Ash trees threatened

The ash is one of my favourite trees. It is also one of the commonest trees in British woodlands. Unfortunately it is now threatened by ash dieback disease caused by the Chalera fraxinus fungus,. This disease has already done a lot of damage in continental Europe, killing up to 90% of ash trees in Denmark for example.

The British government has known of this disease for a while and logic and common sense would have dictated that we should ban the import of ash trees to prevent the disease reaching our shores. (Why do we need to import ash trees anyway? It's not as though we're short of our own!). Well, a ban is now in place since Monday, but that might be too late as the disease has already been found in trees in parts of England. The disease has been confirmed in a number of woodlands in England including a  Woodland Trust woodland in Suffolk and in Scotland too. Because of the delay in implementing the ban, it may be that thousands of trees near the sites of infection will be destroyed to prevent the disease spreading. George Monbiot writes in the Guardian about the politics behind the delayed ban, while Tobias Jones writes, also in the Guardian about his feelings about the ash tree. 

Hopefully the disease has been caught early enough to prevent it devastating our ash trees.

It was beautifully sunny on Friday so I wandered through Princes Street Gardens, in the centre of Edinburgh, to take photos of some of my favourite ash trees.

And a closer look at an ash tree in Dalry Cemetery, showing the ash keys and the distinctive black buds.

We don't want to lose these magnificent trees from our landscape.

Weaver of Grass also recently blogged about ash dieback.

Gabriel Hemery shares some lovely photos of ash trees in Yorkshire.

For Nature Notes

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I am the contributing poet to Daily Haiku this week, you can read today's haiku here. 

I'm delighted to have a haiku in the Haiku News anthology which will be out soon, you can pre-order your copy here.

I'm also delighted to have a poem in the current issue of Misty Mountain Review.

As ever, text in red contains hyper-links that take you to other web-pages where you can find out more

Otters and Orange Ladybirds

On Sunday afternoon I was at a Water of Leith Conservation Trust volunteer meeting, where we passed round a jar which contained a piece of otter spraint (poo!) (as you do!). It actually smells surprisingly pleasant, sort of a fishy jasmine tea type of smell.

Yesterday I was at the Trust's AGM where the guest speaker was ecologist Melanie Findlay of Findlay Ecology Services. Melanie is an otter expert (though she didn't share the secret behind the jasmine tea scent of otter poo!) and a very engaging speaker. She shared a lot of information about the otters' family life (including some adorable video clips of young otters) and about their diet (mostly eels and other fish, but they also eat invertebrates and have been known to eat rabbits! She also showed photos of various signs of otters, not just spraint, but also a weird looking stuff that is formed when otters eat frogs and then spit out the unformed spawn - this is exactly what I had seen recently in Musselburgh (so there are probably otters there!). The otters are doing well on the Water of Leith but are generally elusive (I've only seen one once!).

Today was my regular patrolling walk along part of the river, that I do as part of my volunteering with the trust. I was particularly delighted to see two great spotted woodpeckers as well as dippers, a heron, a buzzard and a flock of long tailed tits. But the most unusual wildlife sighting wasn't a bird but about a hundred orange ladybirds (Halyzia 16-guttata), all gathered in groups in the tops of fence posts! I've never seen this type of ladybird here before and never anywhere in such numbers! The photo isn't any good, but it gives you an idea of how many of these insects were gathering together.

You can find me on Daily Haiku again! Today's haiku is about the Colinton tunnel on the Water of Leith walkway! 

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

Monday Bunday - & the bunny stars of my novel are

You may remember, quite a while ago I blogged about an exciting opportunity for your bunny or bunnies to star in my novel (a piece of speculative fiction set in a future independent and flooded Scotland) or in a related short story.

I received several entries. Choosing the star for my short story was easy, Humphrey of Cottontails Baby just fitted perfectly into the story, which is now complete and out looking for a publisher. This story will also be worked into the novel as was my original intention (though for a while I had thought they would become entirely separate things).

Choosing a bunny to star in the main storyline of the novel proved to be much more difficult. Largely because the novel itself is proving to be more difficult than the short story and I've been struggling with the main storyline quite a bit. It's still nowhere near being finished but for all you hopeful bunny bloggers the wait is over.

