Tree Following 3: Female flowers, larch

I can't believe I've never noticed these gorgeous little female flowers on the larch before!

The long tailed tits were flitting round the tree, certainly they seem very much at home there, though I didn't see them visiting their nest. 

For Tree Following 

Also beautifully in bloom nearby were the celandines

Gorgie City Farm

I spent a lovely afternoon at Gorgie City Farm yesterday. Some new lambs have just been born, though I could only find one:

The other Poll Dorset sheep were mostly busy eating

or posing for passing photographers

and there's a new rabbit in town, whose name I couldn't find out, but a handsome one indeed (I've since found out this rabbit is called Thumper):

After walking round the farm, I went to the first in the farm's series of Pet Lodge lectures. Lauren Collins (MSc student from Glasgow University) gave a talk on the 'evolution of the symbolic dog in domestic spaces' while the audience cuddled guinea pigs! I didn't get a photo, as it's quite difficult to use a camera with a guinea pig on your knees, specially if you want also to avoid disrupting a lecture! It was an interesting talk though and it was very relaxing to spend time with a very beautiful guinea pig, even if it did get quite energetic at times! 

And I did manage to get a photo of several of the farm guinea pigs in their enclosure in the pet lodge

 Future lectures will feature chickens, a snake and hopefully some rabbits!

Beading and bookmarks

I recently bought a stock of small beads from the Oxfam shop in Morningside (any crafters in Edinburgh, this is an excellent shop for finding cheap crafting supplies and all the profits go directly to charity).

The beads are mostly of the type I use to make bookmarks (a type of bead I had run out of!). So I've made a couple more beaded bookmarks and put them in the Crafty Green Poet Etsy shop.

in the Crafty Green Poet Etsy shop here.

in the Crafty Green Poet shop here.

Bird dialect

It's Spring and the birds are singing their hearts out! It's the best time of year to start learning bird song, as the summer warblers are mostly yet to arrive (though I have already heard a chiffchaff, which thoughtfully sings its own name over and over).

Birdsong can be very tricky to learn, after all they only sing between late February and mid July, leaving you half the year to forget what they sound like!

To complicate matters, some birds have dialects, depending on which part of the country they come from. The chaffinch is a bird renowned for its dialects. I've noticed that although in Edinburgh chaffinches mostly sing either 'ginger beer' or 'how are you' at the end of their short song, in nearby Musselburgh, they almost all sing 'Scooby Doo'.

The yellowhammer is a bird I had never thought of as having a dialect. However, the Yellowhammer dialect project put me right on that one! This fascinating project is studying the development of dialects in yellowhammers in both the declining UK population and the thriving, introduced and almost a pest population in New Zealand. People in the two countries are encouraged to record yellowhammers in the field and send the recordings to the project. You can find out more about the project and how to take part here. It's a great way to make people more aware of yellowhammers and to contribute to an intriguing study into bird communication!

As ever, red text contains hyperlinks that take you to other websites where you can find out more.

Figgate Park

Figgate Park can usually be depended on to be the best park in Edinburgh for seeing birds, but today we didn't see as many as we normally would. We still had a lovely walk though.

It was quite windy as you can see from the way the branches are getting blown around in this willow tree

There were a few ducks on the pond, though not as many as usual. Crafty Green Boyfriend caught this male mallard as it was dabbling for food

while in the trees these carrion crows shared a romantic moment

International Forests Day

Happy International Forests Day!

This is an opportunity to celebrate the natural beauty of forests and to help ensure that they are protected for future generations.


You can celebrate forests by going for a walk in your local woodland! In Edinburgh I can recommend Colinton Dell by the Water of Leith; Hermitage of Braid; Cammo Country Park and Corstorphine Hill.

If you enjoy walking in forests and woodlands, then you will be keen to protect them for future generations. In the UK, the Woodland Trust works hard to protect ancient woodland and other areas of woodland. On their website, they offer sone useful ideas for how you can get involved in protecting woodland.

I love  walking in woodlands and enjoying the peace and quiet and the beauty of the trees and other plants, the birds and mammals. I love watching as woodland nature changes through the seasons.

Which are your favourite areas of woodland and what do you most like about them?

The January Flower by Orla Broderick

This, the debut novel by Orla Broderick is the story of Mary, a single mother living in the Highlands of Scotland and trying find herself and to give her daughter the best start in life.

Mary meets Wallace, a man with few redeeming features other than he looks good in a kilt, and then finds herself torn between the various members of his family and her struggles to bring her daughter up while also searching for her own spiritual and sexual identity.

The element I most enjoyed about the book is the obvious connection that Mary feels with nature:

The little robin is perched out on my washing line. ... I search for scraps to scatter. She comes to take them, returns to gently drop the bits in the other beak. A fatter version of herself with a slow stupid look, I presume this is the last of her chicks to fledge.

The whole book is very poetically written, full of lovely phrases. Oddly I felt this sometimes stopped me feeling close to Mary. I also often felt that the individual characters, other than Mary, could have benefited from more consistently and better developed voices.

Having said that, this is a lovely book to read for a different insight into life in the Scottish Highlands and for its portrayal of people living in close connection and awareness of nature.

The January Flower by Orla Broderick, published by Council House Publishing.

As ever red text contains hyperlinks that take you to other webpages, where you can find out more.