The Importance of Not by Dorothy Baird

 

Dorothy Baird is an Edinburgh based writer, who comes along to one of the writing groups I facilitate. She has published two collections of poetry and this newly published pamphlet was a winner in the 2024 Poetry Space Pamphlet competition. 

It's a beautiful wee selection of poetry about things that are missing, fading memories, lost loved ones, the empty nest and the Sycamore Gap, the last of which is reflected in the cover design by Hanni Shinton. Nature is essential in this collection, from the "squirrel that could clearly run the country / with its problem solving" (You Can't Stand in the Same River Twice) to the "blackbird in his widower's weeds" (Therapy of Vowels), the "otter, the seals and the sleek wheel of a porpoise turning in the blue" (A Small Life Against the Timeline of Everything) and skylarks singing in many poems. 

I was taken right back to my own childhood by "Memories are Lonely things to carry alone" with it's description of a child's den under a rhododendron bush, my childhood den was under a sycamore tree, that has since been removed from the garden I grew up in, just as the poet's rhododendron bush is no longer there. 

 There are moving poems here about her father's dementia and his difficulties coping with the social distancing imposed by COVID-19 lockdowns 

"On the way out, she opens the door
with her sleeve covered hand and smiles
across the distance he wants to close
and she has to maintain, pushing back
against thousands of years of evolution
and the magnetism of family"

Social Distancing 

But in all the grief and sadness, there is always solace and the comfort of nature, and "snowdrops / spread among the stones like small bulbs of hope" in the cemetery (Carpe Diem). 

This is a closely observed, acutely felt and beautifully written pamphlet.   

The Importance of Not by Dorothy Baird published (2025) by Poetry Space. 

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My latest Substack post 'Art and Activism', went up yesterday, you can read it here. 

Autumn Colours over the weekend

 On Saturday we walked round Saughton Park and in between the showers I captured some of the lovely autumn colours on camera

 The cherry trees look particularly beautiful at this time of year, especially when viewed in full sunshine against a clear blue sky  

Yesterday, I met a friend to go to the Resistance exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland Modern 2 Gallery. Described as  "How protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest", it covers all types of British protests including environmental protests from early protests against birds being killed so their feathers could be used in hats (a protest which lead to the formation of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds)); the 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout, highlighting the lack of public access to open spaces; and the 1971 Friends of the Earth Bottle Dump which protested the withdrawal of returnable bottles by a major drinks brand (you can read an excellent article here, about the legacy of that campaign). So it's well worth catching if you're in Edinburgh (it runs until early January.)

While I was waiting for my friend, I took some photos of the autumn colours in Dean Cemetery, which can be seen over the wall from the grounds of the art gallery

 

Stinkhorn by Sion Parkinson

 I attended an event at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival at which Sion Parkinson was speaking and I bought the book after the event. 

This beautifully illustrated book offers a fascinating and often eccentric look at the famously smelly group of fungi known as stinkhorns, a wider look at the relationships between smell and sound and the relationship between bad smells and epilepsy (which the author was diagnosed with a few years ago). The book takes in everything from natural history to the music of John Cage (who himself was fascinated by fungi).

The stinkhorn fungus itself is not only smelly but noisy. The reader's first reaction to that comment might be an impatient 'oh for goodness sake, fungi don't make noises' but "The audible hum in the space surrounding the stinkhorn does not, of course, resonate from the mushroom itself, but is the sound produced by a swarm of several species of fly that are almost always found about it. ... Houseflies hum not with their mouths but with the beating of their wings... in the key of F major. The noisier blowfly Collophora vicina one of the most frequent flies to visit the stinkhorn, flaps its wings at a more bassy .... pitch somewhere between D and D sharp".

This is one of the things I liked most about this book, the way it forces the reader to think about our senses differently. The occasional reaction of 'oh for goodness sake' quickly becomes 'wow, that's fascinating'. 

Stinkhorn by Sion Parkinson, published by Sternberg Press.  

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My latest Substack post 'Why Did I study Botany?' is now up! You can read it here.  

 

Customised Apron

This apron was in a bit of a state, the straps were worn and there were holes in it. So I decided to repair and upgrade it. I sewed brightly coloured patches over the holes, made new straps from the handles of a tote bag that I'd repurposed as a cushion cover and added a flowery pocket for good measure. 

 So now it looks better than ever and is even more practical, as I can store things in the pockets! 

