True or False?

Around nine this morning the sky filled with skein after skein of pink footed geese all, for a change, flying in the same direction, north, but....

....as we set off for Backies to collect some croft eggs at around eleven thirty we were stopped by a terrific noise from the direction of Dunrobin Castle, the sound of hundreds of geese taking to the air in alarm and flying south.

For a keen and knowledgable fungus forager the local woods must be a paradise at the moment but it's frustrating for people like us who are old and cautious knowing that chanterelles are such good eating yet so problematic, because there are both true and false chanterelles and, although the latter probably won't kill you, they can give a bad experience. From my understanding of the websites I have visited, the main way of telling them apart is from the colour of the interior of the stem: the upper one, being bright orange, is a false chanterelle.

Our route home took us down through Golspie Glen where we stopped off for a few minutes at the skating pond in the hope there might be a last, lingering dragonfly of the year - and there was. It was patrolling a section of the pond which lay in warm sunlight but the only way to identify it was by catching it on a photo. I succeeded by taking about thirty pictures of which four showed a dragonfly - it's arrowed in this one but....

....the wonders of digital photography enabled me to blow one of the pictures up to reveal a very handsome male southern hawker.

Sunflower Seed Feeders

As those intrepid stalwarts who follow this blog already know, the writer has, for many years, enjoyed feeding the small birds. For a start, it draws into the garden, up close, many species which we might otherwise not see. It also helps these beautiful creatures survive in what is an increasingly difficult world for wildlife.

A second side of my enjoyment comes from creating the contraptions I use to feed them. The fun of this is that they.... should.... enable me to control who eats what and how much of it. More, it's an ongoing challenge because, as soon as I invent a wonderful machine which excludes certain birds, the wretches find a way to thwart me.

A good example is the arrival in our house of a huge container full of sunflower kernels. If I were to make these freely available to all, the container would be empty in days and we'd have a garden full of very fat, flightless small birds, so I have tried to restrict access. This was the first effort, specifically designed for the tits to access but no-one else.

In no time the sparrows had arrived to find a way to defeat me which, of course, they....

....rapidly did, in a matter of hours rather than days. Round 1 to the sparrows.

Suspending a mesh barrier round it solved the problem, and the sparrows seem to have given up trying to get at the feeder. Round 2 to me.

However, I felt bad about my success. Why should the sparrows and other small birds, such as the chaffinches, robins and dunnocks, be excluded? So this is the latest invention, designed so that only the tits can get on to it but, each time they pull out a sunflower kernel, a few more are dislodged and fall to feed the waiting flock below.

The sparrows are investigating my new machine. I fear they will shortly be on to it.

Late Autumn or Early Winter?

I'm really not sure what season one should call this, whether we're still in late autumn even though the night-time temperatures are dropping below a ground-frosty 4C, or whether we're in the beginnings of winter, as suggested by the pink-footed geese which pass over, sometimes in skein after skein totalling hundreds of birds, several times each day.

The herons think it's winter as they now collect in the glebe whenever a high tide chases them off the shore, and....

....the curlews are here in numbers, their plaintive call so characteristic of winter beaches.

We have new residents which I'm hoping will stay with us, not one but two dippers working the Golspie Burn above the footbridge near our house.

The bumblebees continue to crowd the michaelmas daisies in their torpid dozens, each unwilling to move off 'their' flower even if one brushes against it. This morning, with the temperature struggling towards 7C, a few of them were on the white-harled walls around the house soaking up what warmth they could from a weak early sun.

Between occasional heavy showers there has been some sun during the last week or so, enough to bring out one or two of the bigger butterflies, though the only one I've managed to photograph was this very fine red admiral. This has been a terrible year for butterflies and I've hardly seen any caterpillars so can only hope that this good-looking specimen and some of his fellows make it through the winter months to breed prolifically next spring.

The berries are now almost ready for winter, a heavier crop on the rowans than I had expected and a fair crop of elderberries and blackberries.

Everyone is preparing for winter, either by migrating - the last of the swallows and martins seem to have gone - or by establishing their territories. This robin has staked out his amongst the sea buckthorn along the old coast track below Dunrobin Castle.

Long Bay Beaches

I like to think I was born on a beach. It's very nearly true because what was then called the European Hospital, Dar-es-Salaam, was a stone's throw from one. Dar-es-Salaam means the 'haven of peace', and....

....I think it was, for a small child in such a balmy climate, very much a place of peace. We certainly spent many long and happy hours on the beaches around Dar, with my mother and the kikapu which contained our swimming things and picnic. Occasionally, my father came along.

