August

1975

A day fishing by the river in summer can be interesting and relaxing. A sedge warbler was calling and feeding by the riverside and it was interesting to watch it land on a long reed. The weight of the bird would sway the six foot stem from the vertical to near the horizontal position. The sedge warbler has a nearly white breast, with brown back, a more prominent eye stripe than the reed warbler and it is not secretive as is the grasshopper warbler.
Usually the long -tailed tits go through the garden in a flock or string, flying from tree to tree and calling to each other. The other day a solitary young bird was enjoying itself feeding among the one or two fir trees we have bordering the lawn.
With the aid of binoculars this time, one could see that this long-tailed tit was a delightful creature winding its way skilfully in and out of the branches picking up insects. Its tail seemed ridiculously long for its size, but the black, white and pink or cream ‘ball of fluff’ moved so gracefully even when upside down. Little sightings like these certainly add to the pleasure and enjoyment of summer by the riverside or in the garden.

Our son was putting on the green in front of our house and he took a swipe at what he thought was a passing butterfly. He struck the creature which turned out to be a rare, beautiful, garden tiger moth. Most moths fly by night, but this brilliant creature might be termed a day moth. Butterflies have their antennae thickened at the ends like drum sticks. Most moths have ordinary straight antennae.
When a butterfly is at rest, it normally folds its wings up vertically on top of its back, but the moth generally has its wings down flat in the horizontal position. The garden tiger is a large moth about four inches across with its wings extended. Its outer pair of wings are cream with large brown splotches and the under wings are orange with dark spots. Its body is orange with tiger stripes of very dark blue across the back and thereby, presumably, it gets its name. The head is thick and dark.

I have the dead moth in my hand as I write and it is really a beautiful insect. It laid some eggs in the box in which I deposited it before it expired. Someone has written that moth and butterfly eggs are among “the most exquisite gems of beauty; lustrous as pearls, daintier than hand wrought jewels”. I cannot appreciate the foregoing when I am on my near daily inspection, destroying the cabbage whites’ eggs on the cabbages and cauliflowers, but I see the point.
Some people will not have the buddleia or butterfly plant in their garden because they attract butterflies. Some buddleias are very attractive and decorative. Today our one, ile de France or deep purple, was visited by, as far as we know, its first red admiral butterfly of the season and this is the reason we planted it so that we could enjoy seeing a variety of different insects at it. The red admiral is a big fellow and very brilliantly coloured.
So if you want to attract butterflies, moths, bees, flies, etc., plant a buddleia.

Readers, I hope, will have gathered that I am no sentimentalist. A young herring gull we came across this week with a broken wing just had to be destroyed. Moles were digging in our garden so in goes the mole trap and Mr. Mole digs no longer. I believe one has got to draw the line somewhere and have a sensible outlook about when to let go and when to say, “Stop, enough!” to rabbit, mole or what have you. The shotgun barked. The rabbit ate no more of our carrots. The cat loves rabbit.

1976

There are shoals of mackerel in Banff Bay at the moment and good catches are being made. Our household had soused mackerel, done in vinegar and they were very tasty. The mackerel is said to be one of the fastest fish in the sea and it feeds on herring and is also a bit of a scavenger. It is one of the thrills of a young boy’s lifetime when a mackerel hits his line. To go from getting geekies or cuddies, as we called them in the west, to catching mackerel, is really something. One eventually graduated from mackerel to conger eels, but that is another story.
Many strange and unusual fish are caught in nets from time to time and salmon fisherman, Mr. John Sellar, Macduff, was telling me that the other day he caught an unusual 5 lb. sea trout or salmon. At first it was thought to be a Pacific salmon, but the research centre at Torry in Aberdeen confirmed that it was a bull-head, an escaped rainbow trout. Its scales were smaller than our sea trout, and it had a sort of striped tail. Also in Banff Bay about half a mile from the shore great skuas were The skua is a dark, fast-flying, gull-like bird. It pursues other seabirds and makes them disgorge their food. It will even be as persistent as to make the gannet, a much larger bird, give up its catch.

Sitting in Turriff High Street on the morning after Turriff Show we were admiring the hundreds of swifts that were cavorting around, sometimes low over the street, sometimes high up in the sky, some flying slowly and sometimes flashing across the street at an incredible speed, almost too quick for the eye to follow. They are wonderful flyers. Most of the birds were feeding loosely; but one group of about eight birds were playing ‘follow my leader’ round the clock tower and over the rooftops. Most of the young will be on the wing now and all will be gone by about the 20th of the month.

