Wintry days

The Beach

The influx of grandchildren usually means a trip to the beach no matter what the temperature so gloved, scarved and wellie-booted, we set off to dig and build and play giant steps against the on-rushing waves. Several brave souls in black neoprene were surfing on the incoming swell. Our beach is becoming popular with the boogie board crowd but California it is not, especially in February. Someone shouted “Dolphins, dolphins!” and there they were, two dorsal fins on black bodies breaking the surf.
They were not dolphins but harbour porpoises able to operate in the shallows only twenty yards or so offshore. Maybe they were curious as to the identity of the other group of aquatic mammals disporting themselves in the same waters. The surfers certainly looked like a fellow species.
Home with socks, wellies and children soaked from having lost the game to the waves, lunch was enlivened by the arrival of a large cock pheasant outside the patio doors. Christened Geoffrey by the children, he has taken up residence. The guns of the local shooting syndicate echo over the village but Geoffrey struts about the garden, like a WWI staff officer, well fed and safe, far from the action in a nice comfy billet.

Geoffrey

If Candlemas be clear and bright
Winter will take another flight

The second of February was a beautiful, sunny day and, true to the rhyme, winter is back with frost and snow. The cold weather does bring the birds to the feeders and the woodpecker has been back for the peanuts, though, unlike the finches, blackbirds and sparrows, he doesn’t hang about, more of a smash and grab raid. I did manage one decent picture though.

The snow has made spotting the local wild life a bit easier, like the four brown hares limbering up for the mating season with racing and chasing an in a nearby field. It is a bit early for the boxing matches to start in earnest. That will be next month.. Too big for the buzzard hunched on an ash tree to tackle, they don’t need to turn white like their mountain cousins but the little stoat in his full ermine fig that shot across my path, will be glad of the frosty whiteness otherwise he would have stood out like the man in a Bateman cartoon.
The countryside is stirring; the only dampener on the old joie de vivre was that, I noticed the beach hut is due a coat of paint. Oh well, everything has a price.

'Owling at the moon

Two owls have been calling close to the village. Their hoo-oo-oo cries embodying their old Scots name – houlit.. There is something elemental in the sound of an owl. Like the pee-you of the buzzard or the flutey sound of the curlew, they evoke a wildness, a remoteness that the singing of a thrush never does. Birds of ill omen in most cultures but also of wisdom, owls have always held a special place in human myths. They occur over and over in literature from A. A. Milne to Thomas Gray, from Lear to Tennyson.

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom brings logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail
When blood is nipped and ways be foul
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-who
Tu -whit Tu-who – a merry note

(Love‘s Labours Lost)

Not Shakespeare’s most elegant lines perhaps, nor his usual accuracy as a naturalist.

Tu –wit Tu-who is the sound of two owls, a male and a female, calling to each other In my nocturnal ramblings, I hear two, presumably, male birds tu-whooing away like pantomime ghosts but no answering tu-wit. It looks like the females are not around or are not in the answering mood at present
I hope there is a change soon for the poor owl needs to hear a tu-wit to woo!
Sorry!

The North wind doth blow

St Abbs Head from Earnsheugh

The snowdrops and aconites are out in the corners of the garden, the blackbirds are poking about under the hedges, inspecting twigs for length and strength, the collared doves are cosying up to each other and the jackdaws are checking every unused chimney pot for nest sites. If Spring has not yet sprung, she has started her run-up.
The Burns season of ritualistic haggis-bashing and tam-o’-shantering is drawing to its close when most of the populace will forget all about poems in eighteenth century Scots, indeed about poetry in general, until next year.

Burn’s night may be past but “Janwar’s cauld blast” that hanselled in his birth and his recent birthday, is still very much present as the raw, northerly winds keep threatening with little flurries, to bring back the snow.
The winds have whipped up the white horses on the sea and kept the sea birds in low profile though the garden birds have been present in large numbers due in no small part to LotH’s generous array of feeding stations. The RSPB garden bird count over one hour may have been artificially boosted by the seeds and fat-balls on offer.

