Glen Nant

On the second day of our holiday in Oban, we travelled to Glen Nant, a beautiful area of upland oak woodland, which also holds other trees including birch, hazel and alder.

 There are streams to cross

and uneven steps to climb

There's a lot of Hard Fern (Blechnum spicant) which I always like to find

and some lovely views 

It's a beautiful place to visit, but some of the the slopes are very steep, so be warned! 

Wildlife in Oban

 We're just back from a lovely (but very rainy) few days on the west coast of Scotland. We stayed in the pretty harbour town of Oban. Over the next few posts, I'll share some of our photos. Today, I'll focus on Oban itself. 

The waters around Oban are famous (for us at least!) for the Black Guillemots that nest in the walls of the promenade

 We stayed in a Bed and Breakfast very close to Dunollie Woods

which are part of the grounds of Dunollie Castle, which you can see in the background of the photo below 

the woodland walk also offers good views across the water 

We saw a Red Squirrel in these woods, but it didn't want to pose for a photo. Unlike this Hooded Crow in the centre of Oban 

A Fish Caught in Time by Samantha Weinberg

 

 This is the story of the scientists who rediscovered the coelacanth. This fish had only been known from the fossil record until 1938 when Marjorie Courtney-Latimer, a young curator at East London Museum, South Africa found what she suspected to be a coelacanth in amongst a catch of fish that she'd been invited to look at in case there was anything there of interest to the museum. 

The book then follows the search to rediscover this unique fish for science. Outwith the scientific world, fishermen had been familiar with the fish, though it wasn't considered a good fish to catch, as it didn't taste good. Once the fish was rediscovered by science, it became much more worthwhile for the fishermen to catch it, as scientists and wealthy collectors suddenly started paying large sums of money for it. 

Although I totally understand the need for scientists to study the fish, throughout reading this book, I felt the risk of overfishing to the current populations of coelacanths. It seems though, that the species' elusive habits, that hid it from science for so long, will continue to protect it.  

This is a fascinating book, giving insights into both the coelacanth itself and the scientific research and rivalries around it. 

A Fish Caught in Time, by Samantha Weinberg, published (1999) by Fourth Estate.  

**

The latest post on my Crafty Green Poet Substack is all about my favourite birds, swifts, you can read it here.  

 

 

 

Trees in Spring

As many readers will know, I regularly patrol Edinburgh's Water of Leith river, picking litter and recording wildlife. I've become even more than usual fascinated by the development of fruits on trees. I don't mean the obvious fruits, like cherries or apples (though their development is also fascinating) but specifically beech and larch. 

At the beginning of May, I noticed these lovely little pom-poms on a beech tree

 

Today those pom-poms (on a different beech tree!) look like this:

Meanwhile, the larch cones on 25 March this year looked like this

and today they look like this (same tree, different cones)

(I'm preparing a post on my Crafty Green Poet Substack to show the development of larch cones, which hopefully will be posted in a couple of weeks, though it depends on how quickly the cones develop to full maturity!)
 

Sunshine, Birds and Insects at Musselburgh

 We had a lovely walk at Musselburgh yesterday. We started by walking along the River Esk 

 where we saw a good number of Eider ducks and their tiny ducklings (we counted 17 ducklings in total), though the water doesn't look to be the ideal state for birds to live in

 

We continued along the John Muir Walkway along the Firth of Forth and on to the Lagoons, where there were several Shelducks and not very many other birds (but this is to be expected, winter is the best time to see lots of birds here)

We also saw a few butterflies, including this Common Blue  

and a few Speckled Woods

 There were several damselflies, including this mating pair of Common Blue damselflies, being photo bombed by a second male

 and a Blue Tailed Damselfly 

 and finally a very bright Early Bumblebee

 

 

Rainy Day Haiku

watching the raindrops -
kitten raises her paw
to the windowpane

 **

originally published in Blithe Spirit, the journal of the British Haiku Society.  

**

Today is World Bee Day, to read my latest Crafty Green Poet Substack post about bees, click here.  

Arthur's Seat

 We had a lovely walk round Arthur's Seat yesterday, the weather was lovely, sunny and mild. 

We were particularly keen to check on the tadpoles in Dunsapie Loch. Regular readers may remember the scenes from a few weeks ago when we found a lot of toads in the loch. Well yesterday, we found a lot of tadpoles! 

Hopefully a good number of these will grow up to be toads (or in a few cases frogs). 

There were lots of Chaffinches singing around the hill 

and several pheasants who seemed to want to pose for the camera

We were delighted to watch this Roe Deer as she walked across the field - we wondered whether she had a fawn hidden away somewhere...

 

The Birds Foot Trefoil was beautifully in flower  

much to the delight of this Red Tailed Bumblebee (one of the few bees we saw yesterday)

 The Hawthorn trees were also in almost full bloom 

and were surrounded by St Marks Flies (though we didn't get any photos of those - they're big black flies with dangly legs which come out in late April, early May.)