Yesterday evening Crafty Green Boyfriend and I walked over to Arthur's Seat, hoping to see swifts. These lovely birds nest in the street where we live, but at this time of year they can sometimes be seen gathering in large numbers at Arthur's Seat, feeding up on insects before they start their migration to Africa.
We didn't see any swifts, sadly but the light was beautiful.
This handy book is small and neat, ideal for fitting into your luggage for a walking trip to the beautiful area around Scotland's famous Loch Lomond.
The
book starts with brief tips on walking safely, tips on navigation and the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, appropriate clothing and the animals that may be seen on the walks.
The twenty walks, ranging in length from 2 miles to 15 miles, can all be walked in the space of a day or less, and include low level walks and more strenuous walks for the more experienced hiker. All follow clear, well trodden paths.
Each walk is described in a good amount of detail, with a description that includes landmarks, noteworthy historical notes and things to watch out for (such as how crowded a route gets with tourists during the summer season, sometimes with an annoyingly patronising tone towards said tourists). Detailed directions are offered along with excellent maps (Ordnance Survey 1:25,000) and beautiful photos (mostly taken by the author).
The day before this book arrived in the post, Crafty Green Boyfriend and I visited Loch Lubnaig in the Trossachs and in fact walked part of the route round the Ben Ledi mountain that features in this book. You can read about the walk and see some of my photos of the area in this blogpost here.
We have also climbed part of Ben Lomond, another walk that features in this book (you can read about our visit to that mountain here). Whereas on our visit to Loch Lubnaig, we didn't have time to do more than just part of the route, at Ben Lomond we were defeated by the steepness of part of the path (Or rather I was defeated by vertigo).
Judging from our experiences on these two walks, I would say that the descriptions in the book are a good guide to the difficulty of the walks, Ben Lomond for example is described on a couple of occasions as being very steep and the need for careful footwork is emphasised.
Day Walks in Loch Lomond and the Trossachs by Gerald McGarry published by Vertebrate Publishing.
This is the second Day Walks book I've reviewed recently. You can read my review of Day Walks in Fort William and Glen Coe here.
Disclaimer: I was sent a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
We try to walk the beautiful four and a half mile walk though the Dameny Estate from Cramond Brig to South Queensferry once every summer. It's a lovely scenic area, incorporating woodland
coastal views over the Firth of Forth
Yesterday was hot and sunny but breezy, which felt like the ideal weather for this four and a half mile walk. It was very warm in the open but the frequent patches of woodland offer cooling shade. We hoped that this would be ideal weather to bring out the butterflies. We have often seen good numbers of butterflies here and although this year's Spring was very poor for these insects, we have seen very good numbers of butterflies in recent weeks including at Arthur's Seat, Lauriston Farm fields and Musselburgh Lagoons. So we hoped yesterday to see good numbers to record for the Big Butterfly Count. Sadly we were disappointed to see only a relatively small number of butterflies, including one green veined white, a couple of other whites and a handful of speckled woods.
Nevertheless, we still had a good walk, enjoying the magnificent Scots pines that thrive in the woodland (I'd never before noticed just how many of these trees there are here!)
It seems a shame though that one lovely area currently covered in wildflowers, has recently been planted with young trees
Of course trees are good and these newly planted saplings seem all to be native species (Scots pine and birch as far as I could see) but wildflower meadows are good too, a beautiful sight and also excellent food sources for insects including bees, hoverflies and butterflies. It's really nice to see a wildflower meadow alongside a wooded area and it will be sad to see this disappear.
The bright sunshine made for some lovely shadows, like these thrown by bracken
We came across a large number of feathers scattered over the grass at one point. Perhaps the remains of a predation event, some bird having been killed by a bird of prey or fox. I'm not sure which species of bird these feathers came from, they're very pretty though. Edited to add: Looking at the amazing database that is Featherbase, I think these may be curlew feathers.
On the outskirts of South Queensferry we saw an adult oystercatcher with it's young, which was very cute! Crafty Green Boyfriend took some photos, but I don't know where they are to upload them here (we're currently using a temporary computer set up as our own computer is ill at the moment). I'll hopefully find them and share them in the next few days!
For Nature Notes.
As we often do at lunchtime, we walked round Corstorphine Hill today (Crafty Green Boyfriend's office is just opposite the hill!). The clashing colours of the (pink) rosebay willow herb and (yellow) ragwort are wonderful at the moment
We also found this beautiful moth, which was lying dead on the path. I think it's a Little Emerald Moth, but if you know otherwise, please let me know in the comments!