There were birdies and birdies to be seen and heard at the second day of the Open Golf Championship at Carnoustie. Out on the Firth of Tay we could hear the unmistakable calls of terns as well as the muffled roar of the hovercraft making its ways across from St. Andrews. Over the course itself, skylarks were singing in the rain much to the chagrin of one disgruntled spectator we encountered. We saw first Gary Player and then Arnold Palmer hole birdie putts on the first green and receive rapturous applause from the assembled crowds. Television viewing is fine, but the atmosphere experienced by being at the Open, seeing the greats making golfing history, takes a lot of beating. In the whins to the left of the 15th fairway we saw a pair of whinchats, quite unconcerned by the additional spectators. The male whinchat is quite colourful with a dark head, orange breast and white eye-stripe and on his wing. As we were leaving the course we saw a small flock of quick-flying grey plovers, the plovers we see in large flocks over coastal Buchan during the winter.

On the lawn at home we have seen a female linnet picking at seeds and today the male appeared in all his finery. He is a handsome fellow, almost a red bird with his red head, breast and to a lesser extent, wings. He is completely different from any of the other birds that are around the garden at this time.

1977

There are many jobs to be done in our menage on a Saturday morning, so on this mild, warm, windless one, I got what I thought was a pretty good number, picking blackcurrants really a second picking off the bushes. I had a transistor balanced on a cardboard box nearby and was listening to the Trent Bridge Cricket Test Match with Boycott and Knott excitedly getting their centuries, so there was nothing coming over me. The blackbirds were a bit annoyed at not getting a free hand at the fast ripening raspberries and the cat, who had entered through a hole in the strawberry net, was having a lovely sleep, curled up on the straw.

The Deveron must be one of the most unsung rivers in Scotland, Nevertheless, it has many fine views, and the one with which we are most familiar at this early autumn time is that from the high hill, Mountblairy, looking over to Dunlugas and up the ridge to Brackens. With the different varieties of barley adjacent to the greens of second cut silage or haylage and turnips and grass, the whole patchwork effect is very striking. It is a good thing, we think, to live in such a rich productive part of our country.

About a week ago now at Banff we saw some interesting waders making landfall over the golf course at Banff.Their calls were unusual and we took them to be whimbrels or godwits. From flying south at height, they wheeled north and west as if to alight along at Banff links. Now, as in the days of Thomas Edward, the Banff naturalist, the links is a good area at which to see usual and unusual waders.

Seen over Macduff on August 25 a solitary swift. Is this remarkable? As far as we know the majority of swifts follow a regular pattern, arriving in the first half of May, raising their brood in three short months and leaving regularly about August 18 or 19. One evening they are all there chasing about the rooftops uttering their typical screams or whistles, and the next day they are all gone. Swallows and martins generally leave in September and we have seen pairs of swallows feeding in the third week of October. Redshanks sometimes return to their winter quarters as early as late August. When newly returned and still strange to their surroundings, the redshanks adopt a tentative, bobbing stance.

We saw a flock of about a dozen small birds the other day and they proved a bit of a puzzle. They were at first glance like a flock of sparrows that one sees at this time of year when they fly up out of the ripening corn or oats. On closer inspection they were smaller than sparrows, greenfinches and buntings. Their back feathers were a rich, tawny brown colour with lighter feathers at the wing joint. They were seed eaters, feeding on dandelion seeds at the edge of the grass and when disturbed they took off uttering a chi chi sound. Having narrowed down the choice to twite or redpoll, the call was the deciding factor really and we came down in favour of our smallest finch, the redpoll.

In case caddies, wives, friends of competitors and anyone interested has time during the week of the Duff House Golf Tournament to look at feathered birdies as well as trying for golfing birdies, the Banff course can be quite rewarding in the number and variety of sightings of different species. Sometimes golf balls become difficult to find among the feathers on the last fairway, much used for roosting by herring, common and black-headed gulls. In the area around the 6th tee and 16th green one may hear the cackling of fulmars from the roof of Duff House itself. Whether they actually nest there and on St. Mary’s steeple ledge, I am not sure. At tournament times, given the right weather, swifts and martins can be seen flying high, particularly late in the day, over land and river. A hawk, a kestrel, can sometimes be seen getting its marching orders from the carrions crows who object to its presence over the course. The mock battle continues until the combatants disappear over the high trees to the left of the 12th fairway.

The stretch of river parallel to the 8th fairway is the territory of a greater pair of black-backed gulls. Here, too, one should see mallard duck. A heron is frequently to be seen on the far side of the fisherman’s pool, beside the 9th tee.

