It's definitely autumn today!

 We had a lovely walk round Corstorphine Hill today. It was quite misty, with a traditional Edinburgh haar (sea mist), which lent a very autumnal feel to the woodland

The gorse buses were draped in spiders' webs, and everything was glittering with drops of water from recent rain. Spiders' webs can be very tricky to capture in photos, but I didn't do too badly today. I got decent photos of both the orb webs 

 

and the blanket type webs, which are made by different species of spiders.

We looked closely at oak trees to find acorns and were happy to find a few full size acorns:

Some of the acorns on one of the Pendunculate Oaks have been taken over by Knopper Gall Wasps, Andricus quercuscalicis, which have created these distinctive galls - this is a young gall

 this darker growth is an older gall

and only part of the acorn below has become a gall

Customising Clothes

It's Second Hand September, which is a call to “shop second hand to take a stance against fast fashion and dress for a fairer world.” (You can read my Substack post on the topic here). However, as well as buying second hand clothes, there are other ways to dress more ethically, such as repairing or customising worn out clothing.

I've been looking at this jacket recently

and thinking that, although it's still a lovely jacket, it's become a little bit shabby. So I've been collecting lace and ribbons to add to it. I now have the design ready and if all goes well, I'll share the result here once I've finished! 

In the meantime, to get myself into the right frame of mind, I added this ribbon to the cuffs of a long sleeved t-shirt:

It's actually been a while since I customised clothing (as opposed to repairing). Here are some of my previous projects: 

I added lace to the cuffs of these gloves:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I added beads to the neckline of this dress: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I removed the worn out cuffs of this blouse and replaced them with satin cuffs that I repurposed from an old robe that had fallen apart:

Autumn Approaches in the Dells

 I walked along the Water of Leith, through Colinton and Craiglockart Dells today. It was a beautiful day, bright sunshine with a slight autumnal chill to the air. A lovely day to record wildlife and pick litter!

The pictorial flower meadow in Spylaw Park is still bright and blooming 

I was happy to see several Speckled Wood butterflies flying amongst the trees. I was less happy to find this dead Common Shrew, it had no obvious signs of injury, so I don't know how it had died. I very rarely see this little mammals when they're alive. 

Butterfly haiku

a sunbeam

through the woodland canopy -

dancing butterflies 

*

previously published in Golden Haiku 2024 and displayed in Washington DC

Summer Sunshine at last!

 Yesterday felt like the first real summer's day of the year, warm and sunny all day! And now it's September so that's probably the only summer we'll get this year. 

We had a lovely walk, starting off at Arthur's Seat 

 enjoying the views over Duddingston Loch

and the flowers, including this clump of Viper's Bugloss, which is still in bloom.

We popped into the designated wildlife area next to the loch, where several hoverflies were enjoying the sunshine, including this Footballer Hoverfly (Helophilus pendulus) 

and ended up at Dr Neil's Garden, overlooking Duddingston Loch

which has recently installed this insect hotel.

We also visited the community garden Jock Tamson's Gairden

**

I'm delighted to have a haiku in the bee themed issue of Haiku Girl Summer!

 

Wildlife in the Farm Fields

 As regular readers of this blog know, I've been carrying out butterfly surveys for the last couple of years. This year hasn't been a good year for butterflies, the weather has been consistently too wet and windy for them. Today, the weather was reasonably good, so I was able to carry out a survey in the rewildling fields at Lauriston Farm - the site of Edinburgh's Agro-ecology Project. 

There weren't very many butterflies about, but I was delighted to see four Peacocks:

I was also delighted to see over twenty Epistrophe grossulariae hoverflies, which seem to have been the most common hoverfly this year.

 

Insects, specifically gardening to help insects, are also the focus of this week's post on my Crafty Green Poet Substack. 

At one point today, I noticed a Kestrel, hovering over a field, then something caught my eye - a Roe Deer was jumping over a fence and then startled a Grey Heron which flew up and away! Later I saw the Kestrel fly down to a prey animal, though I didn't see whether it was a successful kill or not.

Weekend Nature Notes

Yesterday we visited Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens.  We loved meeting this family of Moorhens. There were four very young chicks and one adolescent from this year's first brood. The first photo below shows the adult with three of the very young chicks 

and here the adult is at the back and the adolescent is in the front

It was lovely to see the adult and the adolescent both feeding the young chicks. 

We were happy to find a good number of hoverflies in some parts of the gardens, including this Batman Hoverfly (Myothropea florea) 

but the most unexpected find of the visit was this array of Birds Nest fungi! I've only once before seen this unusual fungus and never before in such abundance! 

On Friday, we had a lovely lunchtime walk around North Merchiston Cemetery (which now has a nicely updated website, which you can see here). This cemetery is officially full now (you can only be buried here now if you already have a family burial plot) and is left pretty much to its own devices for the benefit of nature (obviously there needs to be some management though, which can be a tricky thing to get right). On Friday, we were interested to find several young Hawthorn Shieldbugs on a Holly bush