Hooptedoodle #314 - October - Unusual Visitor (and other stuff)

Nice, sunny day today - cold first thing in the morning, then the sun shone all day. We have started putting some food out for the birds again - starting with a suet block on the apple tree. Much excitement among the humble sparrows and dunnocks, but we also got a couple of visitors we seldom see here. They are not rare locally, but they don't come here.

Motacilla cinerea - Grey Wagtail

Grey Wagtails - despite the name, much more colourful than their cousins the Pied Wagtail, who are regulars here. Whatever the weather did in 2018, it has certainly produced a lot of insects in October, so the Wagtails of all varieties are very busy, and very entertaining they are too.

Photos, as ever, courtesy of the Contesse Foy.

While we are on about insects, this is the time of year when we get one of our visits from Cluster Flies - they arrive in large numbers, but always in the same rooms, on the same windows (how do they know?). They are harmless, in the sense that they don't bite, and they don't contaminate your food, but the sheer number of them is a menace. In October they come looking for somewhere to hibernate, and really they are small enough to go anywhere they want, so they are impossible to keep out if they wish to get in. A few years ago we had a scary episode when the Contesse discovered there were thousands of the beggars wintering in the tiny gap between the window sashes and the frames in a bedroom which overlooks the woods at the back of the house. Regular checking for uninvited squatters, occasional applications of the vacuum cleaner and some understated Raid spray in the crevices in the window, and we have had no repeats.

Don't panic - this isn't our photo - this is just what they look like

Their life cycle is interesting, if you are not eating a blueberry muffin at the moment. They swarm and mate in the early Spring (when they emerge from wherever it is they have been hibernating), and the females lay their eggs near earthworm burrows. When they hatch, the larvae tunnel down, attach themselves to earthworms and spend a gruesome summer in the dark, underground. When the weather turns colder (about now, in fact) the new adult flies emerge in great numbers, and set off looking for desirable winter quarters such as our bedroom windows. So you get two swarms a year - one at this time, when they move into a sheltered winter home, then another in the Spring, when it's time to wake up and mate. As far as I know, that's about it for Cluster Flies - seems a pretty pointless existence, though the earthworms might have something to add.

We also have a fine crop of toadstools in the lawn, which is seasonal - lots of moss in the lawn, plenty of rain recently, and bingo - here they are again. The last mowing of the lawns (which will be a little late this year because the long Summer has meant that the grass is still growing after we would have expected it to pack in) will get rid of them, and things can go to sleep until next year.

Oh yes - Dod the Gardener has planted a load more crocus bulbs in the grass verge in the lane, so we should get a nice show in the early Spring. Something to look forward to.

[I think Dod goes to sleep in the Winter as well, boys and girls.]


***** Late Edit *****

It is now the following morning, and the aforementioned Dod has already dug out the toadies (they are unpleasantly squishy) and is now applying lawn sand to - that's right, you  guessed - the lawns. This stuff is to be applied by a push-along rotary spreader, so we have jointly been searching out the reading glasses and reading the instructions on the plastic sacks. 

Right.

The instructions on the bag say you should go to the manufacturer's website at www.gardenhealth.com to get the correct setting for your particular job and your particular spreader (ours is a Scott's EasyGreen - I knew you wanted to know this). In fact I don't live too far from our garden, so was able to do this without much difficulty, and took a shortened version of a large printout for Dod's enlightenment. Set to number 30 on the adjuster, it says, and do the lawns twice, at right angles, in a sort of tartan pattern. First problem I had was trying to do the arithmetic in my head, before my first coffee. The table from the website says this will give you about 112-135gm/sq.m - at two passes, I estimate that my 2 large sacks of lawn sand will cover about one-third of one of the 3 lawns, though each sack is claimed to treat 200 sq.m. We have something like 300 sq.m of lawns. Spinning of head - does not compute.

Dod sets the trap-door in the bottom of the spreader to number 30, and can see right away that the thing is going to empty itself far too quickly. Thus he proposes to guess a reduced setting, see how thickly the sand goes on, and go over it again if it isn't enough. That, we agreed, is easier than trying to scoop the stuff back up if we run out. Something bothers me about this. Apart from the collapse of my ability with fractions (which is only one of a number of such concerns...), I have this mental image of a groundsman, half a mile from the nearest electricity, at the end of the cricket field somewhere, probably working in the rain, desperately trying to get a signal on his mobile phone to access the flaming website.

The triumph of gratuitous science.