Autumn Colours on Corstorphine Hill

 Yesterday we had a lovely walk, enjoying the autumnal colours of Edinburgh's Corstorphine Hill. 

I find autumnal colours tricky to capture effectively on camera, it really does depend on there being enough sunshine and for large parts of yesterday's walk thre was ample sunshine so some of the photos turned out quite well. 

At the top of Corstorphine HIll is the Corstorphine Tower, which was built by William MacFie of Clermiston as a memorial to Sir Walter Scott, in 1817, the hundredth anniversary of the author’s birth. The tower is open on Edinburgh's Doors Open Days and on Sunday afternoons during the summer, but for the rest of the year, you can only view the outside

Corstorphine Hill is well known for being a good place to find a variety of fungi, both edible and inedible. We found several Porcelain fungi on one tree and managed to get some photos, the best of which is below 

Other than the Porcelain fungi, we didn't see as many fungi as we might have hoped. We did however have a thoroughly enjoyable walk! 

Orison for a Curlew by Horatio Clare

 

The Slender-billed Curlew was officially declared extinct in 2024, with the IUCN listing updated on 10 October 2025. The next day I found this book in a charity book shop. 

In this book, Horatio Clare travels through Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania in search of the elusive Slender- billed Curlew, the last officially accepted sighting of which was in Hungary in 2001. 

The Slender-billed Curlew is "a species of curlew, plumaged in a blend of whites and golds, with dark spots on the flanks, slim and graceful of form, more refined than the plumpy common curlew, with a thinner, down-curving beak, which makes it look as though it is chewing a stem of grass". 

The author visits some of the places where this wader used to be seen and talks to people who have worked in conservation across the area, including Christian Mihai, a bird photographer, Petar Iankov of the Bulgrarian Society for the Protection of Birds (BSPB), Janos Berthond Kiss, who has been instrumental in developing environmental protection in the Danube Delta in Romania and Yannis Tsougrakis, a greek sustainability expert, who has the call of the Slender-billed Curlew as his ringtone on his mobile: "it rises and rises, a burbling ache, a fluting whistle with lament and wildness and defiance in it".

The Slender-billed Curlew favoured areas, such as the Danube Delta and the Evros Delta in Greece, which are severely hunted, though many are on paper protected, largely due to the rarity of the this species of curlew itself. Deltas are affected by rising sea levels and often also drained for agricultural expansion and polluted by industrial activities, which damages the ecology and fragments the remaining suitable habitat areas that aren't directly damaged. The degradation of these wetland areas is bad news for all species that live there, but particularly for rarities such as the Slender-billed Curlew. 

There are signs of hope, though no longer for the Slender-billed Curlew, now that it's been declared extinct. The BSPB has "persuaded the Bulgarian government to declare 30% of Bulgaria a Specially Protected Area under EU Law". An area of Burgas in Bulgaria, once home to the Slender-billed Curlew, before an oil refinery was built, has, since the refinery closed down, been restored and is now a nature reserve hosting 273 species of birds, though alas, not the Slender-billed Curlew. The author portrays the story of the Slender-billed Curlew as "a story of a great generation of conservationists. Their legacy, in protected areas, reserves, information centres, visitor numbers and the people they recruited and trained to continue their work, has a value which is incalculable".

However, though we need the optimism, we also need to pay attention to the loss of wetland habitats and the creatures that live there: 

"Perhaps this is a message from the Slender-billed Curlew,: the marshes, the soft overlaps of water and land, are shrinking. Human use leaves little room for environmental ambivalence.... If the coming hundred years see disputes over water usage in southern Russia, the Balkans, Europe or North Africa it may come to be said in hindsight, that the quiet, almost invisible fate of the Slender-billed Curlew was a sign of troubles to come".

Orison for a Curlew by Horatio Clare, illustrated by Beatrice Forshall, published (2017) by Little Toller Books.  

Autumn around Arthur's Seat

 We walked around Arthur's Seat yesterday and the autumn colours were beautiful. Here are some photos. 

 Dunsapie Loch was lovely too, and full of birds, despite being the water being very low. (We saw several Mallards, a few Mute Swans and five Little Grebes on the water, plus a male Pheasant and a Grey Wagtail both at the edge of the loch). 

 From Dunsapie Loch we walked down to Duddingston Loch, which was also looking beautiful

 

Here we saw Mallards, Mute Swans, Tufted Ducks and Moorhens. 

We also saw several of these fungi, which I thin are Shaggy Parasols. 

