July

1971

“Rosewall has more lives than the proverbial cat”, says tennis commentator Jack Kramer at Wimbledon. In nature it was the cat and its nine lives that was my starting point. During the last couple of months we have seen at least two cats that have used up their quota. I think they like to use the firm base of the road as a launching platform from which they dive upon unsuspecting mice in the long grass on the roadside verges. These two must have been too near the kill to move and were probably hit by passing cars. Another possibility is that they were heavy with young and moved out of the way fractionally too slowly. This was certainly the case with a red squirrel that had been hit by a car. A post mortem on it was carried out by some senior pupils at Banff Academy and it was found to have been in an advanced state of pregnancy.

When a cat jumps for a mouse and misses, it is quite interesting to see it thrashing about in the long matted grass, leaping and twisting here and there with its ears alert and tail swishing very angrily from side to side.

We discovered last week for the first time a most attractive summer visitor to our area, the wheatear. For a number of days we have seen the bird, with its conspicuous white rump, flying beside the road as we motored past. At first we thought it was a house martin, because the wheatear flits across the open ground in a restless manner; but its flight is comparatively direct and not so daring as that of the martin. When the wheatear, an invaluable destroyer of pests, is in flight, the white patch on the rump, above the dark tipped tail, is very noticeable.

Flaming June didn’t get much of a chance to show its paces and spluttered out in a general unusual dampness. From the first day of the month, July decided it would show us what summer should be about and the temperature shot up into the eighties. During the winter, a friend, Mr Johnny Knowles, made us an eating-out table with a top and seat all fixed together such as is found in some wayside cafes. Our new acquisition really came into its own and meals in the garden were the order of the day either in the sun or in the shade of the old apple tree. Earlier in the summer the bird table was taken down but the fat basket had remained up with a few dry scraps inside and while we were at our meals, the great tit would come seeking a change of summer diet and it would scold us for being near his aperitif or sweet, I don’t know which.

This is the time of year when one gets the wind across the barley and this, to us, is a wonderful sight. When the barley gets its ears, it has a uniformity and thickness or volume at the tops of each stem and when the wind blows across a field, then fine waves or ripples appear and depending on various circumstances of light and shade and stage of growth, one can see the most wonderful colourings as the waves move and change. In this delightful season too, one gets parties of oystercatcher parents teaching their young to do ‘circuits and bumps’. They fly over low in ragged formation, calling loudly all the time with parent birds seemingly delighted and saying “Look we have reared these offspring and now they can fly !” The curlew is not nearly such a show off as his more gaudy, red-beaked, black and white cousin. One can still hear his low sympathetic, confiding, mellifluous call, letting the young bird know that father and mother are still in the offing. There is no longer the rushing anxiety in the curlew’s flight that there was when eggs and young were easier prey to hooded crow or black-backed gull. So summer for all brings ease and contentment and this, I suppose, is how it should be.

1973

We are holidaying on what should be termed from our north-east corner, the midwest, or Argyll. Not having seen a wheatear this year, we were delighted to see quite a number in one afternoon in a Highland glen. We climbed into Dunach churchyard and there was a dead lamb in one corner, moving with maggots and oh the smell! Maggots are really an interesting study, good bait for fishing and things like that. From the bottom of the glen and as we climbed an old watercourse to the north side we heard, coming from an uncut hayfield, the strong call of that nearly lost bird, the corncrake. We have only heard it twice in the last 12 years.

On our way to visit Ardanaiseig gardens, which is open to the public in aid of Scotland’s Gardens scheme, we stopped below a telegraph pole on which perched a buzzard. This one was particularly dark in colour. While trapped by a heavy shower in a wood shed in the garden, we had an interesting chat with the head gardener, Mr Johnny Martin, who comes from Inverness. On the shore of the loch we came across a pair of sandpipers which were probably nesting as they never moved very far away. Delicate waders these and graceful in flight with a very rapid wing beat. Crossing a firth we saw numerous pairs of guillemots, some with young, many miles from the nearest land. On an island we had good views of reed buntings. We also saw whinchats. Seen through the binoculars, the male bird has a delightful flush of pink on his breast and a very noticeable white flash above and behind his eye. Jaunting finished and back home we noted the heavy rains have started to put down some barley crops creating interesting patterns, but problems for the farmers.