What are we doing here? The lawn sand manufacturer has instructed us where to get details of the spreader settings (which may or may not be correct), but it isn't exactly handy, is it? Which banana thought this was good customer service? I suspect there will be a big increase in the number of mental health issues among gardeners and groundsmen in the near future.

*******************  

Hooptedoodle #310a - Further Adventures of Batty...

[Spoiler: Batty has a short rest on top of a stone wall, then climbs up a tree and flies off home into the woods. If this goes viral, I'm going to be kicking myself for not putting adverts in the blog.]

Hooptedoodle #310 - (Unintentional) Wildlife Rescue

I haven't tried directly uploading video to Blogger before, so this may not work, which means you'll never get to read this...

There's been some discussion of accidents involving wildlife recently, here and on Pierre le Poilu's fine blog page. Here's more of the same, but if I can get the videos to upload this should be a little more like daytime TV.

Episode 1 - The Baby Swallow

At the moment we are still troubled with nesting swallows in our woodshed, despite the ingenious introduction of a fake owl to scare them away. To put this into context, we actually like the swallows, but they make a dreadful mess of the place. If we can stop them getting in next year that will be a positive step. Mind you, we said that at the end of last Summer, too.

Anyway, this is a tale of a swallow that isn't one of ours - the Contesse was at Tescos the other day and found a baby swallow which had fallen off their roof. It seemed unharmed, if a little groggy, but it was right in the pedestrian footway, so she moved it to a safe place where its relatives could find it and take it home (or whatever). We just know this story will have a happy ending - it had better, the poor little thing is due to fly away to Africa in a few weeks. I'm sure it will be all right.

And - if it works - here's a short video of the little chap being rescued...

Episode 2 - The Bat

The business with the swallow was a few days ago. Today's excitement came when my wife was getting ready for her exercise session. Unwisely, a pipistrelle bat had decided to take a nap in her sports towel. Happily, both parties survived their chance meeting, and my wife had the advantage of having her pulse-rate nicely revved up before she started her static-bike workout. I took the trespasser outside into the garden. He seemed well enough, and we put him in a protected spot under the hedge to get his bearings.

We'll assume that is another happy ending. That's enough for this week, thank you.

Hooptedoodle #304 - The Haar

View from the upstairs bathroom window - somewhere out there, there should be a
distant view of Dunbar, and the Lammermuir Hills. But not today. This is a day for
staying indoors, and listening to the guy on the radio complaining about how
hot he is in London.

What you might call a characteristic regional phenomenon here is the haar (otherwise known as a sea fret) which blows in off the North Sea during warm weather. As an incomer, I always assumed that haar was probably a Viking word - a number of our local words - especially weather-related ones, have a pleasingly rough, Nordic twang, but it turns out that the origins of this one are almost certainly Dutch - there are similar, ancient words in use in Friesland and the Netherlands which simply describe cold, foggy weather.

Whatever the etymology, the haar is the reason why for the last couple of days, while most of the rest of the country is enjoying a minor heatwave, we have our central heating switched back on and the view out of the window stretches about as far as the trees on the far side of the nearest field.

One of my older sons visited North Berwick on Sunday, and he reassured me that Edinburgh was also cold and misty that morning, but yesterday, when my wife returned from a shopping trip, she arrived at the end of our farm road in bright sunshine, and could see our very own haar sitting like a pancake on top of our woods, so it is probably OK to take it just a little personally. Microclimate.

My first memorable experience of such weather came when I first moved here, in 2000, and my parents came to visit - all the way from (warm, West Coast) Liverpool, during a remarkably fine, warm spell in October. One late afternoon we were sitting on the terrace, with glasses of chilled white wine and straw hats deployed, when suddenly the mist began pouring down from over the trees at the bottom of the garden, and it became gloomy and bitterly cold while you watched. Show over - remarkable. [As a footnote, I have to say that my parents were not put off, and they duly upped sticks and came to live in this area the following year.]

[Drat.]

The haar, as I'm sure you are aware if you live on the East Coast, anywhere from Norfolk to John o' Groats (or could care less, if you don't), is the result of warm air passing over the cold sea - the water vapour condenses into thick mist, and the sea breezes waft it back in over the coastal land - the fog obliterates the sunshine, the temperature drops, and we start wondering about the heating. It's always been like this here.

We have had a good number of bright days, too, of course. Here is a swallow resting on
our electricity cable, gathering his strength for nest-building in the woodshed...

And our beloved white lilac has had its brief few days of glory. We really do love the
show it produces, and each year, as the blossoms start to turn brown, I ponder the fact
that it will be another year before we see it again. That's a thought that becomes more
profound each time, I guess. 

