The Changing Season

Sections of the beach below Dunrobin Castle are deep in seaweed thrown up by Friday's first of our winter gales, Storm Amy. Arriving to take advantage of anything in the seaweed and nearby fields are....

....the rock doves, wild relatives of the common town pigeon, which spend every winter here. So far only a few have arrived but last winter we saw upward of a hundred,

The Dairy Park, so-called because cows were kept there for milk for the residents of the castle, is now down to cereal crops, this a planting of, probably, winter barley, much appreciated by....

....the local crows, the main species enjoying the feast being....

....rooks (left) and jackdaws. All this while....

....geese pass overhead, skein after skein of them, perhaps a thousand or more, heading south.

Meanwhile, in our back garden, in the increasingly rare flashes of sunshine, the red admirals come out, enjoying our michaelmas daisies and verbena which refused to lie down during Amy's violent passage.

Lochaber Fungi

The warm, damp lanes of Lochaber were determined to make me feel welcome by providing a wealth of fungi along their verges. One feature of these fungi was that many were large....

....like this fly agaric - though it was not the largest.

This is a bolete, perhaps the orange birch bolete or slippery jack, while....

....I have no idea what this species is, catching my eye because so many were crowded onto one rotten log.

And this I liked for its delicacy, and for he rich green of the mossy bed it had chosen to grow on.

One particular thing was noticeable: the fungi hadn't been eaten by snails and slugs, not in the way that our local one are. Which leads us to wonder what it is about Lochaber fungi that the molluscs don't like.

Lochaber

We chose a singularly unfortunate weekend to spend a few days in Lochaber, one of the inland areas which was worst hit by Storm Amy. Not only were the trees badly mauled but so were the power cables. As a consequence, our hotel was freezing for the two days we were able to stand it - they couldn't even offer us a hot drink - so we left for home early. 

As always, we spent as much time as possible walking, though we had to confine our activities to lanes and tracks, not infrequently being passed by SSEN trucks scurrying around the countryside intent on mending the many fallen power cables.

Even in the most inclement weather, Lochaber is beautiful. It seems to be at its best when a storm has just passed and the first fleeting intervals of sun warm one's face. This view looks across fields which all seemed to be brilliant green to the three peaks of the Grey Corries.

Life there is somehow different, though very similar to Ardnamurchan. This picture features a post box which stands proudly in the middle of nowhere but, like all British post boxes, its mail is collected on six days of the week - at 9am on weekdays and 7am on Saturdays.

Each time I leave Lochaber I feel a deep regret. It's not that I know the place well - that was the privilege I enjoyed by living over twenty years on Ardnamurchan - it's more that its fierceness appeals to me. It takes people of character to thrive in remote communities like this, and I am proud that, on more than one occasion in my life, we lived in similarly remote places.

A Persistent Wren

We use a brick to keep the plastic lid on the compost bin but our....

....sharp-eyed resident wren noticed that....

....the brick might have another purpose: something was using it as a hiding place, something which required some....

....acrobatics to find; which, if it couldn't reach it from one side, could perhaps be better accessed by....

....getting at it from another side, or by....

....working its way round the brick.

This is one persistent wren, one which doesn't give up until....

....it finds what it's looking for, even though it's such a small fly it hardly seems worth all the bother though - and only the wren will know this - it might taste rather good.

The African Hoe

In the last twenty years we have created two gardens from scratch, and the work that went into them would have been much harder without this tool, an African hoe - badza, in Central African, jembe in KiSwahili. In many ways its function is similar to that of the spade but, because one can get a good swing on it, the badza/jembe digs much more deeply and also, by then pushing forward on it, will leaver the clod out of  the earth.

Look up this tool on the internet and it appears to be a tropical tool, coming in a huge variety of forms. So some African ones are quite small and elegant, while the Asian ones seem to have far longer handles.

All this came to mind because we are still planting our garden and this morning I had to dig a hole for two small shrubs. These days I can't swing my beloved hoe like I used to - though in past days when I did I kept everyone well away - but I still made the hole in quick time.

This picture shows the African hoe in its native environment. These boys are members of the farm club I used to run at Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia but they would never have done this at home as...

....traditionally, in Africa, digging the shamba (KiSwahili for farm) has been women's work.

Naming of Fungi

One thing I do love about fungi is that so many of them have been given such simple, easy to remember names - like this one, obviously, is called orange peel fungus, and....

....this one is cauliflower fungus - it's about 6" across and had two smaller ones exploding into life near it.

This one, puffball fungus, is also well-named, in that it's the shape of a ball and if, at the right time, you squeeze it, it sends out puffs of spores.

This one's not too bad - if, that is, I've identified it correctly: it's a blackening wax-cap - it goes black as it ages and it has a fairly waxy cap.

It's so sad then when others, like this beauty, which is the sort of fungus that many people notice, should be given a name like fly agaric: why not call it the fairy fungus - I can almost see a fairy sitting on it.

All these fungi, and more, are flourishing in the woods above our house, helped by the fact that we've had some, though not much, rain.

Weaver Birds

One of the joys of returning to Tanzania in 2010, after being away for almost fifty years, was to renew my acquaintance with weaver birds, so-called because they build their nests by....

....weaving lengths of grass into round nests which are suspended beneath branches, the purpose of this being to make it as difficult as possible for snakes to prey on their eggs and young.

I don't remember many birds from my childhood - or, if I do remember them, I've long forgotten their names, but I could never forget the weavers. 

They came to the gardens of the four houses we had in Mombasa because we always had a bird bath. Even in the UK, one is urged to have a bird bath, not just for the birds to drink from but also because having a bath is an important part of a bird's health regime

I particularly remember weavers visiting the garden of the last house we had in Mombasa, where we had a concrete bird bath in the middle of the lawn. This our 'garden boy', Mlalo, would clean late every afternoon in time for the weavers to arrive, which they usually did around the time we were sitting on our veranda enjoying our sundowners.

However, my strongest memories are of the weavers at....

....the Hoey house at Nyali, that lovely house which looked out across a lawn and through the palms to a beach, a lagoon, and the far-out white line of the breakers on the reef.

This was a bigger bath, set into the lawn, with some cobbles arranged artistically in it - it's just visible in the right-hand bottom corner of the photo, located immediately in front of the veranda where we sat for.... yes.... our sundowners.

Weavers, I have since learnt, come in almost forty different species, in Tanzania alone. The one I photographed on our 2010 visit is a Tanzanian masked weaver. I am amazed I didn't see other species during the couple of weeks we were there but, as I have said before, we were ill-prepared for the wonders of Tanzania's bird life.