Happy New Year!

It's an Edinburgh tradition to visit Arthur's Seat on New Year's Day which is what we did today.

We don't go to the top of the hill, as it is one of those horribly steep peaks that gives me really bad vertigo, plus at this time of year there are too many people up there so we kept to the valley where there were far fewer people.

One of our own New year's day traditions is to make a list of all the birds we see, as a start to the year list we keep. We're not competitive about this and just shrug our shoulders when extremely serious birders laugh at  how relatively few birds we see over the course of the year. We did have a good start, seeing 28 species today including in our own street, during our walk across Edinburgh and round Arthur's Seat. Crafty Green Boyfriend took these lovely photos

 goosander on the Union Canal - female above, male below

treecreeper in the Meadows area

male tufted duck, on one of the lochs on Arthur's Seat 

 

Feed the Birds!

We had a lovely walk this morning at Cammo, walking through the fields by the old water tower

where we saw a roe deer

Sadly Edinburgh City Council is planning on building houses on some of these fields (you can see my previous posts about that here).

We then walked into Cammo Country Park. We had some bird food with us and scattered most of it round some fallen trunks where several birds had already gathered. We then stood and watched for a few minutes while the birds came in to feed, the blue tits

the great tits

the robins (posing beautifully for next year's Christmas card!)

and the nuthatches (can you see how many seeds its got in its beak?)

Here's advice on feeding birds on the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) website.

It's Cold at Cramond

 It's cold out at Cramond today!

But plenty of birds around, including this carrion crow

this grey heron

several turnstones

and a few ringed plovers

Mountain the Movie

Mountain is an exploration of the human relationship with mountains, with beautiful cinematography set to a soundtrack of orchestral music played by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. The text is written by well known naturewriter Robert MacFarlane and narrated by Willem Defoe.

I loved the beautiful scenery in the film but felt that it was flawed in a number of ways. The narrative was very simplistic, there were too many scenes of vertigo inducing extreme mountain sports (rock climbing, paragliding, extrme ski-ing) and not enough wildlife.

It looked like a film to extol the beauty of nature so why so few shots of wildlife and so much of an obsession with extreme mountaineering? And, if at it purports to be, it's supposed a film about the human relationship with mountains why, when showing scenes of people queueing to ascend Everest was there not even a mention of the mountains of rubbish left on the mountain every year?

It's a film to watch and enjoy and not analyse too deeply and certainly don't expect anything of great insight.

Mountain is showing at Edinburgh Filmhouse until Sunday 31 December.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

 a winter's day in Colinton and Craiglockart Dells along the Water of Leith.

  snow caught in umbellifer inflorescences

teasels in the snow 

 

 wintry mosses

 

roe deer on the hill

 

Winter on Calton Hill

Calton Hill is more or less in the middle of Edinburgh and so is an ideal place for a nice walk before doing some last minute Christmas shopping. It's famous for its various follies

 and for it's views of Arthur's Seat

(You can browse my other posts about Calton Hill here).

Jane - a film review

Film director Brett Morgen tells the story of Jane Goodall, a woman whose chimpanzee research challenged the male-dominated scientific consensus of her time and changed our ways of thinking about primates. The film draws from over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage from the National Geographic archives, mostly shot by Goodall's then husband Hugo van Lawick.

The film follows Goodall in her early career, when she set out to study chimpanzees in Gombe without any scientific training. She had been taken on byLouis Leakey who specifically wanted someone who didn't have academic preconceptions about primates. 

We see how patience and diligence helped Goodall to become accepted by the chimpanzees which allowed her to study aspects of their lives never seen before - such as their ability to make simple tools, their caring relationships with their families and their warfare when provoked. There are some wonderful clips of chimps stealing food, playing together and grooming each other.

It's a fascinating film for anyone interested in Goodall and her ground breaking research with chimpanzees. 

Jane is showing at Edinburgh Filmhouse until Sunday 24 December.