The Contesse continues to produce some terrific wildlife photos - here's a very
scruffy robin at his ablutions.

We've also had some remarkable exhibitions of raw aggression recently from those icons of peace, the Collared Doves. They have been beating up the wood pigeons on a regular basis. They have now been seen chasing magpies out of our garden - very scary - they really are surprisingly vindictive little beggars. We're still trying to get a photo of that - maybe even a little video, but no luck yet.

Hooptedoodle #302 - Nice Weather for Pigeons

Two consecutive wildlife Hooptedoodles is usually a sure sign that not much is going on in Hobbyland.

That's not entirely true, in fact - yesterday morning I spent a couple of hours re-sorting the lead piles into things that need to get done (in properly labelled boxes) and things that maybe need to be put at the back of the cupboard now (or got rid of, in some cases). I also did a little more work on some converted Bavarians which (according to the Grand Plan) are going away to be cloned, to provide some necessary cavalry command presence for the forthcoming contingent of Bavarois.

Most of my afternoon yesterday was spent out in the sunshine, mowing the lawns - I even got to run the mower over the grass verge, outside in the lane, which was a bit of a mess after our crocuses had died back. There was a bit of a deadline - the forecast for today (accurately, as it turns out) was very wet. The gardener is due to come on Tuesday, but he is likely to be a bit inhibited by the fact that Tuesday morning is also the date for the guys to come and flush out our septic tank. Just routine, you understand, and the least said about that the better, but I suspect that not much mowing will be possible.

Anyway, comes the morning, and here is the rain - a lot of it. Looking at the bird bath, I estimate we had about ¾ of an inch overnight. Around breakfast time, the Contesse took a picture of a line of wood pigeons enjoying a spa on the kitchen roof.

Local wood pigeons (columba palumbus) enjoying the rain - a chance to wash out
the dust and the biddies.

They're all right, pigeons. We're not really very interested in them, since they lack the glamour of some of the more spectacular garden birds, and they do cause a bit of damage to the fruit trees, but there are so many of them that they are pretty much a dominant presence here. They are big, lumbering fellows, and they seem to fall naturally into the role of clowns. They have an endearingly stupid routine when eating chunks of stale bread - since they cannot bite or chew, a pigeon will pick up a large piece, and toss it up in the air. This successfully detaches a mouthful, but the remainder of the piece of bread will normally land behind the thrower. The pigeon will take a quick glance to either side, shrug its shoulders in a resigned sort of way (and if you've never seen a fat bird without shoulders shrugging, keep your eyes open for this) and plod off in search of another piece.

Their love-making is also noted for its noise and clumsiness - the aluminium roof on the garage is a deafening place to cohabit, and they regularly fall out of trees while coupled. And yet they are obviously very successful - if you close your eyes, the endless mumbling of pigeons is the main sound here. It's soothing, but sometimes I wish they would learn a new tune. [I am interested to note that some recordings of birdsong I made here in 2001 clearly demonstrate that the proportion of pigeon in the vocal line up was much less in those days. Demographics, man.]

Very recently, we've seen a few odd feral pigeons here, of the type you get in towns - very rarely see them. They didn't cause any fuss, but they obviously didn't like it much - went back home again pretty quickly. They obviously couldn't handle our sunflower hearts and the fresh peanuts, and went back to eating cigarette ends and chewing gum, and dodging the trams.

Hooptedoodle #301 - Lack of Planning Permission

Suddenly the weather is good - there's evidence of Nature trying to make up for lost time. Everything Springlike is happening at once. The swallows definitely appear to be nesting in our woodshed - no nest yet, but a lot of activity - I don't suppose we could get our money back for the fake owl, but it has not been a success. No matter.

There is much displaying and fighting going on among the garden birds; surprisingly, it is those supposed symbols of peace, the doves, who are the most aggressive of the lot at present - they have been beating up the wood pigeons for some weeks, though they must be outweighed about 2:1 per individual. The deer have scoffed most of the tulips, and the pigeons have eaten most of the blossom and fruit-buds off the plum tree, so everything is as usual.

Paper sculpture - a bad place to build. Delicate though - you can just see the builder's
leg, and the start of the hexagonal cells. I would guess this is manufactured from the
chewed remains of an old railway sleeper we use in the garden as a ramp.

Yesterday we spotted the beginnings of a wasps' nest right in the middle of the window over our front door. We really don't want a nest nearby, and especially not there - it is, let's face it, a dumb place to build one. So we withdrew planning permission and removed it with a broom. It is possible that a little of our irritation over the swallows business found its way into the wasps' nest removal, but no hard feelings.