 

The Fly Trap by Fredrick Sjoberg

As many readers of this blog will know, I have a particular interest in hoverflies, many of which mimic bees or wasps. So I was particularly interested in this book when I saw it mentioned in this post in Whilst Out Walking, one of the Substacks I read. I buy many of my books second hand, but I doubted I would be able to find this one in a charity shop so I went to a local book shop and luckily there was a copy on the shelves. 

The author lives on an island in Sweden and devotes himself to collecting and identifying the hoverflies on that island. He amusingly describes collectors of hoverflies as: "quiet contemplative people [whose] behaviour in the field is relatively aristocratic".He himself first got specifically interested in hoverflies, when accidentally catching one that was an expert mimic of a large bee, which turned out to be very rare in Sweden. 

He discusses whether to use an insect trap or not, though doesn't address the ethics of whether collecting and killing insects is ethical in the current drastic decline in insect numbers. (He actually at a couple of points makes comments that seem oddly dismissive of wider issues of ecology). The discussion about traps leads into a focus on Rene Malaise, the Swedish inventor of the eponymous insect trap, his travels in Kamchatka and his interest in art collecting. 

This book is really a meandering exploration of being a collector, the hoverflies being just the starting point. Luckily (for those of us who already love hoverflies) there are interesting insights into these insects, such as the fact that the Narcissus Fly (Merodon equestris) can be identified by the distinctive sound of its buzzing, I'll definitely need to listen more carefully next time I find one of those! I was also fascinated by the fact that it is: "possible to map the movements of the most peripatetic hoverflies by examining the grains of pollen in their coats and determining where these originated".

Along the way, the book brings in observations on topics from the value of disturbed ground for hoverflies; forensic entomology ("more than 500 species (of insects) may be involved in the decomposition of a large cadaver"), a mention of hoverflies in the Bible and how to tell whether an entomologist loved their partner or whether it was a marriage of convenience ("Check and see if he named any hymenoptera after her. In that case it was true love").

The book also includes a challenge, one that as a poet and hoverfly fan I feel bound to attempt: "what poet writes verses in honour of the narcissus fly? Or of any hoverfly at all?"

Originally published in Swedish in around 2005, the book was translated into English by Thomas Teal and published in hardback in 2014 and in paperback in 2015.

The Fly Trap by Fredrick Sjoberg, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal published (2015) by Penguin. 

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If you're in the British Isles and want to learn to identify hoverflies, I'd recommend Hoverflies of Britain and Ireland, a Field Guide by Stuart Ball and Roger Morris.

 

**

My Substack post this week focusses on migratory birds and insects. Some hoverflies migrate! You can read the article here.  

 

 

Autumn in the Hermitage of Braid

 We had a lovely autumnal weekend walk round Blackford Pond and the Hermitage of Braid. The autumn colours were pretty

 

We were very happy to see lots of fungi in the woods, though we didn't try to name most of them, here's just a selection. The first photo shows a species of puffball, but we haven't identified the rest. 

 

 

I was fascinated by this Harlequin Ladybird, travelling around the fungus

 

Insects on Fences

 At this time of year, it's common to see ladybirds gathering together on fences (or gravestones) to hibernate. Yesterday, I was surprised to find a group of hoverfly larvae gathered on a fence post where I would have expected to see ladybirds. (I'm not entirely sure that the green insect in the photo below is a hoverfly larva, but the rest of them certainly are) 

I also wrote about this in yesterday's post on my Crafty Green Substack (with several photos). You can read that article here. 
 

The Healing Wisdom of the Forest by Anthony D. Fredericks

 

Subtitled Timeless Lessons of Renewal, Tranquility and Joy, this is the latest book from Anthony D. Fredericks, professor emeritus of education at York College, in York, Pennsylvania where he taught general science and creative writing courses for 30 years.

The book is prefaced with the author's account of a particularly memorable childhood encounter with a mother deer and her fawn, which sparked his lifelong interest in forests. The remaining chapters share what he has learned over the years from his times in forests, starting from his childhood camping and fishing trips to the John Muir Wilderness in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. (I myself enjoyed an unforgettable trip to this area too, when I was a child!)

