We had a lovely short walk round Figgate Park this morning. The weather has been very changeable today with several heavy showers of rain, but we managed to time our walk to co-incide with the dry times!
The rowan trees are beautiful just now! Different species and varieties of rowan trees have different coloured berries. I particularly like the contrast between the yellow berries and red leaves on this rowan
We made friends with this Grey Squirrel, who was particularly unafraid of us
It was a lovely autumn walk
The rain has stopped.
From my desk, I watch
October sunlight play
on the white walls
of the football stadium
across the car-park.
Upstairs, someone else’s boss
moans about the weather
‘It’s raining cats and dogs
and dark as winter’.
I am my own boss
free to watch the slow movement
of sunlight across white walls
as geese fly overhead
winter on their wings.
Originally published in the seemingly now defunct Work Literary Magazine.
**
Inspired by my time in Malawi, where the rains failed in my second autumn.
First published in The Mamba, Issue 14, the journal of the Africa Haiku Network.
Yesterday we had a lovely walk along the River Tyne at Haddington, a town in East Lothian, a short bus journey away from Edinburgh (This is a different River Tyne to the one that flows through Newcastle upon Tyne.)
We spent quite a lot of time looking at the pictorial wildflower meadow that stretches from the bridge in the photo above quite a distance along the river. There were a reasonable number of Eristalis hoverflies enjoying the flowers
and a few Banded hoverflies (Syrphus sp) which have been very elusive so far this year
The meadow includes a nice variety of flowers including red poppies
and Wild Carrot, my favourite of the umbellifers, especially at this time of year, when it's in seed
We've had a really poor summer as far as weather has been concerned. However, we were lucky enough to get three days of glorious sunny weather early last week which coincided with our brief trip to Peebles in the Scottish Borders.
Yesterday, we walked around Corstorphine Hill again! It's one of our favourite places to walk. Also, I had, earlier in the week carried out a butterfly survey there, when the weather was only just good enough to do such a survey. Yesterday, we started our walk thinking that the weather might be better. So we started in the Walled Garden, where the butterfly transect route starts
At another part of the hill, we were impressed to see this web of a Funnel Web Spider