Swans and cygnets are a feature on the river, usually beside the 16th and 17th holes or close to the bank beside the 9th green. Here, on the island in the river, I have seen a pair of greenshank. Cormorants fly up and down over the river and wood pigeons frequently fly across the course.

During last week we saw a pair of reed buntings, naturally enough in a marshy reed bed. The buntings have a y-shaped tail. The female is sparrow-like in appearance, but slightly more striped and the male is easily recognised as he has a black head with a noticeable white collar. Really quite a remarkable, small, handsome bird.

The other morning I was awakened by the alarm call of a blackbird and I also heard various other bird calls including a peculiar one from a mistle thrush. On looking out of the bedroom window I saw a young blackbird caught in the strawberry net. The garden was alive with birds of all kinds flying about and calling in an agitated way. There were warblers, flycatchers, dunnocks, house sparrows, other blackbirds, blue tits, wrens, mistle thrushes, swallows and house martins, all concerned for one of their kind that was in trouble. Knowing there was a danger from our cat, I dressed quickly and went out, scissors in hand. The top strawberry net is getting old and a snip or two would not do much harm. As I approached the young bird, the cat was in attendance and had a sort of playful dive at the bird in the net. This was the reason for all the birds being agitated. Whether the cat would actually have tried to kill the netted bird while all the others were protesting round about, I do not know. I chased the cat away and took him in, gave him his breakfast and locked him in. Then I proceeded to cut the young bird out of the net. Its wings had become entangled and its struggles had only succeeded in ensnaring it more securely. It wasn’t at all grateful at being handled and held by human hands and it tried to wriggle and peck quite violently. Eventually, I got all the enmeshing strands cut away and the robber bird flew off quite happily and unharmed.

On a summer golfing visit to Spey Bay we were delighted to see wheatears and stone chats over the course. Wheatears in flight, have a patch of white on their rump which makes them easy to identify when seen. On the ground they are not so easy to identify. The bullfinch, brambling and house martin are others with a white patch on the rump. Despite its name, the stone chat perches on whins and broom and the male can be identified by its white collar below a dark, nearly black head.

1983

I have written on topics from different parts of Britain, but this is my first Italian report after a holiday in the hills of Tuscany, south of Florence and north of Rome and Siena. We were at the Melazzano holiday complex, in the hills above Greve in the heart of the Chianti Classico wine growing area of Tuscany.

The Alsatian dog at the airport at Pisa was a source of amusement. A handler had him on a leash and let him scamper over and sometimes slaver on the moving baggage as it came along the ramp. He was presumably trained to sniff for drugs or explosives. We had been led to believe that because of the heat, there would be few birds to be seen in Italy. It certainly was warm. While we were there, Florence recorded a record 105 degrees F. For all the heat, there was plenty of bird life and bird and insect sounds going on all day. Our house was situated in a vinyard on the side of a hill. Rows of vines and olive trees were on all available spaces and the rest of the hills were clad in pines and oaks with an occasional line of Italian cypress near to houses on the hillsides.

Crickets sang, scraped or chirruped all day. It is the sound that grasshoppers make, only much louder. The crickets are mostly in the trees. We could count on their orchestra starting up at about 10.30 a. m. every day. When it got dark after 10 p.m. one could see the light from fireflies quite clearly as they flew about. The first Italian bird we saw was the sparrow. Swifts were the species that were most numerous where we were staying. We saw swallows, house martins, blackbirds, goldfinches, chaffinches, (less colourful than ours) wood pigeons, turtle doves, pheasants, jays and wagtails. There were no gulls, starlings, rooks or crows. The two most unusual birds we saw for the first time were the masked shrike, (two sightings) and hoopoes (five sightings). The shrike, a distinctive black and white, is an aggressive bird which often perches on a lookout post and then swoops on its prey. The victims are sometimes impaled on thorns or spikes. This is the shrike’s larder. A number of years ago at Mountblairy, we saw a great grey shrike perched on top of a fir tree.

Hoopoes were fairly common. Their call is like that of the cuckoo. It is far carrying, but less musical than the cuckoo. Hoopoes have long curved bills and a prominent black-tipped crest. Their plumage is pinkish and the wings are rounded and strongly barred black and white.
We visited Florence and Siena and Ugolino or Florence Golf Club where it was only possible for us to play nine holes because it was so hot. After that we had to retire to the club pool where the water was actually cooled and not heated. If possible we always left our fly-drive car in the shade as otherwise the seats were too hot to sit on.

