Hooptedoodle #194a - More of the Same Sort of Thing

No new painted soldiers to show or anything, so here's another in my breathtaking series of Down on the Farm This Week posts, following on from Friday's effort - I find these are useful for keeping the number of hits down.

Around this time each year we get a fine show of these toadies - we think they grow out of rotting tree roots, but when we mow the lawn they disappear until next year. Can't eat them or anything, but there's certainly lots of them.

This is also the week for harvesting and stewing up the fetching Red Love apples - we got a few more this year - probably enough for 3 crumbles. One for tonight and two in the freezer.

Very unusually, we also got some of these in the garden this afternoon - Red-Legged Partridges. We see a lot of pheasants, but these chaps are very uncommon here. I have to explain that the only reason they are here at all this year is because the farm ghillie bought in a load of chicks, and they have just been released from the nursery pens in the last week or so. They are here so they can take their chance, along with the other game fowl, in the big shooting parties which take place on the estate here around Christmas.

Not my sort of thing - on shooting days we usually try to be somewhere else, which would also be a good strategy for a pheasant, I suppose.

Hooptedoodle #194 - More Critters

pararge aegeria, large as life

This week I have mostly been in Edinburgh, performing my civic duty as a jury member, which means I missed some new visitors here at Chateau Foy. Yesterday was - out of nowhere - calm and dry and sunny, and the garden was full of little brown butterflies.

We do well for butterflies here - there is a wood at the bottom of the garden; we don't get anything too exotic, but the variety is good - especially on a sunny day when the buddleia is in bloom (it's finished for the year now) we get Red Admirals, Peacocks, Painted Ladies, Commas and all sorts of white ones with light blue or orange piping. But we've never seen these before.

This little chap got into the Garden Room, so was a good subject for a photo or two. He's not very spectacular, but it seems he's a Speckled Wood (pararge aegeria), and the name comes from the fact that he is speckled and lives in woodland (any questions, at the back?). What is significant is that these are native to the South of England, and - though they are known to be establishing themselves further north - these are the first ones we've seen in Scotland.

There were dozens of them yesterday - it's not such a great day today, so we have only midges to look at this morning. There was a little excitement earlier, with some kind of a fight going on among the rooks on the far side of the horse field, but it was noisy rather than vicious, and things calmed down quickly.

Always pleased to make some new friends - if the Speckled Wood is a shadowy harbinger of global warming then he's welcome anyway.

*************

Very late edit:

I've seen it before, but someone sent me a link to this rather fine film of a sleeping dormouse. This dates from about 4 years ago, and if memory serves me correctly I think was originally uploaded by the Surrey Wildlife Trust - while we're on a nature break(?), this is worth a look...

Hooptedoodle #192 - More Critters outside the Kitchen Window

The Contesse was busy with her camera again yesterday - here's a quick view of garden wildlife in September in South East Scotland.

Not necessarily welcome, but a handsome specimen

There was another stationed as lookout - they can eat as much of the
geraniums as they like, as long as they stay off the fruit trees...

Chaffinches on the garage roof

Nothing to do with wildlife, but someone drew my attention to this cover from an American Sci-Fi magazine published in 1939 - gripping stuff - I swear this is genuine.

Hooptedoodle #181 - Another Gizmo

"Father - oh, Father - please come and see - there is something strange in the garden - what can it be?"

"Calm yourselves, children, it is simply a wonderful new Gizmo that your mother has purchased for us."

"But it looks very odd - how does it work?"

"Well, you see, it is a WASPINATOR, a truly ingenious device. You stuff it with old plastic bags, pull tight the drawstring and you hang it in a tree, or some similar place. Then all the passing wasps which frequent our garden (and there are a great many, as we know) see the Waspinator hanging there, and they say to themselves, 'uh-oh, there is a wasps nest of some size here already, I must hasten away, and not think of building any rival nest close by, lest I offend the residents' - and then they buzz off and do not trouble us further...    but I detect that you are giggling - why do you behave thus?"

"Oh Father, it is hard to believe that such a device would work, or that the wasps would buy into the deception so completely. We suspect that the Waspinator may in fact have been supplied to us by the World of Bollocks Gizmo Company, who have disappointed us so often in the past."