The wind may have had an unexpected benefit. A local farmer, whose farm extends to the cliff edge, reported seeing a big buzzard-like bird with a wing span “as wide as a barn door”. He was sure it was a sea eagle, the erne or earn, as it used to be called. Several eagles have been released in Fife as part of ESSE, the East Scotland Sea Eagle Project, and the Fife coast is clearly visible from the cliff tops. With a tail wind from the north, one of the birds could easily make it to our shore.

http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/conservation/projects/eastscotlandeagles/index.asp

It would be marvellous if they re-colonised this area. I say re-colonised as Muirhead’s Birds of Berwickshire, published in 1889 notes them as “being seen less frequently than before”. Since every account cited mentions where, when and by whom they were shot, it is little surprising that they became less frequently seen.. Our Victorian forefathers really have a lot to answer for!

Muirhead does say that there are several place-names associated with the sea eagles, Earns Rig, Earnscleugh and, for us, Earnsheugh, just along the cliff top from where the bird was seen.
How great would it be if the earns returned to Earnsheugh.



Earnsheugh above the cliffs

One day, we might even see the re-introduction of the “reid-nebbed craw”, the chough, once so common on the cliffs that local children kept them as pets.

A great place for choughs

Aye, as they say, it's an ill wind...and all that.

Curling at the edges

Sweep Sweep!

So, the Grand Match didn’t happen. The once-in-a-lifetime event in the curler’s almanac, the alfresco bonspiel, the traditional North versus South contest on the Lake of Mentieth for hundreds of enthusiasts of the roaring game, never got off the ground or on to the ice, to be precise. By the time the RCCC had consulted with the various services and public bodies, got all the ducks lined up, the thaw had set in, the ice was unplayable and the ducks were back on the lake.

It has become extremely difficult to organise any event without running foul of some obstructive rule or regulation. Litigation has made the term “accident” redundant. Someone is always to blame or so we are reminded daily by television adverts. This is all the more ludicrous when quantum physics tells that the universe itself is based on probability not certainty. Chance is what keeps the whole business going. The universe, it seems, keeps all its options open all the time. Nothing is fixed until we look at it and it ceases to be fixed as soon as we stop looking. At the very building blocks of matter, you can never know for certain where anything is, only the probability.

The infinite number of possibilities provided convenient escape mechanisms for Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It all comes down to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The more we know about one variable, the less we can know of the other. It is a fundamental law of the universe.

The Curling Club bonspiel did go ahead, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of George the blacksmith. Members were summoned, guests invited, sustenance arranged and rinks drawn, with the result of a splendid evening of sport and bonhomie.

Mind you, some of the curling did demonstrate the truth of The Principle of Uncertainty.
Simply put, the principle states that it is impossible to know both the position and the velocity of an object at the same time. Oh, how true of the curling stone. No wonder it is known as the roaring game, the noise made by the skips shouting their sweepers on and off - “Sweep sweep, harder harder, Leave it, Up Up , Oh no! Sweep sweep !” as they tried to judge the speed and the ultimate destination of a stone, would certainly justify the epithet and despite all the noise they were, mostly, no nearer solving the problem.

Perhaps the boys and girls at the Large Hadron Collider should take up curling. It certainly makes one philosophical about the fact that despite your best efforts, projected particles don't go where they should, unexpected results occur, disappointments are many and the next end is always going to be better.

Uncertainty rules!

S'now fun anymore

The village

The snow plough has blocked us in having pushed enough of the white stuff up on to the sides of the road to barricade the entrance to the drive. Even the 4WD can’t get through it so it will be shovels out once it stops falling out of the sky. No point in starting it now while the flakes just keep coming down.

The garden is under a couple of feet and the birds couldn’t get at the feeders so a quick clearance job was needed for our daily diners to get to the seeds and peanuts.

Among the finches, tits, sparrows, dunnocks and robin, all squabbling and pecking furiously at the seeds, LotH spotted an oddity. A brambling had joined the chaffinches to grab some much needed sustenance. The poor deluded soul had flown over from northern Europe to escape the harsh weather and landed here in the worst winter for decades.
“The best laid schemes….etc”

Jackdaws have taken to coming to the fat ball feeder, clinging clumsily to the cage, wings flapping, as they peck at the suet. A yellowhammer, never one to voluntarily approach human habitation, has been warily inspecting the offerings. Times must be hard in the bird world

The geese have been flying up the coast in long straggly skeins, presumably looking for clearer feeding grounds.

