Dogs – as I’m sure other dog owners will confirm – have a canny habit of finding the most revolting things in smelly corners and either rolling in them and carrying the fragrance back to share with the family, or eating them and throwing the proceeds up on the drawing room carpet.
I’ve just finished an utterly absorbing book – The Seabird’s Cry, The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers, by Adam Nicolson. The ocean voyagers are “creatures of the high latitudes and distant oceans” and include albatross and gannets, kittiwakes, shearwaters, fulmars and gulls – “pelagic wanderers and wind-buffeted migrants”.
A report in this paper of the sighting of a hoopoe at the Scottish Wildlife Trust visitor centre at Montrose Basin reminded me about a possible sighting of one of these exotic birds on Piperton croft, outside Brechin, in 2005. I haunted the croft for five days hoping to see it but was disappointed.
A report in this paper of the sighting of a hoopoe at the Scottish Wildlife Trust visitor centre at Montrose Basin reminded me about a possible sighting of one of these exotic birds on Piperton croft, outside Brechin, in 2005. I haunted the croft for five days hoping to see it but was disappointed.
The local great spotted woodpeckers have been drumming their tarradiddles in the trees across the road from the house.
I’ve been lucky to have lived most of my life in the country, away from the noise and light pollution of built-up areas. I often make the point in my talks that the night time walks with Inka can be every bit as interesting as the day time ones We live on the edge of a village now but I’m just a step from the countryside proper.
The sky was flushed with a glowing, pink sunrise as Inka and I went out for the morning walk on Monday. The pity is it was so fleeting, the colour fading imperceptibly into infinity – for where else was there for the colour to go?
On Wednesday Inka and I were out around half past eight, the morning sun shining out of a clear sky streaked with high trails of cirrus cloud. There wasn’t so much as a whisper of wind to shiver the topmost branches of the leafless trees or the dead grass heads, bleached ghosts of their summer glory, crowding the burn side.
A message from David Turner, the Bursar at The Burn, near Edzell, was to tell us of the demise of an old friend. Recent high winds had brought down the hundred years old towering monkey puzzle tree in the part of the gardens known as the Arboretum.
Words are my seed corn and I am rarely lost for them, but words failed me when I saw an expensive cream settee dumped in a layby on the road between Fettercairn and Edzell.