"No, no, my children, I assure you that I, too, was very doubtful of the chances of success of such an unlikely-sounding idea, but - and you may blow me away with the proverbial feather - I am forced to admit that since this fine thing has been hanging in our tree we have seen very few wasps, and those which we have seen have scarpered pretty fast. Despite my prejudices, I may be forced to accept that it works. In any case, you should not be so small-minded in your view of the world - yes, I admit we have had some unsuccessful gizmos in the past, but did your mother not also purchase the very fine Fiskars dandelion removing tool?"

"Yes she did, but then she followed up by buying the Fiskars lawn-edging tool with rotating head, which failed dismally and quickly, since the main load-bearing cam was made of rather flimsy plastic. Also, we feel that two successful gizmo acquisitions in a single lifetime seems too high a proportion to believe."

"Well, you may scoff, but I am so impressed by the absence of wasps in our garden that I have saved up some more old plastic bags and stuffed the second one - yes, you get two Waspinators in a pack - and I propose to hang it in the front hedge as soon as Dod the Gardener has given it its annual short back and sides. I have no view on the long term effect on the local ecological systems, but in the short term it is looking good, so bring me another glass of the Australian Shiraz. Thank you."

Hooptedoodle #178 - Juveniles!

Quick wildlife interlude - our garden is full of baby birds at the moment, and the Contesse has been busy with her camera. These pictures show some of the juveniles on our garden feeders, being fed or being shown how to use them by their parents.

For the first time, we have a family of Nuthatches - previously we have only seen odd individuals, but this Summer we have some chicks, and you can hear the distinctive chirping song throughout the day. I've never seen a baby Nuthatch before - this one is watching one of his parents working on the peanut feeder, and he appears to be unconvinced about all this silly hanging-upside-down business - none of the other birds seem to do this, and it must be a bit embarrassing.

And here is a rather chunky young Greater Spotted Woodpecker (left - red cap), who looks a bit large to still be getting nuts fed to him by his mum, but he doesn't seem embarrassed at all.

I realise that garden birds are perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, but we get a lot of pleasure from watching them, and they are quite a big part of our life here - we live in a very rural area, and our garden is next to a wood. Anyway - a baby nuthatch is certainly a first for me.

Just one more - this is a video clip my wife took with her iPhone in the car park at our local hospital - this baby Bluetit insisted on sitting on her car windscreen wiper - wouldn't budge off it, so eventually she had to pick it up and place it on a nearby bush. We like to think that its relatives would find it before too long.

Hooptedoodle #174 - Oi! - Gerroff!

We take a great deal of pleasure from the birds in our garden, and some pictures of them have been posted here in the past. Our previous bird-feeding gantry collapsed last year (rust and gale-force winds), so we have a stronger and more complicated one now.

One feature is an elevated gauze tray to allow ground-feeding birds that are not comfortable hanging onto a nut feeder or sitting on a seed perch (primarily blackbirds, chaffinches, robins) to eat from a flat container which is safely away from the neighbourhood cats.

Common (Mongolian Ring-Necked) Pheasant - south east Scotland
 - not supposed to be up there

The tray is clearly stronger than I would have thought, but it is not designed for great, greedy oafs like this chap! At the time of his visit, the tray contained mostly spilled niger seeds from the containers above. A niger seed is only just visible if you have decent eyesight - not unlike one of the commas in this post - any idea how many would make a snack for a cock pheasant weighing about 1.25Kg?

He didn't stay long, and lumbered off to continue his normal hoovering of the woodland floor.

Hooptedoodle #166 - More Garden Birds

Tough guy - the robin will take seeds from the ground, but prefers his food to wriggle a bit

The gantry that holds up our bird feeders surprised us by collapsing in the gales the other night. When the investigation team moved in, we found very quickly that the structure is brilliantly designed so that the tubular steel fills up with rainwater and rusts through quicker than you would believe. All structural engineers working on the design of bridges or large buildings, please take note.

The replacement stand is expected in a day or so - of rather better quality (or at least we hope so - certainly it is more expensive). In the meantime our feathered pals in the garden are coping well enough. Here's a couple of photos taken by Mme la Contesse this morning - everybody looking bright and chirpy, in readiness for Spring (which does not start on 1st March here in South-East Scotland, whatever they may tell you).

