This bunny may remind some of you of someone

On a rainy  day Gorgie City Farm is a lovely place to visit, as it's almost on our doorstep.

The farm has a new bunny, she may remind you of somebun if you used to follow House of Rabbits.....

 Bunny didn't pose for a better photo as she almost immediately ran back into the shed to escape the rain

 Almost as fluffy as the bunny are the young sheep,

They're no longer the youngest sheep on the farm, some very young lambs were being bottle fed in one of the barns while we were visiting

Show the Love

On Valentine's Day, the Climate Coalition run their now annual Show the Love campaign. We all have the power to show the love for the places, people, and life that we want to protect from climate change.

There are many ways to do this of course but part of this campaign is the symbolism of the Green Heart. People across the UK and no doubt elsewhere craft green hearts to wear, share and display! These are the green hearts I've made for this year's campaign

The wooden heart in the middle is attached to a clothes peg and came in a birthday gift bag of craft supplies, the two cardboard hearts I bought recently from a second hand shop. The beads and thread are from my stash of upcyclable craft supplies. I painted all the hearts with poster paint, which is water soluble.

World Wildlife Fund sent me a green heart as part of this campaign a couple of years ago. It's now permanently pinned to one of my coats and is a little faded but this is what it looked like originally!



As part of the Show the Love campaign, the Woodland Trust are asking people to record signs of spring that they notice in the first couple of weeks of February. This is so that the trust can get an idea of the degree to which climate change is changing the seasons. You can read more about this here.

So what do you want to Show the Love for? Comment below for the chance to win one of the cardboard hearts shown in the top photo! 

Big Garden Birdwatch 27/29 January

 robin, one of the most familiar of British garden birds

I grew up in suburban Manchester and loved watching the birds in our garden. There were blackbirds, song thrushes, robins, blue tits, great tits and lots and lots of house sparrows and starlings. My Dad still lives in the same house and the garden is still full of birds. The species have changed though, there are now lots of goldfinches (attracted by the nyger seeds Dad puts out for them) and a lot more crows, including the occasional jay (my best ever view of a jay was in this garden a fewyears ago) and lots of magpies. House sparrows have declined in the garden (as they have across most of the UK). While Mum was alive, my parents always took part in the Big Garden Birdwatch, but often complained that the most interesting species didn't turn up that day!

As an adult, I have mostly lived without a proper garden. When I lived in Malawi we had bougainvillea growing over our verandah and a small vegetable patch outside under a papaya tree. A fish eagle lived in a tree behind our garden and several birds visited, including a beautiful kingfisher who must have lost its way from the nearby Lake Malawi (though it wasn't a pied kingfisher, which was the prevelant lake species, in fact I never found out what species it was though suspect it was a malachite kingfisher). Also in Malawi, though in someone else's garden, I saw the only hoopoe I've ever seen (though there was a rumour when I was a student that a hoopoe visited Edinburgh every summer).

Where we live in Edinburgh there's a pretty bush in front of the garden where a dunnock skulks, sometimes joined by blackbirds (who sing beautifully in the spring and summer) and a robin. Behind our building there's a shared backgreen with a vegetable plot, surrounded by some well looked after gardens and some bramble patches. Some of the neighbours put out bird feeders. I've seen several species out there, robins, blue tits, song thrushes and dunnocks. One Christmas Day 50 fieldfares appeared from nowhere and took over the whole backgreen then next day had disappeared again. In summer, swifts constantly fly about over the nearby roofs and nest in nearby buildings.

Unfortunately we can't see our backgreen from our flat and there are no comfortable sitting places there so it's not ideal for a winter birdwatch. But if  you don't have a garden for the Big Garden Birdwatch, you can still join in. Just go along to your local park and record the birds you see there. It's fun, good exercise and you'll be helping the RSPB to keep up to date records of birds in the UK.

The Big Garden Birdwatch offers the chance to get to know your garden birds better and also to feed your observations into the national survey. Over half a million people now regularly take part, which combined with over 30 years worth of data, means that Big Garden Birdwatch enables the RSPB to monitor trends and to understand how birds are doing in the UK.

So make yourself a cup of tea, pull your chair up to the window, get your binoculars out and start counting! 