Each brief chapter shares something that the author has learned from time spent in forests, and from the lives of notable individual trees, and then gives us a practical tip for life, a journalling prompt and a snippet to think about. For example, the starting point of observing 'burls' (age related imperfections) on an ancient bald cypress tree, leads to a passage about accepting our own imperfections. The practical exercise in this chapter is to pay close attention to the differences between trees and the imperfections of individual trees; the journalling prompt is to think about your own imperfections more as unique aspects of yourself and the topic to think about is to consider the imperfections of the box elder, whose "Brittle limbs, twisted trunks susceptible to rot, and dull yellow leaves often put this species in the “ugly tree” category."  

Interesting / inspiring quotes from various writers are scattered among the chapters, my favourite (given that I've done wildlife surveys of Edinburgh's cemeteries) being "Forests may be gorgeous, but there is nothing more alive than a tree that learns how to grow in a cemetery." from Andrea Gibson.

I really enjoyed the way that Fredericks used observations from nature as a starting point both for investigating nature itself in greater detail but also thinking about ourselves more deeply and seeing ourselves as being more integrated with the nature we see around us. This dual approach gives this book a particular texture and richness, that gives it an appeal that I don't find in standard self help texts, though having said that, it does become a little repetitive at times in terms of the life lessons offered. 

This book is designed to be read slowly, one brief chapter every week or something so that you can spend time thinking about the lessons the trees (and the author) are offering you. 

The Healing Wisdom of the Forest by Anthony D. Fredericks, published (2025) by  Health Communications, Inc.

Disclaimer: I was sent a free electronic copy of this book  in return for an honest review

A Weekend Walk Along the Water of Leith

 Yesterday we took a lovely walk along the Water of Leith from Roseburn to Stockbridge. Storm Amy was still in evidence in the high winds, but it stayed dry. We had a wonderful view of a Dipper (though didn't get a photo) and did capture this Grey Heron on camera.

 We saw several ladybirds (mostly Harlequins, as the two in the photo below) gathering together, ready for hibernation 

and these fungi, which we didn't manage to identify
 

It was UK Fungus Day yesterday, a chance to celebrate fungi, which are such a feature of our autumns! 

Infinite Paradise by Dianne Ebertt Beeaff

 

This memoir follows the seasons over a year, on sixteen acres of wild land along the Conestoga River in Southern Ontario, Canada. The land has been in the author's family for many years and she writes about it with a keen observational eye and a great affection for the wildlife that lives there. 

The author starts by taking the reader on a tour along the river, introducing us to the wildlife and humans that share this place and inviting us to slow down and appreciate the natural treasures that surround us. She obviously knows the land very well, she knows where the raccoons live, where the beavers build their dams, and where the blackbirds nest. She is attuned to seasonal change such that she can tell us things like: "A patch of toothy-leaved herb Robert, its tiny pinkish blooms already nearly done, spreads out in emerald-green beneath a rift in the canopy of young cedars. In a few short weeks, we’ll see the yellow-orange spurred slippers of spotted jewelweed in their place." 

We're then treated to Beeartt's nature diary, starting on 1 March, when snow still lies heavy on the ground through the seasons. She details the weather and the wildlife she sees around her, and includes interesting facts such as: "Red squirrels can even suss out the difference between maple species, singling out those with the highest sugar concentrations." This is followed by an exploration of the history of human use of maple syrup, which I found fascinating (even though I don't like the taste of maple syrup).

This use of nature observations as a way into exploring the ecology, geology, history and cultures of the area, is a real strength of the book, giving the reader a deep sense of the place. She also uses nature as a way into thinking about the divine and the nature of religious belief and for looking at issues such as climate change, pollution and nature deficit disorder. For every month she shares information about the flower (for example, the common Daisy is the flower for April) and possibly more information than we need about the birthstone. 

It's a beautifully detailed book that leaves the reader with the impression that Beeaff would be a great person to have as a walking companion. 

Infinite Paradise by Dianne Ebertt Beeaff published (2025) by She Writes Press  

Disclaimer: I was sent a free electronic copy of this book in return for an honest review.

 

Emus and Goats at Edinburgh's Hidden Cold War Bunker

The day before we went on holiday to Dumfries and Galloway we visited Barnton Bunker - Edinburgh's hidden Cold War Nuclear Bunker! It's currently being restored and transformed into an arts venue. You can read a little more about the bunker itself in today's post over on my Shapeshifting Green blog. 

The bunker is surrounded by open space on Corstorphine Hill, with some pretty dramatic cliffs, great views across to the Firth of Forth

 

and some unexpected residents. The goats are very friendly - here are two we made friends with. 