Handsome cock Chaffinch, with his Spring plumage starting to show on his head

Coal Tit - we can't tell the males and females apart, but presumably the Coal Tits can

Hooptedoodle #161 - Feathered Visitor

Apart from gale force winds last week, we have been very lucky with the weather here - there has been plenty of snow further south. Our garden bird feeders are still very busy, and we are getting geared up for the RSPB's national Garden Birdwatch this coming weekend.

Right on cue, we have seen a visitor in the garden that we haven't seen for years - a Brambling. A kind of finch, can be mistaken for a male Chaffinch if you are in a hurry. They are not specially rare, in fact, but we haven't seen one here for about 10 years or more.

So warm greetings to the Brambling (who won't go on the feeders - just cleans up the scraps the others have dropped, but there are plenty of them) - ideally, we need it to reappear during the observation period of the Birdwatch, so we can record it on the sheet, but we won't be too upset if it doesn't show!

Hooptedoodle #159 - Feeding the Neighbours

Breaking the ice on the drinking water is always a popular move

We have always been very fond of the birds in our garden - there are plenty of them, since we have a fair-sized wood just over the garden wall, and we try to keep the feeders stocked in the winter months. Watching them has given us an immense amount of pleasure over the years.

This Christmas, the Contesse was presented with a more sophisticated lens to go with the new camera she got last Christmas (I'm not very good at the imagination thing), and her photos of the visiting birds are suddenly a lot better - so much so that I thought I'd share some of them. Nothing too rare or exciting in the varieties that turned up, but it's nice to see them close up, enjoying a meal on some of our more pleasant days (i.e. before the gales started). We have an extensive menu of lunch specials on offer, including niger seeds, sunflower kernels, suet, nuts and some extremely disgusting dried mealworms. The customers seem to approve. The only question we would like an answer to is, where have all the greenfinches gone? Two or three years ago they were among the most common visitors, but we see hardly any now. The answer, I'm almost certain, is simply that they are dining in someone else's garden, but I would be upset if something more dramatic had happened to them.

Anyway, here's a selection of what constitute common-or-garden birds on the East Coast of Scotland around New Year time.

Blue Tits on the nuts

Handsome male Chaffinch

Coal Tit

Collared Dove - won't go near the feeders, but will hoover up anything dropped
on the ground

I love these little guys - Goldfinches - you either get none or you get a crowd

Great Tit

The enigmatic Nuthatch - spends most of his life hanging upside-down; a
pretty bird, but aggressive. One of Nature's failed prototypes?

The dumbest bird in the garden - a cock pheasant who survived the Christmas shoot;
I read somewhere that they are terribly inbred - most pheasants in Britain
today are descendants of a very small number that were imported originally,
which may explain the low IQ. It has to be said that the females are even more
daft than the males - they forget where they've laid their eggs, for a start.

Robin (yes, yes, all right...)

My favourite of the lot - a female Greater Spotted Woodpecker - sometimes we get
an entire family group on the feeders together, which is spectacular

Hooptedoodle #152 - Spooks & Villains

Casual post, carefully timed to be not-quite-seasonal, as behoves one who is not-quite-on-the-ball.

Hallowe'en is an odd one for me - I have a vague understanding that the traditional festival is the night when the souls of the departed get up for a bit of a boogie around the churchyard, but it's all become very confused with the American Trick or Treat thing, not to mention Guy Fawkes. The gift and greeting card and party-gear industries have climbed all over this, naturally, and left us with a strange, pseudo-gothic hotch-potch whose main theme seems to be extraction of money with menaces by kids dressed in ready-made outfits, the royalties for which will go straight into the coffers of a predictable, short list of American film and TV companies. Of course, the kids still enjoy it, however the tradition may have slipped, which is the most important point.

So that's all right then. In fact, things have moved on a bit here - I have been known to do the Uncle Scrooge bit, turning off the lights at the front of the house on Hallowe'en, in the hope that the local kids would pass by (believing I was out, or even dead), but the local kids have mostly grown up now, and would not choose to waste their time coming here anyway if they hadn't. The ancient Scottish tradition of "Guising" - when children dress up as dead people and ask for money (an activity which is now mostly carried out by the government, come to think of it) - has largely been subsumed by Trick or Treat and fund-raising for fireworks. A tradition of any sort may be better than no tradition at all, I suppose, but I am waiting suspiciously for an official, copyrighted, Christmas cartoon image of the Infant Jesus to emerge from the Disney empire quite soon.

