This year's butterflies

I wouldn't normally find the appearance of a Red Admiral butterfly (Vanessa atalanta) all that remarkable. On Sliabh Mannan these butterflies are usually relatively common but have been scarce this year. Peacock, likewise usually relatively common, have been almost completely absent.

I suspect the lengthy period of significant summer rain has been too much for some of the larger species. Quite often the butterflies I've seen have been short of bits of wing.

This specimen however was particularly bright and may well have been recently-emerged. I wonder if there might yet be a late-season surge?

By contrast Orange Tip in the late Spring, Ringlet in early summer and Green Veined White much of the time have been abundant, and a Painted Lady, not seen for years, did appear in the garden. Their periods of emergence were marked by more clement weather.

A dry spell

My writing output in April was similar to the weather - a long dry spell. However a downpour in mid-May coincided with another burst of writing productivity. I've recently finished my first new story in two months and I received an acceptance from the respected Third and Starlight anthology for a reprint of 'The Waiting Room.'

In the meantime I as usual turned to writing poetry. By this, of course, I mean formal poetry as opposed to free verse. For some reason I find the discipline of metre and rhyme helpful, even though the output is not saleable in today's free-verse dominated poetry market. I suppose the modern fashion really is poetry because the market tells me so, but personally I prefer prose properly punctuated. If you'd like to see some of my recent work, there are some new pieces on this blog's poetry page.

One strange result of the freak weather has been the may blossom blooming in May high up on top of Sliabh Mannan rather than as it more commonly does in June.

camellia (unknown variety)

To my surprise and pleasure a camellia bought cheaply in a car boot sale years ago has produced its first flower (left.) I had suspected it would turn out to be Japonica rather than Williamsii. The former, it seems, just don't flower at this altitude. However it has just about the most sheltered spot on the place, so it does have its best chance. It was anybody's guess as to the variety, so if anybody happens to know, I'd be pleased to hear from you.

The early season butterflies have been out in good numbers, particularly orange tips and green-veined whites. A red admiral turned up in the garden this week.

At least one pair of greenfinches seem to have taken up residence in the garden this year too. We have chaffinch every year and bullfinch occasionally but greenfinch are a novelty. Siskin have also turned up this year and there are grey wagtail down by the burn. Wrens also seem to be on the increase and the local greater spotted woodpecker has also been visiting the garden.

For the amateur photographer a woodland summer is so frustrating. The summer visiting birds are all displaying their brightest colours, but the shade and the leaf cover make it so hard to get a good picture!

Spring Forward

I'm told that the depreciation of sterling following the Brexit vote has compelled consumables

manufacturers to make their products smaller in order to avoid putting their prices up. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? But what, I wonder, is the explanation for years getting shorter? Almost before I'm certain that winter is over the seasonal migrations are under way.

Last week the over-wintering geese of Sliabh Mannan were packing their breeding plumage and heading for their summer nesting grounds in Sweden. Like normal families they set off on the journey arguing with each other about who should lead the way and what direction they should be flying. Down on the ground we humans just look up and wish them bon voyage.

Meanwhile the grey wagtails (above) have been arriving for a couple of weeks along the course of the Culloch Burn and today I saw the first house martin (left) of the season. He's timed it nicely again, because a cloud of midges were out in the sunshine yesterday evening.

However it's early yet for most of the swallow family and I've noted before that a single martin has arrived a week or so in advance. I'm not sure whether he communicates telepathically with the main flock about the climate or whether he's just determined to grab the best nesting site.

The Grey Wagtail

I was surprised to learn from the RSPB website that the estimated UK population of grey wagtails (motacilla cinerea) is only 38,000.

I first recall noticing these birds on Sliabh Mannan  several years ago. They frequent the margins of the Culloch Burn and in  the summer they are well supplied with insects of various kinds.  I don't actually know if they can catch midges on the wing like swallows and house martins, but if they can, good luck to them.  In the winter they leave the uplands and take refuge at lower altitudes near the estuary.

Anyway I've been struggling to take a decent photograph for years. Though larger than a pied wagtail these birds are still quite small, pretty skittish and, as their name suggests, terrible at sitting still. The reach of my 75-300 Minolta lens has not really been adequate, while my photography brain is still too slow and my old fingers too arthritic to achieve wonders with my entirely manual Sigma 400 mm.

This year I have managed to acquire  an Alpha-type doubler lens to go with my recently acquired A580. Using this with the 75-300 produces a maximum aperture of f 9, which is too slow for autofocus but the camera can automatically raise the ISO when I'm struggling. This means that on aperture priority my only task is to focus manually, and I can just about do that, at least some of the time.

As a result I can now boast some tolerable, if grainy, stills of a grey wagtail!

The Wild Hunt of Sliabh Mannan

It's hard to describe how delighted I am to receive an acceptance from Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.

I'm doubly delighted because this is a story about the Gododdin, the old people who lived in Sliabh Mannan before me.

It's called The Wild Hunt of Sliabh Mannan and is about 3400 words.

I'm pretty sure I made it up, but the events have now melded so inextricably with the surrounding landscape that I cannot help thinking Yes, this is where that happened.

Of course when our characters tell us a story about the past it does tend to become historical truth as far as we, as writers, are concerned. I sometimes can't understand how no-one else seems to know about it until I tell them how it happened.

Mink on Sliabh Mannan?

Mink have a few characteristics in common with foxes. Both are pretty to look at and thus benefit from urban sentimentalism; both have taken advantage of opportunities offered by misguided human activists to expand their populations all over the UK; both are pests; both have a reputation for killing more than they need to eat; neither is kept in check by another natural predator.