I would have loved to include all the bunnies, I really would, but the winners are:

Sydney and Tyler from The Qi Papers. I love the fact that these two bunnies were separated and then reunited, it makes a lovely sub-plot to the novel, where the long standing community of the Scottish island needs to integrate with the incoming population of climate change refugees. Tyler also has a number of character traits that I'll be able to work into the story nicely. 

But all you other bunny bloggers may still have a chance for a small amount of fame. My story about a family of rabbits Anya and the Foxgloves was published recently and I may write some more stories in this series. The other nominated bunnies may feature in these future stories!

Oh and a word of advice - if entering a blog competition, it really does help if you make it easy to contact you in case of success!

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Meanwhile, not bunnies, but cats in my haiku on Daily Haiku today. 

As ever, red text contains hyper-links that take you to other web-pages where you can find out more.

The Cloud Spotters Guide

clouds between the trees near the Water of Leith.

 
I really enjoyed reading The Invention of Clouds (which I review here) but it left me wanting to know more about the cloud types themselves. So I immediately picked up The Cloud Spotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney of the Cloud Appreciation Society.

This book takes each cloud type in turn and gives the details of what it typically looks like, where and when it can found and what type of precipitation (snow, heavy rain, hail, drizzle etc) it gives rise to. It also outlines some tips on weather forecasting by describing how one type of cloud can become another.

Alongside all the science the author makes it clear that clouds are to be appreciated for their beauty (apart perhaps from stratus, the low, dull, misty cloud that even the most ardent cloud appreciator has been known to describe as boring).

He also has plenty of stories to share about clouds, including that of Lt Col William Rankin a US Air Force pilot who had to eject from his plane above a storm cloud and spent 40 minutes being buffetted by the weather as he fell through a storm.

This is a totally fascinating book for anyone who is interested in our 'little fluffy friends' as Pretor-Pinney calls them. I think I'll need to read it a few times though before I can be sure of telling the difference between some of the cloud types let alone starting to forecast the weather!


The Cloud Spotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney published by Sceptre (part of Hodder and Stoughton) and available in several languages.

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On a different topic, the first of my haiku on Daily Haiku has just gone live!

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

Autumn in Edinburgh's wooded cemeteries

There are two lovely wooded cemeteries near where we live. They are particularly atmospheric at this time of year. We visited Dalry Cemetery this morning.

Then we went to Gorgie Farm for lunch in their lovely cafe. We wandered round the farm after lunch but were disappointed that the bunnies were all in little cages ready to be transported to an educational event, they work their bunnies hard on the farm!

Then we went to North Merchiston Cemetery.

I've also uploaded some other photos from the day onto the Visit Woods website. You can see my Dalry Cemetery photos here and my North Merchiston Cemetery photos here.

Lochend Park

At the moment I'm teaching a creative writing class at the Ripple Project, which is based at Restalrig and Lochend Community Hub in Edinburgh. Just up the road is Lochend Park which is a park I've never really visited before, as I'm rarely in the area. So yesterday, I stayed on the bus for an extra couple of stops and wandered round the park a bit and took these photos.

 The dovecot

The loch

I'll get an even earlier bus next week and wander round the back of the park where most of the trees are and see what I can see there.I'll also try to find the bee cafe, which is a wild-flower meadow created by local schoolchildren to help bees! I'll need to go back in the spring to see it at it's best of course!

I also noticed that Lochend Park didn't have any photos up on the Visit Woods website, so now I've put that right by uploading some of mine!

Swandown

As most readers of this blog probably know I love rivers so I was very keen to see the film Swandown, which had only one showing at The Filmhouse cinema. Thankfully I managed to get to that one showing and was very glad I did!

Swandown is a gloriously eccentric British film. Two men (film maker Andrew Kötting and writer / historian / geographer Iain Sinclair) travel from Hastings on the south coast of England to Hackney in London by means of a swan shaped pedalo. Along the way they meet anglers and dog walkers and talk about what rivers mean to them. Their journey is inter-cut with archive materials about the rivers of south east England and quotations from writers including Edward Lear and Samuel Beckett. It's a wonderfully odd tribute to the unique nature of rivers with a bit of a protest against the construction of the Olympics site added in.

Hopefully the film will be shown again at some point, and all I can say is, if you get the chance to see it, do....

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