On the wildlife front, the unusual summer has brought us unprecedented numbers and sizes of butterflies, an astonishing display of toadstools on the front lawn, and all sorts of wonders. One recent discovery has been the identity of the mystery chewer of our plum tree - here he is, trespassing...

Villains on a different scale altogether are still all around us. A couple of days ago my phone rang, and a gentleman introduced himself, representing a market research organisation who, it seems, have been hired by the Royal Bank of Scotland to get feedback from their customers. If I had 15 to 20 minutes, he said, he would be delighted to discuss the matter with me.

I try not to be impolite on such occasions, since the poor man is only doing his job, but it occurred to me that

(1) the market research organisation may be a wholly-owned subsidiary of RBS.

(2) I did not have 15 minutes to talk to him.

(3) anything genuine which I had to suggest to him about RBS and their operation would not fit with his list of questions or interesting themes - and since this reduces the whole exercise to the sort of self-promotion and lie engineering which we might expect, I became a little terse.

I told the fellow that I did not really have time to speak with him, but would he please take careful note that it is some years since I had any dealings with RBS, and I do not wish to be contacted by them again until I say so. In short, I said (without swearing - I must get some credit for that), I am not a customer, and this is because all my family's business was taken away from RBS and placed elsewhere, entirely because they demonstrated to us repeatedly that they were the most stupid, error-prone, unhelpful, self-obsessed organisation we have ever had dealings with. Are you writing this down?

"Well, sir," he replied, "you are, of course, entitled to your opinion."

And there the conversation ended, though I am sure they will be back. Just a flaming minute - I am entitled to my opinion? Is that not, in fact, exactly the pretence under which they were attempting to get me to play along with their customer feedback in the first place? Do I actually require RBS, or their hired help, to tell me that I have such an entitlement? Does their conceit have no limits?

Next year, dress your kids up as RBS officials on October 31st, and send them out to sell your neighbours loan repayment insurance, or house insurance, or savings accounts which yield very little apart from inconvenience and regular irritation. That should scare the bejesus out of them.

Hooptedoodle #131 - Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY)

We love the things to bits - Roe Deer - it's marvellous to think that wild creatures as big as these live in the forests around our home, but we have a little problem this week.

They have been coming into our garden and nibbling at the young growth on my wife's plants. The strawberries are wrecked, and a number of other promising specimens have been chewed down to ground level. I'm very sorry, but this won't do at all. I have still to have a chat with the farm's ghillie (gamekeeper) about what we can do, but I have been looking on the internet for discussion of solutions for such a problem. As ever, most of the suggestions are worthless, but there are some ideas out there.

Little machines which are triggered by infrared, and then produce strobe lights and sounds, ranging from dogs barking to ultrasonic things. Interesting, in a wacky way - expensive, too. Bags of human hair sprinkled in the woods. Things which smell of dog, or coyote, or lions (!) are reputed to discourage deer. Dried blood, I read somewhere - but this is getting a bit dark.

We are going to try our variation on a recommendation from a man in Maryland, no less. Set up a barrier about 20 feet back into the woods from the bottom of the garden, consisting of two strands of fishing line (15lb strength, so as not to hurt or entangle the animals), wound around the trees and stretching between them at about 18 inches and 2 feet from the ground, which will be adorned (if such be the word) with fishing rod bite alarms, which are little jingly bells, officially made of plastic and alloy, and thus non-rusting. That is the theory.

All sorts of comic visions present themselves - the place could sound like Santa's sleigh at night, or the deer might walk straight through them, or bring all their mates to laugh at them. The deer might even pinch them. We have a little time to think about this - assuming we still have some plants to protect, the bite alarms are coming from China, and - of course - I still have to consult the ghillie. Here's an encouraging glimpse of the jingle bells, with appropriately soothing and deer-free music.

And remember, kids - you're not really supposed to put them on your finger.

Hooptedoodle #126 – Darwin – Further Evidence

Preliminaries

A finger touched the clay, and life began. Good start, thought Babu. But after a while he became impatient with these tiny, ticking, whiskery creatures which he could hardly see, and he ordered a change. 