1974

On holiday in Oban we are wakened in the morning by the strident call of the herring gull, the cooing of the collared dove, the shunting of the railway diesel engines and the steady throb of the engines on the car ferry. The common denominators in the garden to our northeast area are the blackbird, house sparrow, and chaffinch. A herring gull had the interesting habit of alighting on the moving chimney whirligig and getting a little birl all to itself until its weight makes the moving can lose momentum and stop.

The big fisherman, my brother Gordon, has not been well and we, acting as standby crew at the sweep netting at the loch, netted five grilse (total weight 31 lbs) and three sea trout. We had a sea trout for tea, the first of the season, and it was delicious. Oystercatchers are often seen on the shore and occasional sandpipers flit just over the surface of the loch. Curlews call from across the loch and, fairly regularly, a heron flies slowly down the loch. Various mother eiders are rearing families and they sometimes surface with a small fish and splutter in the water with it, preparing it for the young.
Maybe a herring gull will show an interest in the proceedings at this stage and there is an interesting little drama which usually ends with the eiders seeking refuge under water.

Yesterday it was cold, and it was at Wimbledon too, so we didn’t feel so bad. Today was warmer and we saw two large dragonflies on the golf course. In the evening when the wind falls, from our window which commands a superb view of Oban bay, we can see the calm water reflecting the boats, buildings and hills, a summer holiday scene par excellence; but the west coast has not lost its midges.

From the west coast of Scotland it’s a fairly far cry to Hounslow in Middlesex, via the M6 and M1. We stopped in the Peak District of Derbyshire at Buxton and were pleased we did as we would have seen nothing, otherwise, of rural England with its quaint pubs with names such as the Grouse and Claret, the Setter Dog, the Waterloo, the Duke of York, the Gay Dog, the George and Dragon, the Horse Shoe Inn and the Cat and Fiddle, which is at the highest point on the road across the lower end of the Pennines.

In Hounslow we were wakened (admittedly to get to sleep again) by enormous metal birds with rushing engines. Where we stayed at 36 Central Avenue with Uncle George Sell, a retired oil man, was almost on the landing flight path for Heathrow airport and for most of the day at only two minute intervals, one just out of sight landing and the other seen approaching, nearly every conceivable civil aircraft was to be seen. Viscounts, Vanguards, VC 10s, DC 10s, executive jets which incidentally are not so noisy as the Boeing 707s. In spite of all the noise there was a fine clear dawn chorus of mainly blackbirds and thrushes, singing in the fruit trees in the garden. These particular houses had been built on what was a large orchard and where possible, in the garden areas, the fruit trees had been left standing and incidentally produced magnificent pears later in the season.

We had decided to visit Westminster and the House of Commons. I had heard of some Banffshire folk receiving hospitality from a former MP, Sir William Duthie, and I can assure readers that our present MP, Mr Hamish Watt keeps up this good custom. If you are lucky, like us, and get there during the strawberries and cream season, then you get a bonus with your tea, plus the fact that one is seated in historic surroundings on the terrace outside, watching the traffic and the world go by on Westminster bridge. We also visited Windsor castle and a few miles away the Safari Park. Personally I did not like my first experience of this kind, being so close to numerous prides of lions, with only the car window between us and them, made me uncomfortable and nervous.

Home again we watched, at close range, a mole on the surface looking for worms and grubs among the earth and straw under the gooseberry bushes and we also said “Hello” to a large hedgehog that was having a stroll.

We have friends who live in a wood and when one goes to their home one literally goes up a tunnel under the trees and shrubs. To feed his dog the man of the house does what I did as a boy – he goes to the slaughter house for food. On one occasion some months ago they also gave him a skin of suet which he hung up on an outbuilding wall. This wall is at right angles to his kitchen window. It is not recommended that birds be fed in the summer time as at this season there is plenty of natural food to keep them going; but to this suet still come blue tits, chaffinches and wonder of wonders, while we were there too, a great spotted woodpecker. This was an interesting bird to see at close quarters. It is slightly longer than a starling but with no middle plumpness. It has read on its head and sides and the rest is a rather pied effect of black and white, which gives rise to its name. With its gripping toes it was able to hold on to the harled wall quite easily and, of course, hold onto the suet and peck vigorously with its powerful beak.

