In the Office

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.

Rainy Season haiku

no rain

in this 'rainy season' -

silent lightning 

 **

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.

 

Along the River Tyne at Haddington

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

Three Days of Scottish Summer

 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. 

You can read a wee bit more about our trip in my latest Substack post.

Corstorphine Hill again!

 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

 We saw a few hoverflies in the garden, including this Bog Hoverfly (Sericomyia silentis):

We didn't see any butterflies at all and soon realised that the weather wasn't going to be good enough for a survey, so we didn't keep to the survey route and just walked where we wanted to around the hill.

At another part of the hill, we were impressed to see this web of a Funnel Web Spider

Viewing a Landscape through Cataracts

Nothing is clear, all is blurred green
with blotched lights strung out like beads
while every dew-drop glows
at the centre of its own rainbow.
We seem to be in the middle of fields
and there looks to be woodland over there.
I wish I could see the birds that are singing.

Surgery will soon fix my eyes:
these blurred colours will resolve
back into shapes and meaningful things
but nothing is clear for this land -
any time in the future, all this greenery
could be erased just by the whim
of a bureaucrat's pen.

(inspired by Green Terrain by Kelly Austin-Rolo, and originally published on Ekphrastic Review. 

**

Since writing this poem, I've had cataract surgery on my left eye (my right eye was done seven years ago) and my eyesight is much improved. 

Sadly, despite the change in government in the UK, the future for the UK's green spaces is no more secure than it was with the previous government.

Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart

 

Subtitled Unlocking the Secrets of Existence, this book is a readable tour through the maths of biology and ecology. The book is very accessible for those who don't enjoy too much maths and covers topics such as the Fibonacci series, the maths of genetics, game theory, networking and patterns. 

I've got a Botany degree, and so a lot of this felt like revision, but very engaging and sometimes entertaining revision with a new focus on maths. As a student, I had been aware of the importance of statistics in populations studies in ecology and also the importance of mechanics in environmental physics (my least favourite subject, far too much physics!). Reading this book, though, really opened my eyes to the hidden maths, particularly that which determines the pattern and form of living things.

This is an excellent book if you want an overview of the hidden importance of maths to biology, but if you want some serious mathematical investigation, you may need to look elsewhere! 

Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart, published (2012) by Profile Books.

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

 

 

mallard tanka

a female mallard

tucks blue

back into her wing—

dimensions stretch and curl 

in the fabric of space-time 

 

 

first published in the inaugural issue of Password

Searching for Butterflies on Corstorphine Hill

I did a butterfly survey today around Corstorphine Hill. It was windy, just at the edge of being too windy for a butterfly survey, but within appropriate limits (which is just as well, as the weather isn't looking great for the rest of the week). The hill has some wonderful views

The Rowan trees are covered in bright red berries just now, and look amazing

I didn't see very many butterflies, unfortunately, just a handful of Large Whites and Speckled Woods and one Holly Blue. I got great views of the pair of Buzzards that nest in a tree in this part of the hill. 

It started raining heavily, about fifteen minutes after I'd finished my survey! 

**

This week's post on the Crafty Green Poet Substack is all about the benefits of wildlife recording. 

**

I'm delighted to have a haiku included in the Birds selection on Haiku Girl Summer.

Walking around the Craiglockart Hills

 We had a lovely walk yesterday, starting off with walking around Wester Craiglockart Hill

and then walking alongside Easter Craiglockart Hill to Craiglockart Pond, where we watched the Mute Swan family. 

The marshy area near the pond is looking lovely at the moment, filled with the pink and purple flowers of Hairy Willowherb (most of the flowers in the photo below) and Rosebay Willowherb (the flowers in the lower left-hand corner of the photo below)

We were delighted to see this Holly Blue Butterfly, laying her eggs on an Ivy plant (Ivy is, alongside Holly, a very popular plat for this butterfly to lay on)

and we were impressed by this spider, an orb weaving spider of some sort, but we've failed to find out what species it is. If you can identify it, please let me know in the comments!