The Dar beaches and, after we moved to Mombasa, most of the beaches to north and south of that town were what I would call 'long bay beaches'. Typically, they were half-a-mile or more long, sandy, and curved away gently to end against a headland. We spent as much time on them as possible. The East African beaches fringed a lagoon which, because it was protected by a barrier reef, was very safe for swimming and abounded in all sorts of marine life - coral, shellfish, octopus, crustaceans, and fish. This photograph of the beach at Nyali, long before it became crowded with tourists, a picture which brings back so many happy memories, is courtesy Tony Chetham.

The type specimen for a 'long bay beach' is this one, the beach at Long Bay on the less fashionable east coast of Jamaica. A small hotel, Ports of Call, sat on that beach and it was a place we went to as often as we could to escape the heat and hassle of Kingston. We, our two mothers, and several friends will remember the peace of this beach.

Here's another superb Jamaican beach of this type. It's Malcolm Bay near the town of Black River on Jamaica's southwest coast and, on the day we visited, it was absolutely deserted. 

Now we are passing our declining years close to a Scottish version of a 'long bay beach'. It's not as exotic as those of East Africa and Jamaica but it's often as deserted as we remember the lovely beaches of our younger years.

Late September Fungi

We noticed a distinct drop-off in the number and variety of fungi we were finding as we moved in to the latter part of September but this may simply have been that, as autumn began to assert itself and the leaves accumulated on the forest floor, so the fungi became increasingly difficult to see. Nevertheless, we've found some wonderful specimens, some of which I have managed, very tentatively, to identify.
 

That we found this particular fungus was sheer luck, for it is tiny, no more than 5mm across, yet I managed to identify it very quickly, at least in part from....

....the spindly black stem: it's horsehair parachute, Gymnopus (Mirasmus) androsaceus, growing amid the bright green of the mosses on a rotten log.

This beauty, with its intriguing texture, is a parasol mushroom, perhaps Macrolepiota procera, which will open out into a flat, plate-like structure as it matures.

One of the things that I simply do not understand about fungi is that it is not uncommon to find just one specimen of a particular species all by itself, which is what happened in this case. The photo hardly does justice to its colour: it's the amethyst deceiver, Laccaria amethystina, though I'm not at all sure what the deceiver bit refers to.

I've failed to identify this one but it, too, is included today at least in part for its colour. From above it looks like a cookie slightly overdone around the edges but....

....its colours are even richer when it's viewed from the side. It, too, was all by itself.

I'm on fairly safe ground with this one. It's the common puffball, of which there are a lot around at the moment. Common it may be but what is remarkable about the species its its ability to live on the most unpromising substrate. Here, Lycoperdon perlatum is thriving on gravel laid and compacted on a mountain bike track.

Autumn Gentians

Something has been conspicuously missing amongst the long grass and wildflowers of the links at Littleferry. Its ghost is there, in the form of....

....dried leaves and flowers, but the reappearance of this plant which we had expected in late summer simply hasn't happened.

It's the autumn gentian, Gentianella amarella, about which I was so excited in late August and early September last year - see post here. I was even more thrilled to find that we had a rarer variety....

....a white-flowered subspecies, septentrionalis. Not that any of the local gentians did too well last year as, by the end of the season, it was obvious that they were struggling, with many plants dying before they had fully flowered.

However, my concern that we haven't seen any - not one - this year have, to some extent, been allayed. Apparently, gentians can be biennial, that is, only flower every other year, though it isn't at all clear to me why they should do this.

Highland Weather

Anyone who lives in the highlands of Scotland has to put up with this sort of weather: cold, windy, wet - a dreich day as the Scots would put it. To some extent we walk as the day's weather dictates so we started the morning in the relative shelter of the woodland between Littleferry and the main basin of Loch Fleet, where we found....

....a good selection of fungi and slime moulds enjoying their favourite weather, particularly this slime mould, Tubifera ferruginosa, which does look remarkably like caviar served with tomato sauce.

Eventually the weather relented so, with some blue sky visible, we walked to the beach, to find....

....the tide running out strongly from Loch Fleet and a mass of birds playing in the current swirling around its entrance. While there are the usual crows, seagulls, cormorants and oystercatchers in this picture, most of the birds, and particularly those in the 'raft' a little further out, are....

....eider. A few females have spent the summer here, some raising their broods on Loch Fleet, but many of these are males which have only just reappeared. The excitement, and there was plenty of the sort of the hooo-hoooing which eider make, may have been old friends and partners greeting each other.

There are big changes happening along Littleferry's beach. The sand to the right is the narrow beach we've worried about all summer, the mound to the left is the sand we lost last winter being brought back by the sea, so it looks as if we might have a good, wide sandy beach to wander this winter.

By the time we left the beach and headed back towards the car the weather did what highland weather so often does - changed suddenly and completely, giving us such warm sunshine that we sat for some time on a bench basking in it and enjoying the emptiness of the place. This unpredictability is one of the things I love about the highlands, and the wonderful clarity of the air that follows a good washing.