On this very shore, at the margin of the heaving sea and the shifting land, his will was done. Bewildered encephaloids crawled into the freezing dawn, to begin the work of engineering themselves, through countless generations and mistakes, into reptiles and mammals, and marketing consultants.

Oh well, thought Babu.

From “The Casso Verses” – © Lowgate Publishing 1997

I have to admit that I’ve always had problems with the concepts of evolution. I can sort of understand the principles, but I find the implied numbers mind-blowing. Looking backwards, it looks very orderly - there appears to be a progressive development of the species, in that they became better suited to their environment. Of course, I realise that the theory is that countless other, less successful variants died out, didn’t make it. 

It’s the “countless” bit I have problems with. If genetic variations are just random accidents, and only the odd lucky hits work, then the numbers involved seem improbable – even the existence of the odd lucky hit is a bloody long shot. Anyway, no matter – I am interested in this stuff. I have recently been watching the DVD set of Prof Brian Cox’s Wonders of Life, and have vowed to watch it again, to attempt to understand it more fully. My personal beliefs do not insist that there is some form of conscious will behind this progression, nor do they require that I should be able to understand such a thing if there were one, but I have a lot of trouble accepting that it could work without some form of scripting, without something or someone having had a peek at the answers in the back of the book. I’d like to think I keep an open mind on it, and I also like to think that one day it will make sense to me, but not yet.

To move on from the philosophical to the ridiculous, we may have a little more evidence this morning. In crude terms, my understanding is that some variations and mutations just didn’t work. Birds, for example, which built their nests in dangerous places would be less likely to survive and pass on their instincts and their habits to their offspring. We have one such here, at Chateau Foy.

Yesterday a sparrow fell down our chimney, and ended up in the log stove. This happens very occasionally (though, now I come to think of it, it was blue tits previously), and is not recommended. It is upsetting for the bird, and potentially even worse for the owners of the stove. The stove, of course, was not lit.

We let it out, having opened all the windows, because birds are smart creatures of the wild and can spot the way out of a tight situation (e.g. via an open window) in a flash. The results were disappointing - it flew around, bouncing off the ceiling, for 15 minutes - it left us eventually, but the living room was a disaster area. I was too preoccupied at the time to take a photograph, but here is a picture of a dog which gives the general idea.

You may imagine me, if you will, with my son’s butterfly net, standing on one leg, waving it like a fairy wand about 2 seconds after each time the bird has passed. We should register the film rights. The Contesse performed heroics cleaning up, and about an hour and a half later things were back to normal – a lot of work, and really well done.

Sadly, by this stage the sparrow had once again fallen down the chimney and was back in the stove. Yes – it was the same sparrow; the moron seems to be attempting to build a nest inside our chimney cowl.

Now my instinct at this point was to help speed up evolution and leave the stupid thing there – with luck it would quieten down when it got hungry and would be more amenable to being lifted out. At worst, it might die and we would have strengthened the species as a result. The Contesse, of course, could not contemplate such heartlessness, and we were obliged to let it out again. This time the panic lasted only a couple of minutes – I guess the little chap was tired after the first episode – and the Contesse caught him in the butterfly net before too much damage was done, and took him outside.

I know that you are now nodding, waiting for the next appearance of the idiot sparrow in the stove, and it may still happen, but so far so good. Around 3am - peak thinking hour - I had all sorts of crazed ideas for making a bag out of 10mm plastic mesh and putting it over the chimney pot, even a rough design for a mesh bag which would fit the opening in the stove, so that we had a piece of official kit for rescuing birds from log stoves – maybe both these devices could be patented, and I could make a fortune selling them through Scott’s of Stow, along with the sofa-rug-with-sleeves and their other classic devices for improving the lives of dumb pensioners. Maybe not.

Maybe Scotts of Stow gives us another dark hint about evolution, too.

Here are some photos we took during the second visitation. 

Hooptedoodle #125 - Penguin Design Flaw

All students of Darwin take note. Also, anyone who ever took comfort from the fact that living up stairs would keep them safe from Daleks, here's a clue how to keep penguins at bay.

Hooptedoodle #118 - It's still out there somewhere

08:19, 21st January, East Lothian, Scotland. Apollo awakes.

