More Wildlife Woes

We're currently in a run of moderate but gusting westerlies which are bringing heavy rain showers into the Moray Firth which consistently miss Golspie, so to add to the low temperatures we're now seeing the ground dry up - one consequence of which is that we have heightened risk of moor fires.

When we first came to this part of Golspie the many gable ends of the new buildings were perfect places for house martins to nest. This year, we've seen no house martins building nests. In fact, we've seen precious few house martins, sand martins or swallows. 

This may be connected to the insect populations. With temperatures so low - today's midday temperature was 17C....

....the insects continue to struggle, with some plants, like our raspberries, benefiting from the attention of the local bees and hover flies more than others. Sadly, our strawberries look as if they're going to produce a miserable crop compared to the raspberries.

Meanwhile, we continue to see few butterflies. I don't think we saw a single butterfly on the wing yesterday but this one, either a large or a small white, was waiting in the workshop for better weather.

As always, there is a brighter side to life. This is as close as I have ever been to willow warblers, a few feet away, my attention being drawn to them by the cajoling noises this small group was making. It turned out to be two parents trying to control and feed their noisy young.

It's good to see a family of this pretty little bird, particularly as we've had a cuckoo calling along the ridge at the back of the house for some weeks now, and willow warbler nests are a common target for the cuckoo.

Wildlife Worries

This should be a wonderful time of year for observing and enjoying the local wildlife. Sonny is settling in well and seems to prefer feeding on the grass cut short by the strimmer rather then the longer grass left specially for him, and....

....the small group of northern marsh orchids which live up the farm track not fifty metres from our front door are coming in to exuberant bloom, but all this wonderful life is being marred by....

....the dreadful dearth of butterflies. A peacock, a very battered painted lady, and this white are all we've seen so far this week.

Yes, temperatures are low for the time of year; and, yes, it's a bit breezy, and, yes, there are thunderstorms around though no rain has landed on us - much as we need it - but we're not seeing butterflies in any environment - fields, woodland, verges, garden. Worse, as I wrote the other day, we're conspicuously short of insects of any sort - which, making an effort to look on the positive side, is good for our young brassicas.

Mrs MW tells me I'm too pessimistic. I hope she's right.

A Memory

I still have memory flashes, moments when a scene from my past suddenly explodes into my consciousness, like a great rocket illuminating the dark ramblings of my mind. I have fewer, which is a shame as these pictures are of special places, so I try to hold on to them as they fade, then perhaps spend a few minutes hunting to see if I have any photographs of the place that might help recall that moment.

Sandwich Bay is one such place. Our visit was on one of those expeditions upon which tourists are encouraged to go so they can say they have seen true desert, but an unusual desert in that it runs right down to the sea; and the more unusual because, in places, a high proportion of its sand grains....

....are pink and brown, not quartz as in ordinary deserts but garnets. These grains are, perhaps, a clue to why, mostly now buried beneath the sand....

....a few buildings stand rotting slowly, mummified by the heat, for garnets are associated with a particular suite of minerals, and this is the legendary Skeleton Coast of Namibia along which, in days gone by, it was possible to wander the shore picking up diamonds.

In The Garden

Considering we are now well into June and, therefore, into 'summer', things are not good in our garden. For a start, the number of insects is dismally low, with only a few of our many flowering plants attracting attention. So, for example, the chives, which are in glorious flower and would normally be covered in insects, currently attract only this one type of bumblebee.

The flowers which seem most attractive to the few flying insects we have are, surprisingly, the raspberries. I have to say I am both pleased and relieved about this as I do like my raspberries, and Mrs MW does make a very good raspberry jam.

The situation with our butterflies is dire. Each day we see one, or at most two, of which this peacock is the most common visitor. I can only think that it's the low temperatures which are restricting them: when we left the house just after nine this morning to walk down to the village the mercury stood at a perishing 13C.

At least we can be relieved that one species is thriving. Having commented some weeks ago on the total lack of starlings we now have a surplus, with hoards of young ones attacking and emptying the small birds' feeders.

In the short periods when there aren't any starlings around, we're seeing other species that haven't put in an appearance for some months, like the house sparrows. It's good to see them back.

Our 'normal' population of small birds has changed a bit. While we have plenty of goldfinches and siskins, the tit family is very thin on the ground, with the coal tits almost completely absent.

Our resident robin, disgusted at the greedy behaviour of the starlings, has found a solution to his craving for our excellent bird fat - by coming into the room where we store the bird foods and helping himself - and he's very welcome!

Sonny

We were thrilled this morning to wake up to find our new rabbit back on the path below the sitting-room window, enjoying a breakfast of grass and clover.

He's now established here so we felt we ought to give him a name. Following readers' suggestions on last Thursday's post we have decided to call him Sungura Secundus, sungura being KiSwahili for rabbit and secundus being Latin for second - so,'Second Rabbit', or Sonny for short.

A Deserted Beach

We have walked many beautiful beaches in our time - this one is just north of Tanga in Tanzania - and I claim to have been born on a beach, so....

....beaches such as the one at Littleferry have some hard acts to follow.

