Blogtober Twenty Two

It's rather a blustery day, with driving rain, not ideal for working outside with power tools. I rescheduled the day's visits, returned home and settled down to some admin tasks. The Winter thrushes are still moving through, still mainly Redwings, and one eventually deigned to hop about our garden. After lunch, Megan counted at least 150 in the field across the track, with more flocks arriving all the time.

As Storm Boelo is bringing 70+mph winds on Sunday, we took the opportunity, during a break in the showers, to move our garden furniture into the garage. Hopefully the garage will be ok! Other storms are available for folk farther south.

So the weekend will likely be spent indoors, keeping cosy and warm, probably with my nose in a book and fortified by a conveyor belt of tea mugs. The to-be-read pile is simmering nicely.

Unsurprisingly, it's heavy on natural history. The George Monbiot book is my unfinished holiday reading, having sat in the pile for years. I don't know why I didn't pick it up sooner, but the writing is arguably more apt now than when it was written a decade ago. In Lone Wolf, the author traces the path of a wolf's GPS-tracked journey through the Alps from Slovenia to Italy as the species returns to a country where it had been absent for a century. In a change to the advertised programme, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People is a nod to the TV series Detectorists, where Bede was referenced a couple of times (Thank you, Ruth). The Waterlands is Stephen Rutt's latest offering, following a raindrop from the sky to a hilltop and its journey to the sea. I have followed Stephen's career since he blogged from the bird observatory in North Ronaldsay (His book The Seafarers draws on some of his time there). Jenny Durant's Bitter Honey lifts the lid on the industrial farming of bees in the United States (since another blogger mentioned the practices used, I have not drunk Californian wine for many years). Urban Plants is more of a book to dip into now and again, but it has opened my eyes to Nature's battle with concrete and tarmac. It has certainly made me more aware of pioneering wildflowers as I walk the flagstone streets of Stromness.

Stay warm, stay dry, stay safe.