At lunchtime today,- we met up with Crafty Green Boyfriend's mother and brother for a trip across to Loch Lubnaig in the Trossachs. It was a long drive through beautiful scenerywith a wee break for lunch at a garden centre which has a lovely wetland area
We had a lovely walk when we got to Loch Lubnaig. Crafty Green Boyfriend and I walked up the hill while his brother and mother took the low road.
The views from the hill path are stunning, though it was too hot to walk very far to be honest. It's only after looking through my photos that I realise that the loch doesn't feature in most of them! If you look carefully at the third photo below, you should see the loch in the middle distance!
On the way home we stopped just outside Callandar to visit Hamish Dubh (Black Hamish) and Honey the Highland cattle, who like to be fed with special cattle snacks that you can buy in the nearby shop.
It was lovely to also see a good number of house martins, swallows and swifts flying around, lovely birds of summer.
Carnivorous Nights, subtitled On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger is the account by Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson (with illustrations by Alexis Rockman) of their trip to Tasmania to look for the probably extinct thylacine.
Journeying through the Australian island of Tasmania, these young naturalists seek out traces of the long lost creature, that is generally believed to have been hunted to extinction. They speak to scientists, conservationists and people who believe they have had recent sightings of the thylacine.
Along the way they explore the stunning scenery of this unique island, which still holds many species 'of animals that have perished on the Australian mainland (though with non-native predators now ranging trhough Tasmania, how long will these unique species last even here?). It's not only introduced predators that are problematic, but rabbits too. Rabbits 'nibbled grazzing lands bare, destroyed the fragile landscape with their burrowing and displaced native burrowers like the hare wallaby, bilby and bandicoot.' Rabbits have been somewhat controlled since the introduction of rabbit viruses in the 1950s but still have a bad reputation. There's even an inspiring campaign to replace the Easter Bunny with the Easter Bilby, including chocolate Easter Bilbies (I was fascinated by the reference to Easter Bilblies in the book, you can find out more about the campaign here.)
The group have a lot of adventures on the way, and there's a lot of humour in the narrative. But also an underlying sadness. So much of the native forest is being lost, so many species going the way of the thylacine. Large areas of the Tasmanian forests are being clearcut for timber, with signs along the paths highlighting how much timber could be produced by a particularly large tree, and what this timber could be used for, including, once all the good quality timber has been used up, enough paper to 'photocopy the complete works of Shakespeare 3000 times over'. The authors point out there would (rightly) be an outcry if there were a similar notice in an art gallery:
'The by products from taking a sledgehammer to just one of Michelangelo's great works can produce enough tiling to panel the bathroom in every suite at the Ritz Carlton. And after that enough scrap marble will be left over to make 800 six inch high souvenir reproductions of David for sale at our gift shop.'
We wouldn't countenance this attitude to human made works of art, so why do we accept it when it refers to unique and magnificent living beings?
The book also features Rockman’s beautifully haunting drawings of flora and fauna originally crafted from natural materials including river mud, wombat scat, and even the artist’s own blood.
Read this book, marvel at the wonder of Tasmanian wildlife and landscape, then hop over to Change.org to sign this petition to save Tasmania's native animals.
Carnivorous Nights, On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger by Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson (with illustrations by Alexis Rockman) published by Penguin Ramdon House (2005)
As many readers of this blog know, I volunteer once a week with the Water of Leith Conservation Trust. I pick litter and record wildlife along the river as it passes through Colinton and Craiglockart Dells, two beautiful, wooded areas. I was very glad of the shade offered by the trees today as the temperature is ridiculously high for Edinburgh (this is a sign of climate change of course, just as are the current floods devastating parts of central Europe and parts of Africa).
There are two very different beautiful wildflower meadows along the route I take through the Dells. The brightly coloured meadow in Spylaw Park is a pictoral meadow, sown with a selection of species that guarantee a good, changing show of colour throughout the year.
In previous years this meadow has hosted large numbers of pollinators, particularly hoverflies. Today I didn't see any hoverflies, only a few white or buff tailed bumble bees, lots of tiny flower beetles and one large white butterfly. I'll add the butterfly record to the Big Butterfly Count website.
The wildfower meadow near the site of Bog's Mill is entirely different. It has been planted with a seed mix that reflects the marshy nature of the site. So there's a lot of meadowsweet, thistles, yarrow, meadow cranesbill, umbellifers and other flowers. It's not as colourful as the meadow at Spylaw Park but it is just as pretty and more natural.