I don't like wasps. I know the excellent cleaning-up job they do, but their main function still seems to be to spoil picnics and frighten people - me, in particular. Their nests are revolting, yet fascinating in an Alien-like way. How do they do that?

Once removed and brought indoors, it is quite inoffensive - about an inch
diameter, maybe a little more. Seen from the outside...

...and inside

This very small effort was not so intimidating, so the Contesse took some pictures. I am intrigued that this short-lived nest is exactly - to the millimetre - on the site of a previous nest from about 15 years ago - we've never had one anywhere near that spot in the meantime. Why there? There was no trace of the previous one, it's not a great site by any criteria. Why would they build there? Is there some nestbuilders' checklist the wasps go through when picking a site? Does some ley line or something pass through our front door? Does this simply give a quick insight into how few wasps are really this stupid? - most of the successful nests (and we've had some belters) have been in the roof cavity, or in a burrow under the stone dyke. That makes more sense.

Well, sorry wozzers, you can start again. We may live to regret this, but we can't have a wasps' nest over the front door, can we?

Hooptedoodle #297 - Deception in Warfare

Spring is a little delayed this year, but things are starting up in earnest - our crocuses (croci?) are making a brave show in the grass verge outside in the lane, and Dod the Gardener has just arrived with an enormous petrol-driven machine he's rented to scarify the lawns. This is getting serious, and may be expensive [scarified, Matron? - I was bloody terrified].

One thing we'd like to avoid this Summer is a repeat of the Swallows Episode from last year. Last Summer, after 17 years when they could have done the same thing (but declined), swallows eventually built a nest in our woodshed and - though I wish the little chaps no harm - they were a nuisance. They made a terrible mess. When starting their nest-building project, they appear to have thrown mud and crap all over the place, and the eventual nest was where it happened to stick best. Also, once the laying and brooding bit started, it was a problem to avoid disturbing them, and we had to clear the woodshed and put plastic sheeting down to limit the medieval squalor.

This is not so handy; we keep garden furniture in there, and some tools, and all the bins and tubs for the bird feed (which are, as they say, legion); we had to shift all that lot into the garage, so it didn't get pebbledashed - and then there was the small matter of having a load of firewood delivered during the Summer, so it could dry nicely for the year-end, and - another thing - last year the stupid beggars put their nest on top of an electric light, so we had to use a flashlight to avoid frying their eggs.

Once they had gone we disposed of the nest (which was a wreck anyway) and cleaned up thoroughly. Actually I'm not sure whether it's legal to get rid of the old nest - well, it's gone. This year we'll try to avoid a repeat. Rhetorical questions: do a pair of swallows come back to the same nest? - is there, in fact, such a thing as a pair of swallows to come back to the same nest? - could another pair somehow find (or hear about) last year's nest?.....

Whatever, we'll try to discourage them gently. We have a hot tip that one way to keep swallows away is to equip your shed with [wait for it]...

...a FAKE OWL.

Good, eh?

You buy a fake owl, and put it near the potential nesting site, and the swallows will express their disappointment, fleetingly (which is how they do everything, of course), and will then go and happily build a lovely nest somewhere else, where they can make as much mess as they want. You may well have a fake owl in your garden already, but here are some examples of what you can get.

Owlternative No.1 - this one's head turns in the wind - how awesome is that?

No.2 - this is a long-eared owl, and the swallows may knock on our door to
explain that these don't live around here

No.3 - very scary - this one is supposed to flutter on the top of a pole

So we are going to order one - at the very least we should get a good laugh if it doesn't work. It could make an interesting conversation piece if we have any soirees in the woodshed. The only slightly chilly note is that the Contesse found a reference to some unfortunate lady (in Devon, apparently - you probably like a bit of authentic detail in your stories?) who invested in a Fake Owl for exactly this purpose, and the swallows built their nest on top of the thing. Yes, I know - the owl doesn't look very realistic, does it? - and the swallows may not have realised they were supposed to be scared away. Also, I think it may have been reported in the Mail, so the story may be tripe.

People will always try to discredit a good idea
- just a minute - isn't that No.2...?

Interesting, though.

Real Life has been getting a bit much of late. We could certainly cope with swallows as well, but we'd rather they didn't bother.

Max Foy visits the lighthouse

Hooptedoodle #296 - Suddenly Things Went Quiet

The weather has eased a lot over the last week, but today it is blustery, from the East, and the temperature is dropping again. The feeders are very busy - today's crowds included lots of Great Tits, Greenfinches, a Siskin, and then...