So we are fortunate to live so near the Littleferry beach: it's an impressive swathe of sand and usually as deserted of humans as any comparable tropical beach - today we saw just three people walking their dogs - but we do like beaches to have some wildlife along their shores.

Our local beaches' lack of life is depressing and concerning. If you search this picture you will find three gulls; and a few gulls were all we saw in the time we spent on the beach. The only other wildlife of note was, along the high-tide line, a line of corpses of....

....dozens of small moon jellyfish.

So we left the beach and wandered across the links where the northern marsh orchids are putting on their annual display. This year the flower-heads are smaller, and some areas have no orchids at all, but the hundreds of flowers are impressive.

We were also pleased to find that, in the coniferous woodland along the back of the links, the creeping lady's tresses were about to flower.

The links also had a few fungi on display, the best being this large common puffball.

On our way back to the car we diverted from the path to see if the dragon- or damselflies were active on Loch Unes but an air temperature of 15C is obviously a bit too chilly for them.

Yellows

The forestry track which I walked today was lined with yellows. With the gorse dying back, the main yellow is from the newly-flowering broom - seen to the right in this picture - while the gorse, now a fading orange, can be seen in the distance. However....

....not all the broom is a bright yellow. In the left bottom of the picture of the track is this, a rare wild broom with orange-red flowers very similar in pattern to....

....the bird's-foot trefoil usually called eggs and bacon.

One short section of this particular track is host to a plant which we've only found in a couple of other places - a yellow pimpernel - while....

....this little plant is even rarer than the yellow pimpernel, being, as far as I have found, the only wild strawberry plant in this part of the woods.

My return journey took me past the lower rabbit field where....

....a rabbit collective has developed a warren in the middle of the field. It would seem to me that the rabbits feeding here are wide open to attack by the buzzards and kites that are nesting in the pine plantation not two hundred metres away, but perhaps a wise bunny has negotiated some sort of agreement with the local raptors.

Hut Circle: A Last Visit

With the weather a little more cheerful I set off this morning to make a last visit to the hut circle before the bracken buries it until spring of next year. I was kept company while I sat on a convenient rock by....

....a cheery pipit - and it was while I was watching it that the first swift of the summer made a fleeting appearance, its scythe-like wings cutting the blue of the sky.

I couldn't find any of the orchids which were in bloom when last I walked the hut circle track ten days ago but I did find one new heath spotted, as well as some....

.....bugle and....

....this very pretty, delicate flower which, beyond considering it may be a veronica, I have failed to identify.

I also found plenty of is marsh thistle, notable for its deep colours and the symmetry of its leaves.

As I approached home this bird met me with an explosion of song, which enabled the Merlin app to identify it as a male blackcap - which, in its excitement, was hopping around too much for a good picture.

Another Rabbit

When we woke yesterday morning we found a new rabbit in the garden feeding, as Tsuro did, very contentedly on the grass and clover that covers our paths. For a few moments we thought it might be Tsuro, back from some far-away adventure, but this rabbit is much bigger, has a very different coat pattern, and lacks....

....some of Tsuro's distinctive features, like a small white blaze high on his forehead.

Before Tsuro's sad death I had seen two rabbits of about the right proportions feeding on the grass at the front of the houses in our road. This was late in the evening, around 10pm, when it's still very light here. So I'd like to think that this is Tsuro's friend.

We thought this might be a one-off visit as he was disturbed by the builders working next door, but he was back this morning so, maybe, we have a new resident rabbit. The next thing we'll need is a name for him.

Encounters

During the hour or so we spent in the garden yesterday afternoon with the sun out we saw only one butterfly, a white, which moved through so quickly I couldn't identify it - until....

....I stumbled across this little gem feeding on a clover flower. It's a small copper with a wing span of about 25mm when fully extended.

The lack of butterflies is upsetting as we've spent the last two years planting this garden so it would attract insects. At the moment we have a variety of flowers available including pansy, aquilegia, kale, clover, lupin, raspberry, blackcurrant, buttercup, gorse, bugle, strawberry, a beautiful pink-flowered hawthorn.... I could go on and on.

Yet, so far, this has been a dismal year for butterflies. We are now into the official British 'summer' so, with this in mind, I took a walk this morning with Mrs MW to see if our local 'hardiest' butterfly, the speckled wood, was on the wing in Speckled Wood....

....which it wasn't, probably because the air temperature sat at a miserable 15C, the grass and leaves were damp, and the sun was obscured by blanket of low cloud which spasmodically delivered a thin drizzle.

Thankfully, the walk did produce a few moments of real pleasure as....

....just past Speckled Wood the path skirts a large field beyond which lie the railway line and the village - and in the middle of the field, despite the human noise, which included the heavy traffic on the A9, a....

....roe deer hind was enjoying breakfasting on the farmer's lush pasture.

The deer knew I was there. She knew, I suppose, that if I had a dog with me the dog couldn't get to where she was. And perhaps the deer has been photographed before because she didn't seem in the slightest worried by my antics in trying to digitally capture her.

Then, in just one place in a clearing in the dark Scots pine plantation, I stumbled across a mass of white flowers of the....

....delicate wood sorrel. Beautiful!