The red fox is a UK native which has benefited from man having first wiped out the wolf and then banned his fellow men from forms of fox-control that they seemed to be enjoying too much.

The mink is an American import deliberately released from captivity first by activists and allegedly later by fur-farmers when their industry was outlawed.

Arguably the latter may turn out to have been the more disastrous of these two human interventions.

Mink have devastated the UK water vole population, which has declined from around 8 million in the 1960's to a figure possibly below 100,000 today.

Being semi-aquatic, mink are able to colonise Scottish islands which are breeding grounds for vulnerable seabirds including the puffin. On the mainland they are a threat to waterfowl and other ground-nesting birds, fish and domestic pets.

The Scottish Mink Initiative, launched in 2011, aims to remove breeding mink from the north of the country.

Why am I interested? Because this week I'm pretty sure I saw one of the little perishers beside a branch of the Culloch. Almost black, with just a sprinkling of lighter guard hairs, it was below me on the bank, trotting along until it entered a hole beside a pond.

By its movement, I thought at first it was a little cat; then I realised its legs were only half cat length and its head was so streamlined with its body that I could not tell where one began and the other ended. It was much too big for any of the smaller mustelidae such as stoats or weasels, more the size of a polecat or pine marten. The combination of the colour and the waterside habitat persuaded me it was probably one of the foreign invaders.

As the bean goose flies, this sighting is a goodly distance away from the breeding grounds of our local protected species, but since I gather mink will even take on gannets and swans there is no room for complacency here. So I've reported it to SMI and I await a response.

Comma butterfly on Sliabh Mannan

It is not often I get to report a really unusual sighting, but here is a first for me at any rate and a quick whirl around local butterfly conservation websites suggests I have not simply been walking around with my eyes shut these past many years.

I am indebted in particular to Scott Shanks & Andrew Masterman who tell me that the Comma became extinct in Scotland towards the end of the nineteenth century and even in England had retreated into a very narrow range by the 1920's.

Since then its territory has expanded, reaching Yorkshire in the 1950's and The Borders by the late 1990's.

Although in recent years it has been seen in Lanarkshire and The Lothians, I can say with confidence that I have not seen one on Sliabh Mannan before.

Even in summer it can be nippy at night at this altitude, but today was a nice warm morning and I was out on the moor with my dog and my new camera when beside one of the high woodlands we came across this beauty.

Much too fast for a slowcoach like me and these were the only two photographs I managed.

The Culloch Burn

The Culloch Burn is a stream which flows into the River Avon in Slamannan, a village in the middle of Sliabh Mannan.  The Stirlingshire Avon is unconnected, except by name, with the considerably more famous river running through Shakespeare's Stratford.  In fact the name Avon derives directly from the Celtic word for river and there are several examples of the unimaginatively named 'River River' throughout the United Kingdom.

Although the village is more than 400 feet above sea level it lies in a natural basin in Sliabh Mannan, meaning the only ways out are all uphill. In consequence the lowest parts lie within a natural floodplain and any drainage bottleneck is vulnerable to being overwhelmed after heavy rain.

People who do not live near the headwaters of upland streams find it hard to take warnings against flooding seriously, as I have had occasion to remind local Council planners before now.

The above photograph shows the Culloch in a dry season. That's right, you can't see it. You can however see its banks just behind the electricity pole. You might even wonder how such a little burn has cut so deep a channel and why constant erosion is regularly changing its winding course.

An official will come out on a sunny summer day, observe this trickle of water and condemn as fantasists your correspondent and others who advise them to be careful when zoning areas for housing development.  Such a feeble watercourse, he thinks, could not flood a child's paddling pool.

 

Well the next photograph shows what can happen if it rains for a couple of days. You can still see the long rushes that mark the course of the Culloch, but now the burn is about a hundred yards wide because it has burst its banks and inundated the flood plain. 

 

Turn left from where the first two pictures were taken and you can just make out the outskirts of Slamannan, towards which the Culloch is flowing.  It is there where it joins the Avon as, in normal circumstances, a tiny tributary of a small river.

 

But when the Culloch looks like this, the confluence obviously poses more of a problem.

Now imagine what is likely to happen if additional housing were to be constructed on the southern outskirts of Slamannan, increasing the flow of surface water by reducing natural absorbency and also increasing domestic drainage into a system as volatile as this.

You're right.  Not smart.  So if in spite of my advice such developments go ahead, please remember:

I TOLD YOU SO!

Grey Herons

The Grey Heron (ardea cinerea) is present in small numbers in my part of Sliabh Mannan. I have never seen more than two together. However as consumers of fish and frogs they are reasonably well supplied by the waters of the Culloch Burn and other streams, as well as a number of ponds and areas of semi-permanent standing water.

These upland herons are warier of human contact than those that you may find around town rivers or in shallow areas of larger waterways. This means that they are commonly seen in flight, retracting their long necks into an s-shaped bend and beating their wings in a slow and relaxed rhythm. Their flight is surprisingly graceful for such a tall and gangling bird.

Herons are regarded as predators by the local rook population and correctly so, for they will take small birds if they can. It is less common to see rooks mobbing herons than mobbing buzzards, but I have seen it. I have also seen herons quite happily roosting in trees, a sight which for some reasons seems incongruous, though no-one seems to have told that to the herons.

It was not until a river cruise in central Europe that I was able to take good pictures of herons on the ground. I would need a very long lens to achieve such pictures around Sliabh Mannan. This one was happily standing on one leg and pretending to be a statue.