Bad Baddie in the garden - Accipiter nisus - female Sparrow Hawk (hungry; disgruntled)

We are always nervously aware of these fellows - you don't normally see them clearly, but sometimes out of the corner of your eye you see a flash of something, and a puff of feathers, and one of the smaller birds has gone. There is a slight feeling of setting up a buffet for the Sparrow Hawk when we restock the feeders, but we don't see much of them and that's Nature, I guess.

This is a rare view. The Contesse spotted this female sitting in our apple tree, and it was still there when she got back with her camera. We suspect that it's sulking, mentally reviewing what went wrong with that last attack.

You win some, and then you lose some.


***** Late Edit (Friday night, 16th March) *****

M. Le Poilu sent me this fine picture of Omar, his former local Sparrow Hawk kingpin - shows up well how much more colourful the males are (Merci, M. Le P)

And my wife passed me this rather horrifying confrontation between a Sparrow Hawk and a Starling, which is from the very fine work of Terry Stevenson, a British wildlife photographer with a large and deserved following. Sorry if this spoils your enjoyment of your supper...

Hooptedoodle #295 - A Walk with the Beast from the East

It's been snowing here now for three days. By other people's standards, considering the severity of the current storm, our conditions are not bad at all, but we rarely get any snow here, which is probably an indication of what it must be like for the more exposed bits of the East coast.

The Contesse took her camera out for a walk on the farm this afternoon - she had some trouble holding the thing steady in the freezing wind, but here are a couple of her pictures, to prove there is still life here.

Cock chaffinch hanging on for grim death in the easterly gale, he has his eyes
fixed on our feeders

Down on the beach things are a bit rough; when we get strong easterly winds,
combined with the Spring tides, it is not unknown for the waves to wreck the
harbour of our nearest village

He's hiding, but still recognisable - in the hedges near the Old Adam field, the
Contesse spotted a male Yellowhammer [emberiza citrinella] - not so rare in these
parts, and they are here all year round, but we've never seen one! - not in all the
years we've been here. So, he's not in our garden, but he's still a bit of a star guest.

Hooptedoodle #281 - Rats with Bushy Tails

sciurus carolinensis - introduced into the UK from North America in 19thC
 - doing very nicely, thank you

Visitor to our garden this morning - nothing particularly exotic, but a nice enough fellow.

I'm not saying that Neil the Ghillie used to shoot squirrels, mind you, but it is a fact that we never saw any here until he retired in June.

Are squirrels pests (I mean to farmers)? Maybe we'll find out over the winter.

Still haven't decided what we are going to do about our bird feeders this year. There's an experimental one attached to the kitchen window at the moment - sunflower hearts - no visitors yet; they must have given up on us. If we see any Magpies around the feeder it will be withdrawn immediately. Having said which, we've had Jackdaws for many years, and they don't bother with the feeders.

We'll wait and see.

Hooptedoodle #280 - One for Sorrow

Smart chap, but unwelcome - pica pica

Neil, the ghillie here on the farm, retired in June, and has moved to live in the town, at Dunbar. The ghillie is the man who keeps the wildlife under control, and on this farm a proportion of his work was also to look after the large numbers of pheasants, which are introduced in yearly batches to ensure that there is plenty of shooting around Christmas time. (Personally I do not care for the big shooting parties, so we try to arrange to go out somewhere else for the day when one is organised.)

A lovely man, Neil, generous and helpful but surprisingly shy - I shall miss him. In recent years there hasn't really been so much to do on the farm, so he has also been working part time as a driver for the local bus company.

Well, he's gone, and we are becoming aware that things are changing as a result. We never really saw or heard much going on - it was all quiet and behind the scenes - but we now have sightings of foxes, stoats, rats, and a few other things which Neil, with his traps and his shotgun, used to take care of. Rats and stoats are not good news - if you think that a stoat would be a delightful creature to have as a neighbour on a farm then you have never seen the havoc they can inflict on a chicken coop. Some years ago Neil's wife lost her complete stock of Christmas turkeys to stoats, which tunnelled into a closed compound and killed the lot - didn't eat them, just killed them, apparently for recreation.

Though related to the weasel, an animal which is weasily recognisable, the
stoat is stoatally different, as you can see

One further intruder we have now is the chap right at the top of this post - pica pica - the Common Magpie. Regarded as one of the most intelligent creatures around, they are also very vigorous predators.