Like yo yos we ‘ve shuttled to the west again and to the loch side and there two days ago after the weekend spate I saw my first otter in the wild. This was at mid afternoon and the otter was playing or fishing at about two hundred yards range beside a marker buoy. Some of his movements were seal-like, although he was smaller, and as we watched through the loch side telescope, the last thing to disappear, as he dived, was his tail. Sometimes like a swimmer coming up from a deep dive, he would rush to the surface where his head and part of his body would appear and then he would rest on the surface for a moment or two before diving down again. We watched his movements for about half an hour until he gradually moved up the loch towards the Nell river mouth.

1975

Has anyone lost a muscovy duck ? An ornithological colleague thought he had discovered an exotic rarity. The duck was solitary in the drill of a potato field near a wet patch. Its dark plumage and redness about the head made it interesting to see from a distance. For the most part muscovy ducks do not fly much, I suppose, but stay about the farmyard. This one had obviously flown quite a way. I heard the amusing story of one which was having a try at this flying business and landed rather shakily on a chimney pot, only to wobble and topple head first down the lum. The subsequent mess, etc, I leave to my reader’s imagination. Another addition to the story was that the fireplace had really been closed up !

Various farms report fewer swallows about the steadings. Last autumn’s cold snap may have taken its toll after all. We have a pair trying to nest in an outhouse. The nest is still less than one quarter built, but progress is being made. The shed door is left ajar really for the cat, but after inspecting it at length during the week, even to staying on the rafters while we were in the shed, the swallows have persevered.

At three yards range, looking down from a wall, we saw a tree creeper collecting food for its young from the garden path. We were surprised at how strongly striped with brown its back is, and how small it was viewed from this position. Its beak is curved and large in relation to its size. It seems to increase in bulk when it is in its usual vertical position on the trunk of a tree. We saw where it was going in and out to its nest beside a large tree root in a wall, close to the burn. We didn’t poke too closely for fear of disturbing parents and family.

Summer has really come when we see the willow warbler flitting in and out of the shrubs collecting insects. We have seen it quite often recently and we think that it is one of the most graceful and delicate of the birds which frequent our garden.

1976

The other morning when rising early and visiting the rest of the family to get them moving, I looked out on to the lawn, as is my custom, and thought there were no birds there. When my eyes became accustomed to the early morning light, I saw a family of well camouflaged young chaffinches and they were feeding on the elm seeds. There were young greenfinches too, sparrows, a robin, the first I have seen for some time, and a solitary young pied wagtail. The wagtail and the chaffinch played aerial ‘tig’ and the rapidity with which one chased the other, in and out of the leaves and branches was wonderful to behold.

I make no apology for mentioning again the ongoing display of sea trout and salmon jumping in the Deveron estuary between Banff and Macduff. The Palmer cove side seems particularly well favoured and one could stand in wonderment for long enough watching this fine display of jumping fish. There has not been an appreciable amount of rain for some time so the fish are congregating at the mouth of the river waiting their chance to get up to spawn. For a keener angler than I, it must be frustrating watching the fish jump and not being able to do much about it.

An incident occurred the other evening which was rather sinister in its way, expensive in a way and was probably the consequence of the very warm spell of weather we are having. On the BBC 2 programme, “The World about Us” , one occasionally sees unusual insects from foreign lands; Japanese spiders come to mind. A programme which they might have done or could usefully do would be one about woodworm. I have seen swarms of bees, mosquitoes and angry wasps in numbers, but I have never before seen what I can only describe as a swarm of woodworms. On the wing they are like gnats or big midges, but when they alight as they did on the car roof the other evening it was evident that they were woodworms in their hundreds. They are a dark brown in colour, about a centimetre long with what appears to be a hard shell like body, but they squash fairly easily with the tip of one’s finger. I have an old garage next to an older house, about one hundred and forty five years old so far as we know and not listed. The woodworms are in the garage timbers. I know I should knock it down, burn the timbers and build a new one, but there is always that little matter of what we used to call L.s.d. I can’t say there is no woodworm in our house, but we keep the Rentokil handy and endeavour to keep them in check. They can make holes in the hardest of timbers, so to me, a magnified study of their actual boring technique would be very interesting.