It is interesting how black and oily is the ‘reek’ from burning straw. We walked in the Deveron valley the other evening where in the middle distance combining was in progress. Nearer us, two tractors with reversible ploughs, one four furrow the other five, were busy turning over the burnt stubble. One wonders if ploughing is as right in August as it is in December or January. The land was being prepared for the sowing of oil seed rape.

On our walk we passed the big ash tree where we know that barn owls nest and there were plenty of fresh owls pellets on the ground below the tree. Wood pigeons flew across the valley. At the river we only saw sand martins, a heron and a number of mallard duck.

1984

The soft, sibilant whisperings are the sound we hear of the house martin parent birds crooning to their young just above our bedroom window. is nearly dark in the French Dordogne region where we are on holiday and there is a wonderful glow in the sky in the north-west where the sun has set. The area is famous for its paté de foie gras, a delicate and expensive paté made from goose liver. There are numerous prehistoric limestone caves round about. There are popular places where there are many tourists, but it is easy to get into the quiet, beautiful countryside on narrow but good roads. The village in which we are staying is called Payrac on the N 20 which is one of the main roads from Paris to Toulouse, in south-west France. Our two star hotel is quite well appointed and importantly, it has a swimming pool and we swam most days.

We visited Sarlat, Domme, Gourdon (where we got our Daily Telegraph), Souillac and Cahors, a large market town, as well as other small places. The countryside round about is very wooded with mainly oaks and Spanish chestnut trees. Payrac is about 1000 feet above sea level and one looks from its height down into many valleys round about. At this height it had the benefit in the evening of getting cooler and this was a very acceptable contrast to the heat in the valleys during the day. Crops are grown in the valley bottoms, on the slopes of the hills and on the hill tops. The main crops are barley, wheat and oats. Hay was being worked. Quite a lot of maize (corn on the cob), tobacco, sunflowers, oil seed- rape and vines are grown. We watched oil-seed rape being harvested on Bastille Day, the 14th of July. The country is a naturalist’s paradise with many more butterflies, moths and other insects than we have. It is obvious by the crops that the French do far less spraying, or are not allowed to do as much as our farmers. An English lady said that the French are only allowed twelve additives in their foods and there are 1000 allowed in the U. K. No wonder we have “plastic” cheese and tasteless chickens.

The large black birds of the area are le buse, pronounced, yes, like our drink, booze. Into this category would come the buzzard, and the red and black kite. At a place called le Roc, (the restaurant had the usual French hole in the ground toilet,) we watched the first red kites we had seen, soaring above the valley of the Dordogne. About the size of a buzzard, they are rufous or red on top of the wings and have a deeply forked tail. They soar effortlessly on wide, angled wings.

We flew from Aberdeen to Heathrow and then to Bordeaux where we picked up our fly-drive car and then motored east for three hours to Payrac.
During our holiday we added kingfisher, red kite, red-backed shrike, woodlark and jay to our all-time bird list.
Swifts, sparrows, swallows, house martins and goldfinches were probably most numerous in Payrac. We were admiring the blue-bodied dragonflies which hovered over a river at the bottom of a gorge, when a kingfisher flew from under the arch of the bridge on which we were standing.
It perched below us on the top of a dead branch which was sticking out of the river.
Around the village magpies were fairly common and on a number of occasions we heard green woodpeckers calling. We saw a number of jays and as they flew off it was fairly easy to distinguish the white feathers on their upper rump. A matter of a few years ago we did not have jays or green woodpeckers in the north-east of Scotland. As I write near the end of 1989 the jays and green woodpeckers which we had in the mid 80’s have gone again from our neighbourhood.

The red-backed shrike which we saw in the Dordogne was smaller than the great grey shrike, but it was a strikingly handsome looking birds just the same. Its chestnut red back and wings contrasted with the white under its chin and on each side of its tail. It was perched on top of a solitary tree and flying off to catch small moths or butterflies and then returning to its perch. The woodlark flies in a more undulating way than the skylark and because of its shorter tail, sometimes as it flies it looks almost bat-like. There were quite a few “chase” notices pinned to trees so we deduced that a bit of hunting or shooting was done in the winter. We heard one pheasant, turtles doves occasionally, but saw only one pair of wood pigeons.

During our French holiday we failed to identify two quite large birds which were flying from the top of a tall tree. They were about the size of missel thrushes. By the two or three high piping notes in the call they might have been ring ouzels, according to the bird books,
When we arrived home we found we had a pair of missel thrushes in the garden. On going out to do my usual summer garden chore of picking black-currants, I found that the missel thrushes liked them too, and for some time I had them for close company in the bush, before they flew off.
How much easier it is for them to see you when they are in the middle of a shrub, than it is for you to see them. Some people are good at picking out the wary, beady eyes of birds under such circumstances, when all that is revealed because of foliage and camouflage, (e.g. hen pheasant on a nest) is the sparkling pupil of the eye of the bird. The berries on the daphne mezereum have made a brilliant splash of crimson, but now that the raspberries are not so plentiful, the daphne berries are rapidly disappearing.