 

The bunker keeps emus to scare off potential thieves and vandals, but the emus are pretty friendly too, during our visit, we were given special emu food that we could feed directly to the emus. The emu standing in front of the emu shed in the photo below is called Joyce

The bunker held a launch event today for its community garden, which I had intended to go along to, with a friend, who since cancelled. I didn't feel like going along by myself though. 
 

Animal History edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey

 

Subtitled History as if Animals Mattered, this scholarly book examines the role that animals have played in history. It is a project of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, bringing together academic articles from The Journal of Animal Ethics on a range of topics relating to the concept of animal history; key intellectuals who have shaped our attitudes to animals; meat eating and vivisection. 

Of course, any animal history that we have access to, will be written by humans, though some postulate that perhaps some animals have their own histories, which they share in ways we can't understand (elephants being the species that strikes me as surely having their own history.) However we look at it animals are vital to our history, from the animals hunted by our long ago ancestors, to the cats that kept rats away from ancient Egyptian grain to the rats that spread the plague. It's also interesting to note that Edinburgh has more statues to animals than to women. 

Jacob Brandler opens the discussion with his article "Do “Animals” Have Histor(ies)? Can/Should Humans Know Them? A Heuristic Reframing of Animal-Human Relationships". This article links the current developing interest in animal history to the increasing interest in history of minority groups within human society and suggests that a greater understanding of the place of animals in history leads to a more ethical treatment of animals today.

Violette Pouillard discusses two books about celebrity animals in Animal Biographies: Beyond Archetypal Figures, highlighting how individual animals are treated in captivity and how this contrasts with the lives of free-living animals. 

In the section on historical intellectuals and their attitudes to animals, Cheryl E Abbate goes first with “Higher” and “Lower” Political Animals: A critical Analysis of Aristotle’s Account of the Political Animal which explores Aristotle's consideration of 'the political animal' and extends it to non-human animals, while Christina Hoenig looks at Augustine of Hippo on Nonhuman Animals. Both these articles examine the legacy left by these ancient influential thinkers. In “Mad Madge”: The Contribution of Margaret Cavendish to Animal Ethics, Lauren Bestwick examines Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673). Labelled "Mad" by her contemporaries for her radical views, she was an aristocrat who wrote philosophical works and poetry that defended the rational capacity of animals, while being aware that the prejudices against non-human animals were similar to those against women in the society she lived in. Alison Stone looks at Frances Power Cobbe and the Philosophy of Antivivisection. Cobbe (1822 - 1904) was primarily a campaigner who approached animal welfare as a moral philosopher.  

The essays about vegetarianism are particularly interesting, offering fascinating insights into historical attitudes to those who refuse to eat meat. Historical Christian attitudes to meat eating, fasting and asceticism are examined in some detail by both Marcello Newall in Biblical Veganism: An Examination of 1 Timothy 4:1–8, and Carl Frayne in On imitating the regimen of immortality or Facing the diet of mortal reality: A Brief history of Abstinence from Flesh-Eating in Christianity. In Morality and Meat in the Middle Ages and Beyond, Christene d'Anca examines how "contemporary decisions to abstain from animal consumption mirror medieval ones" and how ancient prejudice against vegetarianism continues even today, though the nature of the prejudice nowadays is not so religious as it used to be. Carl Frayne reappears, now writing as Carl Tobias Frayne with The Anarchist Diet: Vegetarianism and Individualist Anarchism in Early 20th-Century France looks at the historic links between anarchism and veganism.

The final section of the book looks at vivisection. In Vivisection, Virtue Ethics, and the Law in 19th-century Britain, A W H Bates outlines the difference between Virtue Ethics, which "asks how a virtuous person would behave in a particular situation and emphasizes character and motives" and Utilitarian ethics, which claim that "the medical benefits of vivisection outweighed any unpleasantness or suffering". The essay then details the anti-cruelty laws that were brought in during that century and how they applied to vivisection (which those days wasn't common in Britain compared to some countries in continental Europe). Later, in " Boycotted hospital: the national Anti-vivisection hospital, London, 1903–1935" the same author looks at the history of the hospital that for three decades "treated the local poor and conscientious objectors to vivisection, who were assured that staff pledged not to experiment on animals or patients."  “The New Superstition, the New Tyranny”: The Ethics and Contexts of John Cowper Powys’s Antivivisection" by Felix Taylor examines the antivivisectionist writings of the generally overlooked British novelist and philosopher John Cowper Powys (1872–1963). 

