Natural highs and lows

For the last weekend of National Dragonfly Week, I had organised a low-key walk on the island of Hoy, asking any members of my local dragonfly Facebook group if they would like to join me. Several of them did, so Saturday late morning and early afternoon were spent at a couple of pools on the slopes of Wee Fea hill, west of Lyness. The weather was overcast with a cool breeze, not ideal for dragon hunting, or perhaps that depends upon your point of view. Certainly the temperature was too low for there to be much flying activity, but diligent searching in the emergent vegetation of the pools produced six species (4 of damselflies and 2 of dragonflies). Additionally, the diffuse light helped the colours of the insects stand out. One of the gang (not me!) found a roosting male Common Hawker dragonfly, and everyone had the opportunity to watch it at close quarters and take photographs. This species is renowned for being a tireless flyer, not resting when the sun is out, so this was a very s...

What was that song? It went "Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue..." The internet reminded me that it was I can sing a rainbow , sung by Peggy Lee in the 1955 film Pete Kelly's Blues . Well, the past few days have been quite colourful. At the beginning of the week I had the pleasure of flying across to North Ronaldsay (a particularly favourite island of mine) for a couple of jobs. The trip had been postponed from the previous week due to haar, which is the weather that plays merry whatnot with visual flight rules. And I must admit that packing all I might need into a couple of tool bags is always a fraught time, and I feel quite naked not wearing my van. The second job was at the Bird Observatory, where the ever-helpful staff informed me that there was a Quail in the neighbouring field and a Rosy-coloured Starling with a flock of the more usual variety frequenting the shore and adjacent fields at Lenswick in the north of the island. So, once all ...

Another year, another National Dragonfly Week, yet they always find a way to be different. For 2021, NDW straddles the change in Covid levels, but here in Orkney we were already in Level 0 and the chances of more than 15 people turning up for a dragonfly walk on a small island are fairly minimal. No, what we're contending with are the effects of a cold Spring and a dry Summer (not hot, you may note, but definitely dry). A graphic produced by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency last week, showed Orkney with the lowest soil moisture reading in the country. Orkney?! Dry?! What the actual?! To compound matters, rather than start the week with a bang, I was working. Admittedly on the correct island for maximum chances of dragonflies (Hoy), but working nevertheless. Kindly, my partner was more than happy to wander off searching for dragons and damsels on my behalf (into 40+mph winds), and found a very respectable six species, including the first Common Hawker and Black Darters of ...

Humans, eh? They're everywhere, destroying habitats, polluting environments, creating a mass extinction event and shitting on the doorstep of the very biosphere which allows them to exist.  And yet, it is humans who have the nerve to coin words like 'vermin', 'pest' and 'weeds' to describe other species which have the temerity to impact upon our lives and are deemed harmful or undesirable.  We're a plague (Early readers of the post will have seen this typo'd as 'plaque'. That kinda works too). Killing or consuming all in the insatiable desire to be... what? More wealthy? More happy? More entertained? More vain? That's our mores, right there.  Admittedly, a small number of humans recognise the stupidity of all the wanton overconsumption of resources, but this ship's gonna take more than that tiny number to turn around. Maybe the iceberg could envisage what was coming and decided to strike first? But enough of the rant, I have a confess...

It's a word which was used often in another blog, but I don't think that I have previously used it on Natural Highs and Lows. However, it is a very suitable title to this post. We were going to walk from Sandwick to Burwick in South Ronaldsay, along the west coast of the island, but it would mean using two cars, and that's quite a long commute (and a lot of fuel) in Orcadian terms. So then we considered a tromp over the hills of Russadale and Scorradale, but the day dawned windless, which meant midges. And one midge is too many. Scrabbling around for last-minute ideas of another walk, we hit upon Stromness to Yesnaby on the west coast of the mainland. And I am rather glad we did. This particular stretch of clifftop path was unfamiliar to me, the only part of the west coast that I hadn't previously walked. It's not a long distance, but we reckoned too long for a day's wildlife watching in both directions, so we parked a car at Yesnaby and drove to Stromness reser...