Natural highs and lows

Today is April 23rd. Today is not Errol's birthday, neither is it the day of his death. This is because Errol is a swamp dragon, a fictitious character in the book Guards! Guards! by Sir Terry Pratchett. Errol is a small, lazy swamp dragon who falls in love with the huge, female Noble Dragon which terrorises the citizens of Ankh Morpork in the afore-mentioned tome. Errol woos her by evolving his internal plumbing so that he can flame backwards, effectively becoming a jet engine (the parody is that Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of said engine, was rejected by the RAF due to his diminutive stature). Errol by Paul Kidby Coincidentally, the other day, Megan and I visited the Tay Reedbeds , an RSPB reserve on the banks of the Tay estuary. We parked by a church in the village of Errol and followed a waymarked trail through farmland, down to the shore, full of hope at the prospect of possibly seeing Bearded Reedlings. Alas, despite much gazing, we did not. However, there were plenty of ot...

Serves me right, I shouldn't have mentioned 'Spring', it brought virtually instant retribution in the form of several days of southeasterly gales. However, just before they arrived, there were a few more pleasant moments. A walk at Brodgar was graced with a Skylark singing from on high for all he was worth, in defiant opposition to (in no particular order) other male Skylarks, hungry raptors, the gusty wind and gravity. There were ducks aplenty on both Harray Loch (freshwater) and Stenness Loch (brackish), as well as in field pools and scrapes. Just over the brow of a low hill from the Neolithic stone circle, a piece of rough ground offered up a Short-eared Owl on a fence post. When I tried to film it, the owl immediately took to the air, and all I managed was 7 seconds of shaky, wind-blasted footage. Back home, I was able to turn off the wind noise, and slow down the footage so that it wasn't so jerky, resulting in a slo-mo SEO. Some of the afore-mentioned waterfowl, T...

Whisper it quietly, there have been tentative signs that Winter is loosening her grip on the land. Yesterday, a short walk between showers was memorable for singing Skylarks and feisty Robins. There were a few floral surprises too. In a very sheltered verge, some Common Hogweed was in bloom, blatantly not waiting its turn in the normal order of white umbellifer flowering dates. Nearer to home (just across the road) another verge was beginning to reveal the shoots of dozens of Coltsfoot. During a sunny spell last week, when I was wandering around the garden, I noticed some insects buzzing about the flowers of Snowdrops and Crocuses. On closer inspection, these turned out to be honey bees, how very hardy of them! Chatting with a local beekeeper later that day, she confirmed that the daytime temperatures had been just about bee-friendly, so she wasn't too surprised. So, in celebration of that joyous sign of Spring, here's the Afro Celt Sound System, and their wonderful fusion of A...