We are happier now we have seen the new baler ‘giving birth’ to the big bales. They are like ‘Dougals’ in the fields or being more warlike, squadrons of tanks rolling along the fields.

Lazy days in mid-July says the Country Roads song – the grass paths in the garden are burnt and crinkly under one’s feet and the crops appear to have ‘turned’ and ripened quicker than ever before in our experience. There has not been a summer like it for two or three decades. 1955, we remember, was a scorcher and so was 1947; but the heat seemed to come later in those seasons. Conditions would point to an early harvest, but what the quality and condition of the grain will be like is a different matter. I am informed by returning Continental holiday makers that combine harvesters have been working in France for the past two weeks.

Tuesday was the day that the rains came and mature blackbirds and thrushes were flying around the trees and shrubs with the gay abandon of flitting chaffinches. They were presumably celebrating the coming of the softer ground and the return of the worms to the surface.

1977

Each year we used to hear the quite wonderful sound of a breeding colony of black headed gulls at the ‘Lochy’ or more correctly Earl’s Loch, Mountblairy. Sadly they have not bred there for a few years now. This year, on a small island near the mouth of the Ythan, we saw a colony of black headed gulls and it was interesting to hear the incessant calling of the packed nursery. It was low tide and nearer the river on a slimy bit of weed, were numerous eider ducks with only one male among them. He was very conspicuous in his white coat. He seemed to be taking a major part in protecting some tiny eider ducklings. Some keen-eyed explorers in my company, my pupils, discovered in a piece of net which had become entangled with an old hulk of a boat by the river’s edge, two dead ducks. One had a blue ring round its leg and the other had two rings, one brown and one orange. Earlier we had visited the field station at Culterty and so we sent back the rings to them and asked about their significance. At the ponds of Culterty, we saw tufted duck, mallard, pochard, shelduck, ruddy shelduck, greylag geese, white fronted geese and a Chinese goose which, we were told, was about 30 years old.

Not long ago I wrote about keeping a hairy caterpillar. After spinning a cocoon for itself it pupated on the underside of the lid of the jam jar. Now a wonderful large garden tiger moth has emerged. It is nice to know my supposition was the correct one.

Recently we were presumably were introduced to a man called Burnet, but so far have not been able to find out much about him. At the Open Golf Championship at Turnberry we came across, out on the course, a Burnet rose. It grows from six inches to two feet high on many parts of the course and was being trampled down by thousands of spectators. The flowers are a pale pink to a creamy white in colour and are rather delicate to look at. Considering the south west Atlantic winds which sweep over these dunes most of the year, this flower has obviously adapted itself to local conditions. Needless to say most of the people in our company were more interested in names like Player, McEvoy and Nicklaus, whom we were following on the first day of the Open, than Burnet. We then came across a moth which is more like a bee, flying over the Burnet rose and we think this is one of the seven varieties of Burnet Moth which delights in the sunshine. We have come across this beautiful creature before, in the dunes at Cruden Bay golf course. It is bee-like in appearance, with red underneath its wings and a wonderful iridescent blue on top. Our ‘Moths of the British Isles’ depicts it as a shade of green. It is the type of creature which would make one exclaim when one sees it for the first time.

With an unexpected invasion of some 15,000 people a day, the small birds like the skylark did have a hard time of it. Flying over the course we saw our first wheatear of the season. What with the activity of the large ‘birds’ such as helicopters and light private planes there was not too much peace. When Tom Watson, 1977 Open Golf Champion, fades into golfing obscurity, I suspect Burnet’s rose and moth will remain.

