On Saturday we had a lovely walk around Blackford Pond and the Hermitage of Braid.
and Common Puffballs
The fungus below I think is Sheathed Woodtuft (but I may be wrong, so if you recognise it as something different, please let me know!)
It's definitely the time of year for fungi, so keep an eye out when you're out and about!
Shared with Nature Notes.
Weymouth writes about the historical human persecution of wolves and the current resurgence of the population (the wolf population has increased by 1,000 percent since 1965) bringing the animal back into landscapes where it has been absent for decades (though its range is barely more than half what it was in 1800). He talks to farmers and hunters, and visits the Wolf Science Centre in Vienna, listening to people's mixed feelings about wolves and looking at other environmental issues including climate change and forest fires.
Having not lived around wolves for so long, people are understandably nervous about the reappearance of predators that can eat their livestock, and without government support, it can be expensive to protect flocks against predation. People are reluctant to let nature take over:
"...this is what we speak of when we speak of rewilding. Certainly we should manage the risks as best we can, but rewilding means that the wild gets a hand back in the game, with an agency all of its own"
As one of the farmers interviewed in the book says: "If you make the choice to work in nature, you can't complain about nature. Nature gives us all this and we must give something in return".
This is a very readable, thought provoking book about our relationship with nature and 'the wilderness' centred on one species and the journey of one individual across a changing continent.
Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth, published (2025) by Penguin.
**
You may also be interested in my review of The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley.
It really does pay to look closely at things! I noticed these little blobs of a pretty orange colour today on some dead wood. I thought it was probably a slime mould and took a photo and it is indeed a slime mould. I think it's Red Raspberry Slime, but I'm willing to be corrected if there are any slime mould experts reading this.
Read more in this week's post on the Crafty Green Poet Substack.
Shared with Nature Notes.
Yesterday we had a lovely walk around Corstorphine Hill. One of the highlights was seeing this beautiful Small Copper butterfly, one of my favourites. These are really tiny butterflies with gorgeous colours and markings. They're not uncommon but they can be very elusive, partly because they're so small. This individual was very happy to be photographed, first posing on Ragwort, which is an important plant for many insects
We also saw a Speckled Wood
A Raven also flew over, but too quickly to be captured on camera!
Shared with Nature Notes.
Earlier today we had a lovely walk along the Firth of Forth from Silverknowes to Cramond, passing Cramond island
When you think of bees, you probably think of honey bees and bumblebees, which are all social insects. However, not all bees are social, most bees in the UK in fact are solitary bees. Yesterday Crafty Green Boyfriend and I attended an excellent Introduction to Solitary Bees event, organised by TWIC (The Wildlife Information Centre). You can read more about it in this week's Substack post.
The photo below shows a female Hairy Footed Flower Bee, my favourite solitary bee! These bees can be seen in Edinburgh's Botanic Gardens in the Spring.
Yesterday we had a lovely walk around Easter Craiglockart Hill and Craiglockart Pond. It's quite a steep hill so it's nice that there are a few benches at the top where you can sit and enjoy the views.
which is in the grounds of Craighouse, which has a long and interesting history, starting from Old Craig House which was built in the 16th Century, through the development of a clinic which later became part of Napier University and is now a housing development, though with plentiful green-space surrounding it. You can see most of the buildings in the photo below
which is next to a lovely wetland area, full of bulrushes and other plants
the closely related Hairy Willowherb (also known as Great Willowherb)
It's many years now since I set up shop on Etsy. My first shop was called Crafty Green Poet and sold an eclectic mix of handmade items (mostly jewellery), vintage items and craft supplies. After a few years I decided to split the shop into two and about ten years ago set up Crafty Green Magpie as the shop for the vintage and supplies, Crafty Green Poet then solely selling handmade items. A few years after that, people stopped buying my handmade items - one of my biggest sellers had always been my handmade lanyards, which people totally stopped buying during the COVID lockdown when people stopped going into the office.... So I recombined the shops back into one and Crafty Green Magpie has since then been selling mostly vintage and supplies with the occasional handmade item.
Anyway, I've decided it's now time to stop selling. My Crafty Green Magpie Etsy shop will close soon after Christmas. You can browse all the items here.
In many ways this is a wonderful book. It shares the science about Nightingales and their decline in the UK, along with information about conservation successes (he mentions Isabella Tree's excellent book Wilding, which outlines the work she has done with her husband at the Knepp estate, you can read my review of that book here). Lee is also interested in our cultural connections with Nightingales and shares legends, songs, poems and folk tales from across the world. The book ends with a call to the reader to join in nature conservation activities, which, these days particularly, is a vital addition to any natural history book.
Author Sam Lee is a folk singer and has collected songs from communities such as Gypsies and Travellers. he makes the connection between the loss of these traditional songs as the singers die with the loss of the Nightingales' songs in the UK as the species becomes rarer and rarer.
The book is copiously illustrated with beautiful paintings and line drawings of Nightingales.
Two things spoiled it for me. I found the author's writing style to be often odd and ungainly (though I know many critics have praised his writing). I also felt there could have been better editing. One painting appears twice in the book and one literary extract that we are promised just never appears.
