Littleferry Links

We walked Littleferry links this morning on a day which promised some sunshine but which stayed stubbornly dull, not that this detracted from the pleasure of finding plenty to look at, including....

....the masses of northern marsh orchids which weren't in flower when we last wandered the links. This year's crop appears to be more abundant than previous years' but smaller in size - perhaps because of the dry May. We also enjoyed....

....the variation in colours and....

....patterns between the flowers of different individuals.

We didn't see a burnet moth last summer, but that may be because we weren't out and about much this time a year ago. There were plenty on the wing today, most feeding on the bird's-foot trefoil.

This is a more unusual view of the six-spot burnet's underside, while....

....this is the view more usually on display showing the six spots and the underwing.

This beautiful butterfly was comatose in the middle of one of the paths. It's a fritillary but I hesitate to identify the various members of the species.

On our way back to the car through the woods we checked on the creeping lady's tresses, which are still some days away from blooming.

Bird News

The birds' feeding stations are at their busiest at this time of year, with both adults and this year's young competing for the food. This crowd - there are chaffinches, goldfinches, greenfinches and siskins in the mix, at least fifteen of them in all - are feeding on sunflower hearts in our front garden.

Two weeks ago we spotted this blackbird with what looked like a broken wing and a nasty abscess under it, and assumed we wouldn't see him again, but he was back a couple of days ago looking better.

He was one of several blackbirds we've seen. Their busy-ness indicated that several had chicks in the nest but there are now fewer mums and dads rushing back and forth with beak-fulls of food and more of the young sitting around wishing that their parents still fed them.

Since we've been in this house we've not had many starlings coming in to the garden but when, a couple of weeks ago, they did start to appear they came in droves, chasing the other small birds away and making themselves generally unpopular. We put up with it because the number of starlings has plummeted and we wanted to support them, but we had to restrain ourselves from going out and chasing them away. Then, suddenly, they were gone.

Other young we've seen have included this long-tailed tit which was with a small flock working its way noisily through the forestry near our house, and when....

....I was wandering in the hills on Thursday I managed to capture, at extreme range for my camera, a juvenile red kite working the hillside. We've had a pair of kites wheeling in the sky above us for some time, and it's good to see that their efforts have been rewarded.

Lastly, here's a picture of a female siskin, a species which we once considered so rare we used to get quite excited if we saw one. She's one of a dozen or more siskins we currently have visiting us, attracted by the sunflower seeds.

A Very Special Painted Lady

I gave up on the garden yesterday afternoon and took refuge indoors - see post here - not only out of grief for the total lack of butterflies but also because it came on to rain. By the time I had finished writing yesterday's post the sun was out again so I returned to the garden, to be greeted by this very special butterfly, a painted lady.

It was as if it had heard my pain and rushed to the garden to comfort me.

Not only are painted ladies one of the most beautiful of British butterflies, particularly when they reveal their underwing, but they also have a most unusual life cycle - I have attempted to describe it in an earlier post here.

So, if you're still listening, my painted lady, thank you for hearing my cry and for coming to comfort me.

Where are the Butterflies?

This is our view of the back garden when we sit on the lower terrace. In the year since we've been in the house we've spent hours planting up the garden to be insect and bird friendly. At the moment we have masses of annuals, perennials, vegetables, fruits and 'weeds' in flower - snapdragons, toadflax, pansies, verbascum, roses, marigolds, daisies, lupins, geranium (of some sort), violets, clover, buttercups, kingcups, nettles, potatoes, strawberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, even three orchids; and we have some plants kind neighbours gave us which we planted and have forgotten their names; and more are on their way - lavender, verbena, michaelmas daisies, buddleia.

I spent almost all of this morning and some of the afternoon in the garden. The winds were light. The air temperature reached a heady 21.5C - that's hot for this part of Scotland.

And I didn't see a single butterfly.

Flowers of the Moor

I walked up a winding track into the hills above Golspie this morning looking for wildflowers in a season when many of them are at their best, just coming into flower. While the bell heather has been out for a few weeks the....

....cross-leaved heath is only just starting and the ling won't be showing much for some weeks.

I don't remember toadflax from the previous times I've walked this track at this stage of the year but it's out in large numbers, as are....

....the foxgloves, with white the second colour after the 'normal' pink.

Vetch is another flower that's doing well this year.

We've already found heath spotted (above) and northern marsh orchids in the hills but this year looks like being special for....

....marsh fragrant orchids, which are only just appearing - in much larger numbers than in previous years.

Breakfast

Yesterday I had one of those moments when I was suddenly back somewhere long ago, in this case in the house we had in Cliff Avenue for the last three years of my parents' time in Mombasa. I am sitting in the dining room. It's on the ground floor at left in this picture, its two windows on this side mostly obscured by a bush. In the memory flash I am sitting in my usual place at the table, which is with my back to these windows, with my mother on my right, my father opposite me, and Richard on my left. The dining table is dark wood, large, with a small glass bowl in the middle in which floats a single, delicate frangipani flower. One of the servants, probably the head 'boy' Saidi, dressed in a white khanzu - like a long, white night-shirt - red cummerbund and a red fez hat, is coming into the room through the door which leads to the kitchen, to my right front.

The wooden louvres of the window shutters are open so a cool early morning breeze fills the room but, even so, I can smell the coffee which is in my cup. It's good, Kenya coffee, served by my mother from a very elegant silver coffee pot.

When I sat down to breakfast a large slice of pawpaw was on the plate in front of me. Crunchy brown sugar had already been sprinkled on it, and there's more in a silver sugar bowl, but the first thing I do is to squeeze a quarter slice of lemon, picked from the tree in our garden, onto it.

My father has already finished his meal and will be off to work in a few minutes. He's already taken a short but brisk walk, which he does every morning between morning tea on the top veranda and breakfast. My mother is pouring herself more coffee.  And Saidi has Richard's main course, which he serves from a large tray: bacon, fried egg, fried bread, fried tomatoes and a sausage. No-one speaks, we're concentrating on our food, but I expect my mother to ask us what we're doing today, the answer to which is that we're meeting our friends and, perhaps, going for a bicycle ride - but we don't really know, we'll just allow the wind to blow us where it wills.

It's before seven but it's already warming up outside. It's going to be a beautiful day, and I can't wait to start on it - because I know that the number of days like this which are left to me is running down. They're precious.

I am back there for a moment, then the memory is gone.

A Blustery Day at Littleferry

There was really no need for us to go out to Littleferry this morning to look for wildlife as it came to us, in the form of a roe doe which we've seen before from the kitchen window browsing on the young trees planted on the other side of the road.

We went anyway, and enjoyed a fine day but, as this willow warbler must have noticed, a fairly blustery one.

This crossroads of the main paths across the links usually has some of the earliest and largest populations of northern marsh orchids but this year they're running later than some of the other populations, with....

....only a few in full bloom.

We checked the short section of path through the plantation for the other Littleferry orchid, creeping ladies' tresses, to find that, although the first leaves have appeared, the flowers aren't yet out.

Back on the links the only butterflies flying were small browns, while along the beach....

....a ringed plover was behaving very much as if it had a nearby nest to worry about.

We haven't seen a jellyfish for ages, and very few last summer, so these are this year's first, a small number of moon jellyfish, stranded along the tideline. 

Out to sea we spotted the first gannet of the year wheeling offshore but failed to capture its picture. So here instead is a picture a navy helicopter circling offshore, probably involved in the same exercise as the Typhoons flying overhead.