One has to admire any animal which is so handsome and so successful, but we now have daily visits from a number of them, we've seen 3 at the same time in our garden, and we know that if they become permanent residents in our woodland then they will have a dreadful effect on our beloved garden birds. These things eat eggs and baby birds like popcorn.

OK - it's Nature - that's what magpies do. One immediate outcome is that it seems unlikely that we will be able to make much use of our garden bird feeders this winter, and that is a huge loss to us if it comes about. Our feeders are all well above the ground, and the microsystem we have has worked well - perch feeders make a bit of a mess, and the ground feeders clean up after them. That may not work any more - the presence of seeds and nuts in the garden will certainly encourage both the rats and the magpies. Much pondering required.

The magpie (in common with other of his relatives in the crow family) features extensively in folklore and superstition, usually as a bringer of ill-fortune. It may be because the carrion birds ate the bodies of hanged criminals on the gibbet; there are a number of interesting theories on this. I had a friend who always said "good morning, Mr Magpie" when he saw one - he was brought up with the tradition that it was bad luck if you failed to do so - he didn't necessarily believe, you understand, but he was taking no chances...

One for sorrow,

Two for mirth.

Three for a funeral,

Four for birth.

Five for heaven,

Six for hell,
Seven for the devil, his own self


***** Late Edit *****

Also loosely connected with change and sorrow, but this item not down to Neil, I think. Past visitors to Chateau Foy may well recognise this place - this is the only Indian (Bengali) restaurant in our village, and we are regular, devoted customers. Sadly, the owner, Mohammad, has decided to sell up for family reasons, and they will be closing down tomorrow - so there's something else we are going to miss. If we want an Indian meal in future, we'll have to go to Dunbar or Aberlady, which is not nearly so handy. The premises are to be redeveloped as a bistro wine-bar - I'm sure it will be very nice, but there are already 5 similar businesses in the village - did we really need another?

Progress, you see. Next, it really wouldn't surprise me if someone opened yet another gift shop in the village; anything is possible with entrepreneurial people who can think outside the box.

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

Hooptedoodle #268 - Juveniles in the Woodshed

If you can see them then they can see you - hirundo rustica, as ever was

Just to prove that Nature gets the job done, I have to report that our visiting swallows - clumsy builders though they might be - appear to have produced some chicks. Noisy little beggars, and not exactly beautiful in absolute terms, but possessing a certain rough charm.

Many thanks to the Contesse for the photo - a difficult commission - best we have to date.

Yes, our swallows have laid their eggs on top of an electric lamp. Yes, that is dumb. That's nothing, in about 12 or 13 weeks they have to fly to South Africa. Doesn't bear thinking about.

More Transpontine Travels

I can only assume that Count Goya was granted bail - whatever, after a few weeks delay, the Battle of Raab is back on, for tomorrow, so I've been loading the invasion barge for another trip over the water to Tayside. Early start tomorrow - another grand day out. You'll hear more of this.

Foy's Roadshow ready to roll - you will observe the IKEA playmat on the floor,
which is a prized accessory, and much envied by the lads in the local garage

The French army is in the big boxes, with vast quantities of bubblewrap. Bungee
cords are necessary, of course - you can see that my 5 foot wide table sections
just fit, which is something to think about if I harbour ideas of upgrading to a
six-foot-two wide replacement. The van is a French Renault, appropriately

Topic 2 - the Doves of War, a possible suicide pact, and other oddities

Apart from our first-time-ever subjection to the delights of having nesting swallows on the premises, we have observed some odd things going on in the garden. First - and in passing - might I mention that our Collared Doves, those icons of peace and gentleness, have suddenly become violently aggressive. In particular, they seem to have taken a strong dislike to the neighbourhood Wood Pigeons, who are bigger, but slower and (apparently) less intelligent. The pigeons here live in constant fear now - they have to keep an eye open for squadrons of warlike doves, who can swoop in at any time and give them a mighty beating up.

Another strange recent development appears to be a large upturn in the incidence of flying accidents among the birdlife. After some thousands of years of successfully flying around obstacles, our local feathered friends seem to have forgotten something or other. We had a sad moment some weeks ago when, on a rather blustery afternoon, one of our resident baby sparrows collided with the sitting room window, and died very quickly, despite the attempts of my wife to look after it. This was particularly ironic, since the poor little chap had managed to survive its parents choice of a nesting site (inside the junction box for the high-voltage overhead cables), which is impressive enough. I guess Nature claims a few - one might point to lack of flying experience as a contributory cause - presumably this is why fledglings pay through the nose for insurance?