And if you are interested in recording your bird sightings all year round, then you can enter them onto Birdtrack. 

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

Defined by Seas I Never Knew

I dreamt an ocean swell

descended silently from the sky

forcing me to crouch then lie

flat on the ground, staring up

into the heart of a watery hell.

Sleepless in my desert bed

I remember stories I have read

of how my homeland slowly

disappeared beneath the tides

under which it still now hides.

The world, of course, rushed to save

our grandparents from the waves

and brought them here -

a sun-parched desolate expanse

where long ago, another people danced.

Our shamans walk the song-lines

but, coastal dwellers still at heart,

we cannot understand the signs

carved in this arid landscape

our thirsty souls long to escape.

At night sometimes I make a wish

and try to touch the parallel world

where another me

swims with multicoloured fish

round a coral atoll in turquoise seas. 

Previously published by Indigo Dreams Publishing 

**
and over on my Shapeshifting Green blog, I've just posted another poem with certain similarities to this one, you can read it here.  

The Future of Cammo Estate

Cammo Estate is a lovely green area of Edinburgh that was recently made into a Local Nature Reserve. The council sold a property near the estate and tthe funds from that sale along with matched funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund are to go to the restoration of  the estate. Three design options have been put forward, with varying elements of utilisation of the ruined historical buildings and improvement of the local biodiversity. All options include establishing a much needed cafe and having toilets that are open all the time. The options aren't set in stone and elements of each option can be combined.

The option I voted for is the one that preserves the estate much as it currently is and uses the Lodge House (the building at the entrance that is used for exhibitions, and has toilets, but is only currently open two days a week) as the cafe. Though I also chose the idea from oneof the other options of setting up a wetland area at the edge of the estate. The other options I feel include too many infrastructure developments that risk the estate becoming over-run with people to the detriment of the wildlife and the current air of tranquility of the estate.

If you're in Edinburgh and care about the future of Cammo Estate, then you can drop into the Lodge House today or tomorrow and comment on the proposals (you can read the outline proposals here). Meanwhile, here are some photos of the estate

It's Wintry Out There!

It was beautiful at Musselburgh today. This is the view towards the Mouth of the River Esk where it meets the Firth of Forth

The goldeneyes were already performing their courtship dances (the males throwing their heads onto their backs) but they didn't let me photograph that.

 Despite the cold and remains of the recent snow, all the paths were free from ice except the paths round the hides at the Lagoons. The views from the hides across the lagoons were very wintry

There were a lot of teal on the lagoon behind the grass in the first photo. Like the goldeneye they were performing their courtship dances but too far away for me to hope to get a photo so I just enjoyed watching them through my binoculars. The male teal is a beautiful bird and shows off his colours most magnificently during his courtship display.

The only wader I saw from the hides  was a curlew though there were impressive numbers of oystercatchers and a few other waders near the mouth of the Esk on the shores of the Forth. If you're interested in knowing more about British wading birds then it's worth checking out the WaderTales blog, which is full of interesting articles.

A Crafty Experiment - Decorated Photo Frame

Crafty Green Boyfriend's mother recently gave me some modelling clay and I  thought it might be nice to combine it with some of the sea pottery I have to decorate photo frames and mirrors. So I bought some cheap frames from second hand shops and started to experiment. This is the first frame

Once the clay dried I painted the whole thing with glitter nail varnish (which Crafty Green Boyfriend's mother had bought from a jumble sale for me to use in craft projects).

Not bad for a first attempt! I think though that it would be better with slightly less clay and perhaps more pieces of sea pottery. I also know that the clay may not be strong enough to hold the pottery in place long term so I'll need to look into that. The frame would look better if I painted the clay, but that would make it difficult - the clay would need to dry before I paint it, which would mean I then wouldn't be able to put the sea pottery in very easily, and if I painted the frame after putting the sea pottery into it, then I'd end up painting over the pottery shards!

A word about the glitter too. Regular glitter has recently been identified as an environmental problem as it is made from plastics and can end up in watercourses where it is eaten by fish and other water creatures. (Read for example this article). However the glitter is unlikely to wash off (or even flake off) the frame and I reckoned better to use it up than to throw it away. It's often difficult to know what to do in that kind of situation.....

I hope to be able to make a few more of these!