I understand that yesterday - 20th January - is generally accepted as the Most Depressing Day of the year in the United Kingdom. I'm not sure who said so, but intuitively that makes some sense - winter fuel bills, a bit of overspend at Christmas, lack of sunshine (and whatever vitamin that means), cold, blustery weather, and nothing much to look forward to but a couple more months of the same.

Well - ever the rebel - I found yesterday splendid. After a few days of pretty severe storms and horizontal rain, suddenly it was dead calm, and it was sunny. I got a lot of tidying up done in the garden - sorted out the woodshed, restacked all the logs. I got rid of the Christmas tree, which had  been blowing around the front lawn like an idiot. Refilled all the bird feeders, which were going like a circus all day - I even filled the big seed feeders at the edge of the wood at the bottom of the garden, and one tiny coal tit spent the morning flying backwards and forward between them, unable to believe his good fortune. I know how he felt - the calm and quiet were the biggest surprise; the day before, Sunday, normal conversation in our garden had been very difficult, because of the noise of the waves beating on the east-facing beach at Scoughall - more than a mile away.

Leaves were swept, ivy cut back - I even ventured into the wood to deal with some enormous brambles, which were attempting to push the roof off my garage. If I'd had an elephant, I would have washed it - that is the sort of day it was. This morning I may go for a short walk to inspect my born-again woodshed, to enjoy the clean floor and the faint echo, which hasn't been present since - ooh - maybe this time last year.

Last night had a bright moon, and the owls were in evidence. This morning the sun came up again - that's twice in a row…

My photo (from the upstairs bathroom window) shows Apollo just revving up his chariot somewhere behind the Lammermuirs - the town of Dunbar is about 10 miles away, beyond the left edge of the picture - more like a million miles. OK, it's just the dawn, and I'm normally too preoccupied or too grumpy to pay attention, but I am grateful.

If today is like yesterday, that will be terrific. If this is 2014, then bring it on.

Hooptedoodle #108 - Unusual Glimpse of Canadian Wildlife

Someone sent me this, and it cheered me up a bit yesterday. If you've seen it before, and anyone who has had any exposure to Canadian TV will have, then here it is again.

Hooptedoodle #101 - What Are You Doing in My Garden?

[If you're looking for the report of the big battle where the Spanish army got hammered, it's the previous post]

The Summer is definitely coming to a close - cold and windy here, but this afternoon there was a bit of sunshine, and it seemed a good opportunity to give the lawns their last cut of the year. An area of one of the lawns seems to have turned into a mushroom bed. So I thought I should photograph them before I mowed them into oblivion (we don't mess about, me and the Honda...).

I wondered if they were edible - we did have a small crop of morels some months ago (which we didn't eat), but these new chaps look a bit like Jack-o'-Lantern to me, which will give you a definite touch of The Others, so not only will I not eat them, but I'll also wash my hands carefully before I eat anything else.

Not seen these in anything like this quantity before. I don't think it's the Global Warming; like the morels, they are certainly caused by the rotting of the roots of our old Eucalyptus, which was cut down 4 or 5 years ago (or whatever), and the roots must be brewing up nicely.

Attractive though, eh?

Hooptedoodle #97 - Never Seen One Like That Before

As a result of my intensive spell of battle board painting, enlivened by the odd self-inflicted setback, I haven't been outside much for a day or two. Today we have a storm warning for tonight, so I am thinking seriously about getting the garden furniture stored out of harm's way, especially our rather world-weary ombrellone. Putting the furniture away brings thoughts of the approaching end of what has been a remarkably fine Summer, but it seems that it has decided that it isn't going to go without a struggle, and today is absolutely lovely again.

A number of things have surpassed themselves this year - the white lilac, the edelweiss, the dandelions(!) and the wasps come to mind, but the most spectacular shows have come late in the season. The butterflies are the best I've ever seen here, and the berries on the whitebeam trees in the wood are fantastic.

Normally, the whitebeam berries are fairly feeble, and are rapidly scoffed by the pigeons, who seem to get some form of serious indigestion from them, to the detriment of any vehicles parked in the driveway. This year the berries are sufficient to ridicule the efforts of mere pigeons - I thought I should take a picture or two, in case I can't remember this, come February.

Buddleia Davidii well past its best, but the Peacock butterflies are
still very grateful, thank you

Just a Scottish garden, but by our standards this really is something a bit unusual.