One could probably generalise and say that most people do not like bats. This would be because of their appearance and association with witches, darkness and the night. But some people do love bats and there is a publication “Bat News” with an editor, Tony Hutson, Bat Conservation Officer for the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society. All the foregoing information I gleaned from an interesting article on bats in the summer edition of “Birds”, the magazine of the R. S. P. B. There are 15 species of bat in Britain, the commonest are called pipistrelles, the smallest of our bats. Concern is being felt by birdwatchers that bats in Britain are being reduced in numbers to a dangerous level.
There are nearly 1000 species of bats in the world. All Britain’s bats are insect eaters. Elsewhere there are vegetarian bats, bats-of-prey and fishing bats. In a single night a pipistrelle may eat more than 3000 insects. By emitting ultrasonic, high pitched squeaks and listening to the echoes, they can home in on their insect prey and also avoid obstacles, but bats are not blind, their eyes being particularly useful in low light intensities.
Bats are mammals and suckle their young which are able to fly at three weeks, but unable to catch enough insects at this stage, so their diet is supplemented by milk from their mothers. One sees bats during mild weather in the winter and they do interrupt the hibernation process to come out and feed. In cold weather they have the wonderful ability to lower the body temperature and slow down the body processes and so conserve energy. They are very vulnerable, however, during this stage and many do not survive. Bats and their roosts, even in buildings, are now protected under the Nature and Countryside Act of 1981. Once can build a bat roosting box in one’s garden… but no preservative on the timber please as it is very toxic to bats.

The famous wet summer weather of 1985 continues. Being an optimist I was looking for an improvement in the August weather, but there has been none so far. The philosophy of farmers is being tested to the limits this year, I imagine, in relation to their hay crop. I have seen hay being turned after a dry morning and baling about to commence and down comes the rain. This has happened frequently. It is not often that farmers are trying to get hay baled during the month of August. Given a little sunshine now, some winter barley will be ready to harvest.

Summer in the countryside is often a time for seeing more of the activities of the larger birds of prey such as the kestrel and sparrow hawk and one is often alerted to their presence by the alarm calls of other birds such as starlings and swallows. Some days ago my wife and I went to our local heronry to count the nests. Out over the Deveron valley near Turriff, we saw a pair of buzzards, soaring and gliding up high until they were almost lost to sight. Whether they had a nest locally or had come from further up the Deveron valley I do not know. It is unusual to see buzzards in our area. They like plenty of rough, rocky ground and the nearest that I know of where they can be seen is further up the Deveron valley, south east of Fourmanhill.

On one unusual day when we were able to have coffee outside, I watched a sparrowhawk hover and dive down in its stoop. The point of impact was hidden by the roof of a building, but its target seemed to be some swallows which were flying about. The turning dive of the hawk is fine to see, but not so fine for the creature that is its target.

On the day of the radio blackout, I searched the wave bands for a speaking voice and found a Frenchman talking about ‘neige. Sure enough I had heard correctly, as next day the press reported four inches of snow in Switzerland, so we were not the only ones with wet summer weather.

One day recently I discovered a pair of whitethroats in the wild garden, the first of the year. The male attracted me by uttering his scolding tek, tek call from an elderberry tree where he was feeding on insects. He later flew down to join the female in some wild cotton or rosebay willow herb and they displayed one to the other by puffing out their throat feathers. I was able to compare the sexes well. The male has a darker head and browner back than the female. They both have marked white under the chin up to below the beak. This seems to give them a perkier appearance than the garden warbler.
The whitethroats have white feathers in their tail. They have no eye stripe. They are perhaps not so shy as other warblers. They like low scrub and thick vegetation like nettles and brambles and they are sometimes called nettle creepers or nettle mongers.

1986

Just over a week ago I had a phone call from a man in the Boyndie area wondering if the small, burrowing animal which he had in his flower borders was a mole as it did not leave any mole hills.
In summer time when the main food supply of the mole – the worms are near the surface then moles burrow just under the surface of the ground with about one third of the run showing above the ground and so there is no need for the mole to have so many molehills.

_{The illustrations in this book are the original creations of Sheila Chapman and she retains the copyright in them (Reproduced here under licence). More information about the artist can be found at http://www.sheilachapmanart.com}