1978

Mr Leslie Smith of the South Lodge Forglen has made an interesting discovery. In his garden he found a sandpiper with four chicks. Mr Smith’s garden backs onto the river Deveron itself and the banks of rivers and streams are the breeding places for sandpipers, but this is the first time we have known them to breed in this closed in part of the Deveron Valley. When we entered the garden, the female sandpiper flew up onto the hedge. We stood about fifteen feet away and she just bobbed her tail up and down in characteristic fashion. We looked for the young without success and then retreated. On coming forward again we were able to to see where she took off and there among the potato shaws we saw the four young chicks, some scurrying away to the hedge and some sitting motionless using their natural camouflage to make them difficult to see. It is to be hoped that these four Forglen sandpiper chicks reached maturity.

The other day I received a request regarding the identification of different kinds of birds seen on holidays. There were two large ones mentioned, the cormorant and the shag and two smaller ones, the whinchat and the stonechat.
The shag is smaller than the cormorant though both are long-necked diving birds, the cormorant being a yard long and the shag six inches smaller. The cormorant has a white patch at the base of its bill and both are otherwise black birds when seen from a distance. At closer inspection, as seen from above at the Bullers of Buchan for instance, the shag is a dark green colour. The Bullers incidentally, is a wonderful place to take visitors in the summer to see a variety of our nesting sea-birds, but hold on tightly to young children. The paths are narrow. Different varieties of gulls can be seen as well as fulmars, kittiwakes, guillemots and puffins.

The stonechat is not unlike a robin in shape and size but with a more upright stance. The male stonechat has a distinctive black head and white collar and a chestnut breast, a very striking bird. The whinchat is a rarer summer visitor, a grayer bird with a white eye stripe, wing bar and white sides at the base of its tail. Both can be found on whins and particularly on land immediately above the shore.

One morning recently the cat having breakfasted and gone out to the garden, was being severely scolded, nay sworn at, and attacked by a skretching starling. I should have realised something was wrong as the cat can go out to the garden any morning without such a disturbance. He was invisible among the aubretia, just making the tops move occasionally marking his presence. I was sitting in a deck chair having my breakfast cup of coffee in the garden. Out from the broad leaved poppy comes a bedraggled limping young starling with the cat following interestedly. “Anything for a bit of sport”, says he. The starling was at the stage when it could just fly and no more and the cat had not helped in any way by knocking it about a bit. No wonder the parent birds had been so agitated. I managed to attract the cat’s attention for long enough for the young starling to hop onto the dyke and get among the honeysuckle which grows along it. It seemed to stay about that part of the wall for most of the day and was being fed at regular intervals by the parent birds.

From my seat I saw a pair of wrens, very dinkum, feeding in the fir trees close at hand and on the tops of the fires, parent greenfinches were feeding young. We were visited briefly by a willow warbler who was keeping an eye on the cat. For the past few days we have been delighted to see swifts zooming around. Out here in the country we are lucky if we see one pair in the course of the summer. Many of them nest in Turriff.

The geans or wild cherries are ripe on the tree outside our bedroom window and the blackbirds pillage them nearly every morning. The geans reminded me of the real ripe cherries seen recently against the wall of the garden at Cawdor castle, Nairn. We have visited quite a few castles in the north and north-east and Cawdor castle is easily the best on our list so far and is to be highly commended. Things are very well organised without being overdone. The balance was perfect, from the natural beauty of the large acer tree on the front lawn to the beautiful tapestries in some of the rooms. There is a very witty room commentary written by the Thane of Cawdor. The cherries grow in the walled garden and one was reminded that gooseberries can be trained to grow against walls too. As well as all the usual vegetables, there were large vegetable marrows and artichokes and corn on the cob. In the greenhouse there were figs and beautiful peaches with nets suspended below to catch the ripe fruit.
The flower garden was another delight. Here was evidence of the favoured situation with more ripe peaches growing outside on a south facing wall. “This castle has a pleasant seat; the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses “ wrote Shakespeare about this probable situation of ‘Macbeth’. The wild garden at Cawdor, beside the peaty brown river, was towered over by some magnificent trees. We had not time to take the Nature Trail or sample the pitch and putt course. To my schoolboy eyes the cherries and peaches needed picking. I hope someone was collecting the ripe fruit.

_{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}