27th May – damselfly

It has been really warm and sunny here for the last few days.  The heat of the sun has dried up the garden so that the soil now has wide cracks in places, and (how amazing is this?) some of the plants need watering.  It makes such a nice change not to have to wear wellies to do gardening.

Colin was out yesterday with his macro lens, having discovered a Large Red Damselfly in the flowerbed.   He got some superb shots of it eating a gnat.   Look at its eyeball!  Striped brown and green – incredible.

Images copyright © Colin Woolf

We went for a walk earlier this morning, and the ash trees seemed alive with whitethroats in full song.  The butterflies aren’t as numerous this year, though we did find a couple of orange tips and some green-veined whites on the clumps of lady’s smock.  There was still dew on the grass, and the air was full of the scent of blossom.

 

21st May – getting bogged down

The sun came out again yesterday, and this was such an unexpected event that we went off up the hill again in search of wildlife.

A pair of redpolls showed themselves in the young woodland, and their attention seemed to be focused on a low hawthorn bush where they may have a nest.  Whitethroats were chattering and paragliding among the mountain ash trees, but they were frustratingly difficult to photograph.  We stopped to inspect an interesting beige and buff warbler-like bird:  we could see he wasn’t a willow warbler, but what was he?  He didn’t divulge any information, but hopped around the low bushes, piping occasionally.  We later discovered that he was a sedge warbler.

At the top of the road, Colin suggested that we hop over the fence and walk across into Blawhorn Moss, which is a nature reserve managed by Scottish Natural Heritage.  Their website describes it as “an oasis of open windswept moors hidden in the lowlands”, and it is protected largely because of its wide range of bog-loving plants, including mosses and insect-eating sundews.

So we waded and hopped across the tussocks of marsh grass, squelching through carpets of emerald-green moss, while curlews and skylarks added a natural soundtrack.

They don’t call Blawhorn Moss an upland bog for nothing – it is very boggy.   Your feet start sinking into mushy wetness when you stop walking, and I was glad I’d decided to wear wellies.   The SNH says that “beneath your feet there’s over 8000 years of history, locked into the peat layers of this raised bog.”   No wonder our garden is so wet, if this is what it’s like right on top of the hills.

Everywhere there were tufts of harestail grasses, which were just opening out their white candyfloss heads.  Colin set about photographing the miniscule details of moss flowers, sedges and sundews.  I imagined that sundews would be quite big, but in fact they turned out to be really tiny.  They made compact little mats among the sphagnum moss, their deep pinkish-red leaves fringed with sticky tentacles.

We discovered a hare’s ‘form’, a cup-shaped hollow in a hummock of grass, where he must have been sleeping only recently.   A couple of seconds later, I caught sight of a hare lolloping away towards the woodland, his long ears upright and alert for danger.

The sun was really quite warm as we made our way back down;  any more of this, and we might start getting excited about summer!

Mountain ash flowers in bud

Redpoll (male)

Redpoll (female)

Redpoll (female) 2

Whitethroat

Sedge warbler

Upland bog

Harestail (1)

Harestail (2)

Harestail (3)

Harestail (4)

Moss in close-up

Moss

Sundew

Lichen

Air bubbles in boggy bits

Marsh violet

New growth on heather

Sedge

View towards the north

A hare’s form

Marsh marigold

Colin in action

13th May – the darling buds of May

After the endless rain on Friday, yesterday was fine and dry.  We could even feel the warmth of the sun!  It was nothing like March, but we were still inspired to go for a short walk up the hill.

Going for a walk is easier said than done, because if Purdey is outside we have to check that she’s not hot on our heels with her tail held high, pursuing her all-abiding passion for nosiness.

We heard the first willow warblers and whitethroats in the woodland;  they were flitting around nervously, as if they hadn’t quite got to grips with their new quarters.  I can’t really blame them.  I would be feeling the same if I’d gone somewhere warm for the summer and found daytime temperatures of six degrees.