We have had a few more collisions with buildings since, none of them fatal, but yesterday we had a real disaster - a fully-grown hen pheasant managed to fly full-tilt into our French window; the window was undamaged, but the pheasant, alas, is no more.

Sorry about this - the victim was neither young nor inexperienced - just careless -
it must have been about 20 feet off course if it intended to miss the house. The
paving stones are 55cm across, so you can see this is a large, heavy object to have
impact your window. If you found this picture upsetting, please ring
800-DEAD-PHEAS for counselling support

It was a hell of a bang - I was busy packing French soldiers into magnetised box files (as one does), when I heard the most alarming noise - I really thought that a gutter had fallen from the roof or something - the whole house shook. It became obvious what had happened - very sad. What's going on here? - has our house become less visible? - are the birds not paying attention? - is it just a blip? - is it global warming? - you don't suppose it's our new radio-transmitted broadband service, surely?

I'm keeping an eye on things. I don't suppose there's a connection, but a magic fairy ring has also appeared on the back lawn - you can clearly see where the little people crept in from the wood, behind the wall, and danced around. You do believe in fairies, I hope?

Hooptedoodle #262 - Owls of Derision - plus one more from the Small World Dept

Topic 1: Lately we've been puzzled to hear owls hooting during the day in the wood behind our house - even experienced countrymen like Dod the Gardener are puzzled by such behaviour. Well, we've now seen one in the garden - a couple of visits. The Contesse is still working to get a better photo - this is what she's managed to date.

Online experts suggest that it is a Little Owl, though we had thought it might be a Short-Eared Owl, more renowned for their daylight hunting. In the upper picture, you will notice that the blackbird sitting close by does not appear to feel at all threatened.

Topic 2: I only relate this story because it involves a couple of surprising coincidences - the subject matter may be of little interest, so I shall deal with it as quickly as might be decent.

My view on coincidences is boringly downbeat - they interest me, but I believe that the proportion of truly unlikely events in our lives is about as small as you would expect; when something unusual happens, however, we remember it clearly, so that our perception is distorted - we think remarkable things happen more often than they do. Get to the story, Foy...

Well, I've recently been trying to sort out my mp3 collection of the old BBC radio Goon Shows from the 1950s - many of the official published compilations of these shows were edited to drop the musical interludes, but most of mine are intact - sometimes a bit frayed, admittedly, but all the shows are complete. The Goon Shows had music of a good standard - apart from Wally Stott and the BBC's own orchestra, they also featured Ray Ellington's Quartet, and then there was Max Geldray, the virtuoso jazz harmonica player. All a bit dated now, maybe, but good stuff - and, anyway, nothing could be more dated than the Goons, dear boy.

Ray Ellington had a hot little band - on hearing them again, I was interested to note that his electric guitarist was exceptionally good - in fact he sounded most un-British, to be unkind about it. A little research revealed that he was Lauderic Caton, a Trinidadian, one of the leading pioneers of electric guitar on the English jazz scene in the years after WW2. He was friendly with, and a major influence on, a couple of the other lads of note of the day - especially Dave Goldberg and Pete Chilver. He was also noted for being a skilled luthier, and produced good-quality converted electric guitars in the days when it was impossible to obtain modern American instruments in the UK.

Pete Chilver circa 1948 - with electric guitar produced by Lauderic Caton

Goldberg I knew of - a Liverpudlian - but Chilver was a new name, so I read on. He shared a flat in London with Goldberg for a while, was very highly regarded - even by visiting American players - and played with (amongst others) the Ted Heath band and, for a while, Ray Ellington. Then, it seems, he married the sister of the girl singer in Heath's band (are you taking careful notes here? - there will be a test at the end), moved to North Berwick (which is where I live!) in 1950, retired from playing professionally, and thereafter managed his wife's family's hotel, the Westerdunes (now long gone). He also opened the West End Jazz Club, in Shandwick Place, Edinburgh - a place which I vaguely remember, though it was no longer a jazz club by the time I went there. Pete died in 2008, in Edinburgh.

Remarkable - so here's an important English jazz guitarist from the 1940s that I had never heard of, and he even became a prominent resident in my own neck of the woods! Only thing to do was email my old chum and former associate Hamish, for many years a hero and stalwart of the Scottish jazz scene, who has now also retired to the North Berwick area. Sorry to bother him, but did he know anything about Pete Chilver? - and I included some background details.

Hamish mailed back to say yes, he did know Pete a little - latterly Pete and his wife Norma retired and moved to Barnton Avenue, in Edinburgh. Hamish had been to his house there.