Next day, two tracks were dug to get the Freelander out onto the road and a trip for essentials was possible. The main road from the village is “passable with care” mostly by 4WD’s but the other roads are only open courtesy of the local farmers coming in on their tractors to collect the “Scotsman” and leaving a couple of channels. Alright for pedestrians but too wide apart to be of much use to conventional vehicles.

Everyone seems cheery and the community spirit had come to the fore. The local shop has voluntarily rationed milk, a carer walked three miles to, and three miles back to visit her terminally ill patient, farmers have collected stranded workers with tractors, paths to coal bunkers have been dug for the elderly and cars given a helpful push on wheel-spinning slopes.
It’s all very picturesque and seasonal but it’s now getting to be a bit of a bore, like one of those snow scene ornaments that were popular years ago, after a couple of shakes, the novelty palled.
There is only so much winter wonderland one can take.

Blue moons and cold dips

The year has reached its chilly end. Hogmanay gave us the rarity of a blue moon and it is even rarer still for it to fall on the last day of the year
There are usually twelve full moons in a year and each has its name from The Moon After Yule in January, to the Wolf Moon, Lenten Moon, and so on to the Harvest Moon, Hunter’s Moon and The Moon Before Yule. If the “extra” full moon at the end of the year was called the Moon after Yule which, strictly speaking, it is, it would knock all the other names out of place, so it has become the “blue” moon.
As we came scrunching back over the frozen snow after bringing in the New Year, the clouds parted obligingly for us to catch a brief glimpse of the silver disc and , yes, it did look to have a hint of blue about it. It won’t happen again until 2028, so that might have been our only chance. Who knows?

The first day of 2010 was the day for the annual dip in the North Sea. Starting as a dare about twenty odd years ago, the custom has continued and grown over time attracting new adherents, guests, and some of the offspring of the earliest participants carrying on in the family tradition. At least one of the pioneers was still braving the briny.



Being an original, I felt that I ought to still to be taking the plunge but had the excuse of convalescence to avoid the heart-stopping dive in to the sea.
Accompanied by a piper, and surrounded by well wishers and a few astonished visitors, the latest recruits, including two Frenchmen upholding the honour of la patrie, made that adrenalin-charged dash down the beach and into the waves..
It was heartening to see that sheer lunacy still prevails and our proud tradition of innate idiocy is being carried on by the next generation.





Who says that folk can’t make their own entertainment anymore?

keeping track of things

The hard frost over the snow has let me wander off-piste so to speak, able to leave the straight and narrow and crunch my way over field and moor.

Up at the edge of the moor the sky was the colour that used to be associated with Mr Reckitt with wispy cirrus clouds but, on the northern horizon, there was a lowering bank of cumulus with snow in its folds.

I amused myself by trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to identify the animal and bird tracks in the snow. Some were easy, the lines of runes left by the local pheasantry, the neat prints of Mr Fox’s nocturnal searches and the dainty pockets in the snow of the roe deer.

Pheasant

It was obvious where deer had left one field and crossed the road into another, seeking shelter in the lea of a hedge, perhaps, so, fired with boy-scout enthusiasm, I followed on.

Feeling like a hunter I stalked my quarry although the illusion was somewhat dented when a fellow walker, spotting my camera said,
“There are some deer near the river. You might get some pictures”

I’m convinced I would have tracked them on my own!

With a bit of stealth, I did get within bow shot of one and felt that, if I were a Neolithic archer, I might have dined on venison even if I had had a bit of help on the way.

My unsuspecting prey

A better picture

Today is the winter solstice and my Neolithic antecedent would have been celebrating the sunrise. This is the true turning point of the year. Christmas, Hogmanay and all the other festivals are human constructs of religious, political or administrative origin. Gaia doesn’t know when they are but she does know when we have reached the nadir and things are looking up. The new year begins now.

Midwinter sunrise, December 21st 2009

Happy solstice!