This apron was in a bit of a state, the straps were worn and there were holes in it. So I decided to repair and upgrade it. I sewed brightly coloured patches over the holes, made new straps from the handles of a tote bag that I'd repurposed as a cushion cover and added a flowery pocket for good measure.
Yesterday we had a lovely walk, enjoying the autumnal colours of Edinburgh's Corstorphine Hill.
At the top of Corstorphine HIll is the Corstorphine Tower, which was built by William MacFie of Clermiston as a memorial to Sir Walter Scott, in 1817, the hundredth anniversary of the author’s birth. The tower is open on Edinburgh's Doors Open Days and on Sunday afternoons during the summer, but for the rest of the year, you can only view the outside
The Slender-billed Curlew was officially declared extinct in 2024, with the IUCN listing updated on 10 October 2025. The next day I found this book in a charity book shop.
In this book, Horatio Clare travels through Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania in search of the elusive Slender- billed Curlew, the last officially accepted sighting of which was in Hungary in 2001.
The Slender-billed Curlew is "a species of curlew, plumaged in a blend of whites and golds, with dark spots on the flanks, slim and graceful of form, more refined than the plumpy common curlew, with a thinner, down-curving beak, which makes it look as though it is chewing a stem of grass".
The author visits some of the places where this wader used to be seen and talks to people who have worked in conservation across the area, including Christian Mihai, a bird photographer, Petar Iankov of the Bulgrarian Society for the Protection of Birds (BSPB), Janos Berthond Kiss, who has been instrumental in developing environmental protection in the Danube Delta in Romania and Yannis Tsougrakis, a greek sustainability expert, who has the call of the Slender-billed Curlew as his ringtone on his mobile: "it rises and rises, a burbling ache, a fluting whistle with lament and wildness and defiance in it".
The Slender-billed Curlew favoured areas, such as the Danube Delta and the Evros Delta in Greece, which are severely hunted, though many are on paper protected, largely due to the rarity of the this species of curlew itself. Deltas are affected by rising sea levels and often also drained for agricultural expansion and polluted by industrial activities, which damages the ecology and fragments the remaining suitable habitat areas that aren't directly damaged. The degradation of these wetland areas is bad news for all species that live there, but particularly for rarities such as the Slender-billed Curlew.
There are signs of hope, though no longer for the Slender-billed Curlew, now that it's been declared extinct. The BSPB has "persuaded the Bulgarian government to declare 30% of Bulgaria a Specially Protected Area under EU Law". An area of Burgas in Bulgaria, once home to the Slender-billed Curlew, before an oil refinery was built, has, since the refinery closed down, been restored and is now a nature reserve hosting 273 species of birds, though alas, not the Slender-billed Curlew. The author portrays the story of the Slender-billed Curlew as "a story of a great generation of conservationists. Their legacy, in protected areas, reserves, information centres, visitor numbers and the people they recruited and trained to continue their work, has a value which is incalculable".
However, though we need the optimism, we also need to pay attention to the loss of wetland habitats and the creatures that live there:
"Perhaps this is a message from the Slender-billed Curlew,: the marshes, the soft overlaps of water and land, are shrinking. Human use leaves little room for environmental ambivalence.... If the coming hundred years see disputes over water usage in southern Russia, the Balkans, Europe or North Africa it may come to be said in hindsight, that the quiet, almost invisible fate of the Slender-billed Curlew was a sign of troubles to come".
Orison for a Curlew by Horatio Clare, illustrated by Beatrice Forshall, published (2017) by Little Toller Books.
We walked around Arthur's Seat yesterday and the autumn colours were beautiful. Here are some photos.
Here we saw Mallards, Mute Swans, Tufted Ducks and Moorhens.
We also saw several of these fungi, which I thin are Shaggy Parasols.
The author lives on an island in Sweden and devotes himself to collecting and identifying the hoverflies on that island. He amusingly describes collectors of hoverflies as: "quiet contemplative people [whose] behaviour in the field is relatively aristocratic".He himself first got specifically interested in hoverflies, when accidentally catching one that was an expert mimic of a large bee, which turned out to be very rare in Sweden.
He discusses whether to use an insect trap or not, though doesn't address the ethics of whether collecting and killing insects is ethical in the current drastic decline in insect numbers. (He actually at a couple of points makes comments that seem oddly dismissive of wider issues of ecology). The discussion about traps leads into a focus on Rene Malaise, the Swedish inventor of the eponymous insect trap, his travels in Kamchatka and his interest in art collecting.
This book is really a meandering exploration of being a collector, the hoverflies being just the starting point. Luckily (for those of us who already love hoverflies) there are interesting insights into these insects, such as the fact that the Narcissus Fly (Merodon equestris) can be identified by the distinctive sound of its buzzing, I'll definitely need to listen more carefully next time I find one of those! I was also fascinated by the fact that it is: "possible to map the movements of the most peripatetic hoverflies by examining the grains of pollen in their coats and determining where these originated".
Along the way, the book brings in observations on topics from the value of disturbed ground for hoverflies; forensic entomology ("more than 500 species (of insects) may be involved in the decomposition of a large cadaver"), a mention of hoverflies in the Bible and how to tell whether an entomologist loved their partner or whether it was a marriage of convenience ("Check and see if he named any hymenoptera after her. In that case it was true love").
The book also includes a challenge, one that as a poet and hoverfly fan I feel bound to attempt: "what poet writes verses in honour of the narcissus fly? Or of any hoverfly at all?"
Originally published in Swedish in around 2005, the book was translated into English by Thomas Teal and published in hardback in 2014 and in paperback in 2015.
The Fly Trap by Fredrick Sjoberg, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal published (2015) by Penguin.
**
If you're in the British Isles and want to learn to identify hoverflies, I'd recommend Hoverflies of Britain and Ireland, a Field Guide by Stuart Ball and Roger Morris.
**
My Substack post this week focusses on migratory birds and insects. Some hoverflies migrate! You can read the article here.
We had a lovely autumnal weekend walk round Blackford Pond and the Hermitage of Braid. The autumn colours were pretty
We were very happy to see lots of fungi in the woods, though we didn't try to name most of them, here's just a selection. The first photo shows a species of puffball, but we haven't identified the rest.
I was fascinated by this Harlequin Ladybird, travelling around the fungus
At this time of year, it's common to see ladybirds gathering together on fences (or gravestones) to hibernate. Yesterday, I was surprised to find a group of hoverfly larvae gathered on a fence post where I would have expected to see ladybirds. (I'm not entirely sure that the green insect in the photo below is a hoverfly larva, but the rest of them certainly are)
