough rabbit prey elsewhere to raise a family.

While many of the small bird species have almost disappeared from the garden feeders, having much more important things to do in the woods, the blackbirds are back, the males quarrelling while the females gorge on the fat cakes we put out for them. It's evident that they now have young to feed - and if a blackbird is to feed its young it needs a territory which is worth singing about, even if the song is, at times, rather less tuneful than the local song thrush's.

Not that the weather is helping anyone. One minute we're enjoying warm sunshine, the next we're savouring a sharp hailstorm; and today's temperature, if it reaches the giddy heights of yesterday's midday - 7C - is forecast, as the wind goes round into the north, to drop tonight, perhaps below 2C. We might even have a sharp ground frost - in May!

Harry

The last two evenings, both times at around 7pm, Harry the sparrowhawk has been on his favourite perch on the balustrade of the ramp that leads down from the house to the garden. From it, he has a good view of the back garden and of the comings-and-goings of the small birds that come to our feeders.

I'm not sure how well Harry fares out of our garden as I've only found two small piles of feathers on the ground around the ramp.  This may explain why we've been seeing much less of him recently. He's been reported by neighbours as visiting their gardens as well, and one told us that she saw him with a female.

This must be a fairly tough time for him. The small birds are coming into the garden much less at the moment, presumably because they're too involved in pairing up and nest-building, though only the blackbirds seem to have young as they're flying off with beak-fulls of food. The one time the small birds are busy at our feeders is the early evening, the very time when Harry's been visiting. 

We're a bit surprised and disappointed that we haven't seen the female but it may be that she has a quite separate hunting area.

Return of the Rain

All good things must come to an end so, sadly, we've lost the brilliant sunshine and warm temperatures of earlier in the week, replaced by the customary grey skies of these northern parts. However, the warmth has....

....done a wonderful job of speeding up the coming of spring. In our now two-year-old garden the very deliberate planting of insect- and bird-friendly plants, such as the early-flowering aubretia, has paid dividends though....

....we do have some worries. A couple of chaffinches have been behaving oddly, not flying off when we approached. This may have been that they were suffering from heat exhaustion but another grim possibility is that, despite trying to kept the feeders clean, we have an outbreak of the dreaded trichomonosis, a disease which particularly affects greenfinches and, to a lesser extent, chaffinches.

The cowslips have spread even further across the meadow down by the A9, and are obviously having a good year. The seem to come out shortly before the primroses, so are one of the bright flowers of early spring.

Then there are one or two wildflowers out which I associate with full summer, their arrival providing a glorious splash of colour. This very lonely common vetch seemed to glow on our walk yesterday, just as the rain was arriving.

Speckled Wood

Speckled Wood is the name we've given to a section of our frequently used route down to the village shops. We like it because, although it is a plantation, it's entirely of several species of deciduous trees, and it therefore has its own special populations, one of which is....

....the butterfly after which we named the wood - the speckled wood.

It's far from a gaudy butterfly like the peacock and red admiral, but we think it's very pretty. It's also rather special because it seems to be thriving so, when we saw this season's first ones in flight on Thursday, it wasn't the paltry one or two we're seeing of all the other species, but an extravagant dozen or more, all already very actively competing for mates.

We also like Speckled Wood for the other wildlife it offers. For example, it used to be one of the best places to see roe deer. So it seemed quite natural this morning to find this structure by the side of the path. It's about a foot across, and in many ways looks like an open nest - except it has a deep hole at the back of it. There are more of these structures close by.

I have no idea what built it but, if I were pushed, I might suggest it's about the right size for a rat.

The Hut Circle

I set off for the Drummuie hut circle this morning in stunning weather, with hardly a breath of wind and the sun gloriously warm. 

The insects were out in force, with peacock, orange-tipped, white and tortoiseshell butterflies much in evidence and....

....more tiger beetles than I have ever seen. My experience has been that if you see one, you're lucky; today I must have seen fifty.

The birds were celebrating the warmth with their songs, the most common bird up on the moorland now being the willow warblers with their beautiful, cascading refrain.

More of the summer flowers are beginning to appear. This lousewort is the first of its species to flower.

This is the hut circle. I sat for some time on its wall, looking out at the view and savouring the weather. I didn't see a soul and, were it not for the distant murmur of the traffic down the A9, humans might have disappeared from this planet.

The circle of stones is very clearly visible at the moment but, sadly....

....the first of this year's bracken is beginning to sprout, so in a few weeks this ancient and remarkably well-preserved dwelling will be buried again, not to reappear until the bracken has died back early next year.

The builders of these huts, some over 2,000 years old, chose superb sites for their houses. The Drummuie hut circle is exceptional in having wonderful views in almost every direction.

So I sat on the stone foundations of their home and wondered what those ancient people would have made of the frenetic world in which we, their descendants, choose to live.