"Animal Research, Safeguards, and Lessons from the Long History of Judicial Torture" by Adam Clulow and Jan Lauwereyns uses the history of the safeguards used to limit judicial torture to explore how animal research could more effectively be limited and policed, as the accepted notion of 'reduce, replace and refine' in animal testing has proven to be open to confusion and loopholes that mean that more animal testing continues. 

This well researched, copiously referenced book covers a variety of aspects of our treatment of animals and will appeal to students of history and animal studies, as well as people involved in animal rights and conservation. It's a fascinating read, though the very academic approach and content will be off-putting for many general readers.

 Animal History edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, published (July 2025) by Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)

Disclaimer: I was sent a free pdf of this book in return for an honest review.  

 

 

Woodland Trails at Drumlanrig Castle

On our recent holiday in Dumfries and Galloway, we visited the grounds of Drumlanrig Castle, which offer beautiful woodland walks. (There's also a nice cafe!). 

The walks offer lovely views across the countryside

 and views of Drumlanrig Castle itself too

 The woodlands themselves are beautiful too

 and there's a lovely river running through them

 Hidden away on the river, is a stone archway, created by the landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy's art is always concerned with how nature interacts with human constructions and it's lovely to see how this arch is becoming overgrown with mosses and small plants and even young tree saplings. (The National Galleries of Scotland are currently hosting an exhibition of Goldsworthy's work, which is well worth visiting, you can find out more here). 

The woodlands were full of amazing fungi when we visited. We were particularly interested to see these Fly Agarics. The photo below shows a fully developed Fly Agaric 

and below is a newly emerging Fly Agaric, as it breaks through the soil. 

(Fly Agarics are poisonous). 

**

A year ago on my Crafty Green Substack, I posted about how a good friend had died and how I was hoping to deal with all the stuff she left behind. Today, for Recycle Week, I posted about my progress. You can read it here. 
 

Galloway Kite Trail - a walk at Parton

 One of the conservation success stories of recent decades has been the return of the Red Kite to Scotland (this is something I'll write more about on my Crafty Green Poet substack next Wednesday). We've travelled along the Galloway Kite Trail a few times in the past, but never before had we done the walk at Parton. This short walk passes between a small area of ancient woodland on one side and fields on the other. 

We saw a couple of Red Kites here (as we did elsewhere in Dumfries and Galloway, this magnificent bird of prey is now quite common in the south west of Scotland). We also saw an astonishing number of Red Admiral Butterflies, well over fifty of them, feeding on windfall apples and the berries of the rowan trees.  

Also notable were the wonderful lichens on the trees and rocks, her are just some of them:

 

Caerlaverock

 

Caerlaverock is one of the places we visit almost every time we take a break in Dumfries and Galloway, so we made sure we visited last week. The highlight is the Caerlaverock Wildlife and Wetland Trust (WWT) reserve, which is worth almost a full day of wandering around, enjoying the wildlife. There's such a great variety of wildlife here, as well as being an overwintering site for geese and other waterfowl, it's known as a dragonfly hotspot. This visit, we were too early for the wintering wildfowl and too late to see large numbers of dragonflies (though we did see some, including this male Common Darter)

There were also good numbers of butterflies, especially in the wildlife garden area, including Red Admirals (the lower butterfly in the photo below) and Small Tortoiseshells (the higher butterfly in the photo below) 

There are lots of hides around the reserve, including a couple of tower hides, which allow for long views across the reserve. From one of these we had a great view of a Marsh Harrier (only the second time we've ever seen this rare bird of prey). The photo below sadly isn't as great as the view was in real life.

There's also a lovely hide where you can watch a variety of smaller birds coming to a group of feeders

Through those windows you can spy on birds including Tree Sparrows (which are sadly quite rare these days) and Willow Tits (which are even rarer). In the photo below, on the left of the feeder are two Tree Sparrows, on the right, at the front there's a Blue Tit, at the back is a tit, which I think is a Willow Tit, but it's not clear enough and it might be a (much more common) Coal Tit.... 

After exploring the WWT reserve, we drove to the nearby National Nature Reserve, where we were sadly defeated by the mud and so we then went to Caerlaverock Castle  

and walked through the Castle Woods,  

which were full of a variety of fungi, including this rather handsome bolete. 

 

 Note: we don't have a car of our own, we use public transport to get around in Edinburgh. However, we always hire a car when we visit Dumfries and Galloway, as otherwise it would be almost impossible to get around.