Still, it is a book that will probably inspire almost any reader to want to find out more about these wonderful, nocturnal songsters or even to join one of the author's own Nightingale events, where he takes audiences and musicians into the woods to sing and improvise music with Nightingales. (Find out more about these events here).
The Nightingale by Sam Lee, published (2020) by Penguin.
**
My latest post on my Crafty Green Poet Substack is all about wildfires and you can read it here.
We always love walking around Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh and it's sad and terrifying how often it's being hit by wildfires these days. The latest fire, which was on Salisbury Crags, adjacent to Arthur's Seat started on 19 July and took days to be put out. it's now out, but the site has been extensively damaged as you can see from the photo below, with the blackened areas on the Crags being a very sobering sight.
We walked our usual route round to Dunsapie Loch, where there were a lot of Canada Geese, a couple of Mute Swans and a few Mallards.
watched this Kestrel for a while
and several bees, including this Buff Tailed Bumblebee
Hopefully there won't be more wildfires, but rising temperatures and lack of rain make them more likely. If you're out and about in hot, dry weather, don't light fires or use barbecues and dispose of cigarettes carefully. Many wildfires are started by human carelessness and human induced climate change will often make them spread.
Posted for Nature Notes.
I was very pleased to find these Robin's Pincushion galls on a wild rose bush today.
A few posts back, I shared some of the postcards I've been making to share through Postcrossing. Here are some more, all made using craft supplies from second hand shops and paper scraps.
I only send handmade cards to Postcrossing members who specifically say they're happy to receive handmade cards and have a stash of unused vintage postcards that I'm sending to other members. Wondering what to do with the stash of vintage cards is what prompted me to join Postcrossing in the first place!
Yesterday we had a lovely walk round Edinburgh's Saughton Park which lies alongside the Water of Leith. The bridge over the river at the entrance to the park is often a good place to see Otters, though we didn't see any yesterday! However, the little island in the middle of the river was looking very vibrant with a variety of plants in bloom, including the pink Hairy Willowherb which you can see in the photo below.
It was cloudy and very windy when we started our walk, but once the sun came out we were happy to see several white butterflies (probably a mix of Small Whites and Large Whites, we didn't get close enough to tell which they were). There were also a reasonable number of bees, including the Buff Tailed Bumblebee in the photo below
A few weeks ago I attended the launch of Angus MacMillan's memoir 'Between the Echoes' which was held at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh. It was a very enjoyable event and I bought a copy of the book, and even spoke haltingly in Scottish Gaelic to the author who kindly signed my book, despite my lack of ability to speak the language (we did lapse into English very quickly).
I've just now finished reading the book, which is a beautifully written evocation of growing up in Lewis, one of the Hebridean islands where Scottish Gaelic is still spoken and the Gaelic culture still hangs on, though much less so than it did even in the author's childhood.
The book is divided into sections and looks in turn at memories associated primarily with water, earth, fire and air. The personal anecdotes are well chosen to highlight both the freedom that the author and his friends had in growing up in a rural island community and the strong sense of community where neighbours would regularly visit each other and doors were left unlocked. Also a sense of "feeling at home on the earth":
"being fastened to the world by it's colours and shapes, and the bodily feelings created by the natural world and its contours, in the form of grasses, rocks, mud, water, slopes and hollows. Inanimate things are imbued with life, or given an entirely different imagined existence: lumps of soft peat shaped into birds and planes, sticks transformed into swords; puddles become lagoons for sailing matchstick boats"
The book ends with a chapter entitled 'Of Place and Home' which outlines some of what has been lost. Many of the Gaelic speaking islanders have left for education or work, and have been replaced by non-Gaelic speaking incomers, which has diluted the central role of the Gaelic language itself. (Tellingly, perhaps, the author himself no longer lives on Lewis.) Culture has changed too, a Gaelic 'ceilidh' used to be an informal gathering of neighbours, where there might be storytelling and music, but now, the ceilidh is a paid for, ticketed event centred on traditional Scottish dancing.
Between the Echoes by Angus MacMillan, published (2026) by Islands Book Trust.
**
My latest Substack is all about butterflies and birds along the John Muir Walkway, with more detail than in my recent post here. You can read the Substack here.
We had a lovely day at Musselburgh yesterday. It's always a great place to see birds and at this time of year, a great place to see butterflies. So we went along, hoping to get some good counts for the Big Butterfly Count, which started on Friday. The Big Butterfly Count asks you to spend 15 minutes in one place noting the butterflies and day flying moths you see (the project only focuses on a selected range of species). We spent 15 minutes in each of three different places and saw a total of 65 butterflies and three Six Spot Burnet Moths. Here are some photos:
We saw a lot of Meadow Browns, the photo below shows a female (unusually, in this species, the female is brighter than the male)
a couple of Common Blues
We saw a good selection of birds, including around fifty Curlew, which was particularly pleasing as these birds are becoming very rare.
We also had a wonderful view of a Stoat, though we didn't get a photo of it, as it dashed away so quickly.
Shared for Nature Notes.