It seems that the handyman who now helps Hamish's wife around the house and garden used to work for Mrs Chilver - who is now in a care home, I understand - and only recently he had to dump a load of old acetate 78rpm masters of recordings from Pete's professional days [ah - drat]. Furthermore, the very night before he replied to my mail, Hamish had been a dinner guest at Westerdunes House - for many years converted into apartments, but now restored to its original state. Prior to this he had never heard of the place, never been there, and until my note was unaware of the connection with Chilver.

Westerdunes House

Now that is a bit of a long shot, I think. It looks a nice place - must have been a swanky hotel - healthier than the London clubs - a smart move by Old Pete? In passing, his friend Goldberg died of a drug overdose in the 1960s, when he was only 43. The Devil's music, your Honour.

Hooptedoodle #258 - Woody's Breakfast

Thursday, 4th May 2017 - beautiful morning in South East Scotland - a young male Greater Spotted Woodpecker (dendrocopos major), immaculate in his new Spring outfit, enjoying his breakfast at 6am. I realise that I put lots of pictures like this on here, but I thought the Contesse caught this little chap rather nicely.

Woody knows nothing about UK council elections, or Brexit, or Trump - he just knows he likes peanuts.

Good morning, Woody!

Hooptedoodle #256 - Demography at the Kitchen Window

Yet another Hooptedoodle post is a sure sign that not much is happening here on the hobby front - I am quietly doing some lightweight sessions of painting of Spanish grenadiers, but there won't be much to see of them for a little while.

As anyone who has read this blog before will realise, we are very enthusiastic about the garden birds here at Chateau Foy - since we live on the edge of a decent-sized wood, our bird feeders are very popular at this time of year - especially the sunflower hearts - they are definitely on trend - and there is always something to look at.

Among so many visitors, we are bound to get some oddities, and over the 17 years or so we've lived here we have, I think, seen three examples of albinism. There was once a completely white sparrow, and then there was a male chaffinch with a large white patch on his upper body - they both seemed quite healthy, and were around for a complete season without seeming to get picked on by the other birds.

Now we have this fellow - never seen one like this before. This, clearly, is a common-all-garden European Jackdaw, corvus monedula to our Roman chums, but he is supposed to be all black - his plumage is definitely non-regulation. Rather distinguished looking, maybe?

I am interested that we have seen so few albino specimens - I have no idea how many birds we see in a season - there are many millions of visits over the years, but many of these will be regular returners - at any moment on a sunny day we can see maybe 30 or 40 bluetits, maybe slightly fewer goldfinches, maybe the same again of chaffinches, and so on and so on, all in the garden at the same time, which is the sort of guide to numbers that the RSPB are interested in. How many of these were here this morning, yesterday, last year is unknown, though interesting. An albino is recognisable - you know there's only one of him - so it is hard to get a true impression. Whatever the lack of precision, albinos are obviously rare.

Which begs the further question - are they rare because there are very few hatched, or because they may be weak individuals who do not survive for long? No idea, obviously. The examples we have seen on our feeders seem vigorous enough, but then they would, wouldn't they?

Anyway - this is our current albino jackdaw - say hello. Seems a nice enough chap. It is tempting to give him a nickname of some sort, but it occurs to me that if this nickname made any reference to the colour of his plumage I might be in trouble.

So I shall call him Herbert. Make something of that, if you will.

Hooptedoodle #244 - Seasonal Exercise in Self-Indulgence

A week or so ago I was stopped in my tracks by a painting in one of the local high street galleries - I liked it so much that I bought it as a Christmas gift for my wife.

As I mention here frequently (ad nauseam?), the Contesse and I are both very keen on our local wildlife - she in particular is a very skilled photographer - and I knew she would love this picture. It is an original, acrylic on natural linen, by the Scottish artist, Helen Welsh. Helen is based in Perthshire, a little north of here; she worked for many years, very successfully, as an illustrator for the Dundee-based publisher, DC Thomson (no, she didn't draw the pictures in the Beano), and has now retired to concentrate on her original passion, painting Scottish wildlife.

Anyway, by any standards a piece of original art is a bit of an extravagance here at Chateau Foy, but we are very pleased with it, and I thought some of you skilled wielders of acrylics out there might appreciate it also.

Here, then, is A Hare in Winter, by Helen Welsh. Let it serve as a simple, locally-themed greeting card to all readers of the old Aspic blog - I wish everyone a happy, peaceful, comfortable Christmas, and may next year be a little less crazy than 2016 turned out. All the best!