A swallow was perching on some rusty wire higher up the road, and Colin got a few photos that really capture its metallic blue sheen.  We still have no house martins, and this must be down to the weather because they’re usually among the first to arrive.  A couple of curlews were calling wistfully from the moor at the top, and meadow pipits hopped around the fence posts in search of insects.

Most of the buds on the beech trees were still firmly closed;  some of the lower leaves that had been lured out by the warm sunshine of March are now brown and crisp.  There was a strong wind up there, as there usually is, blowing straight across the central belt from the west;  but it felt warm, and carried the scent of spring flowers.

I’m not often moved to quote Shakespeare, but these two lines from his 18th sonnet couldn’t be more appropriate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Looking north from the highest point, we could see distant peaks of mountains, some white with snow.  We’ve caught sight of them before on clear days, and this time we decided to find out what they were.  This led to a full-scale research programme when we got back home, involving OS maps, rulers, a compass, and some online mapping tools.  Colin even loaded Google Earth and started ‘flying’ around the landscape in a virtual aircraft.  While this was quite productive and very exciting, in real terms if he was flying an F16 and I was a sheep, I would keep my head down.

After putting endless Gaelic mountain names into a Google image search and subjecting their profiles to Poirot-like scrutiny, we decided that two of the peaks were Stuc a’Chroin and Ben Vorlich to the north of Callander, a good 40 miles away as the crow flies.  The others remain unidentified.  A cluster of three cone-like hills to the north-west might just be the summits around the Rest and Be Thankful, a mountain pass from Loch Long to Loch Fyne;   and the snow-covered peaks that lie due north could even be the Cairngorms.

Flowering cherry

Willow warbler

Silver birch bark

Gorse (1)

Gorse & milkwort

Milkwort (1)

Milkwort (2)

Skylark (1)

Skylark (2)

Swallow

Stuc a’Chroin & Ben Vorlich

Unidentified hills

All photos copyright © Colin Woolf

11th May – grubby weather

It has been raining all day today – cold rain, almost sleet-like, and the temperature has only got up to about 8 degrees C.   The thrushes have been singing, as they always do when there’s a downpour.   But the starlings have had more important things to do – grubbing for worms and larvae in the boggy section of garden that used to be our back lawn.  I say ‘used to be’ because it’s now pretty much like a quagmire.

They don’t care how wet they get – the water drips off their scruffy neck feathers, and they must get soaked to the skin because their heads are mostly pointing downwards.  They pierce the soil with their beaks wide open, presumably giving them twice as much chance of locating a grub.  Then they collect the squirmy prizes in their beak, two or three at a time, before flapping off to feed their hungry brood.

The pair of blackbirds have joined them a few times, both looking ill-kempt and harassed,  preoccupied with childcare and in need of a good sleep.   I remember the feeling well.

It seems that this weather is due to clear away in the next couple of hours, leaving us with a clear night and a possible frost tomorrow.  And a massive sunspot is now facing the Earth, so big that (apparently) it can be seen with the naked eye.   It would be good if we could see the sun with the naked eye.  Anyway, there’s a high chance of solar flares, so I wonder if we’ll see some action?  I’m checking AuroraWatch and Spaceweather for updates.

Images copyright © Colin Woolf

6th May – moon pillar

Just after 9 o’clock last night I noticed the full moon rising above the Pentland Hills.  The sky wasn’t fully dark, and the disc was like pure gold against a backdrop of indigo.

Colin took some photos, and as the sky got darker we both noticed that the moonlight was creating a faint column or pillar that extended above and below the moon, visible through the wispy clouds but not (I felt) caused by them.

Having checked online, I was intrigued to find out that moon pillars can form in the same way as sun pillars (it makes sense, after all);   it’s just that I’d never heard of them.   A great website called Atmospheric Optics explains them as ‘the collective glints of millions of ice crystals’.   A Google search for more images of moon pillars confirmed our theory.

The full moon was a special one anyway… it was a perigee moon or ‘supermoon’, meaning that the disc appeared 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full moons during 2012.  The slight variation in the moon’s apparent size is caused by its elliptical orbit around the Earth.

More information about the perigee moon can be found at Spaceweather.com.  Images copyright © Colin Woolf