Bog Myrtle & Peat

Worth recording that all three pairs of curlews on the in-bye ground have failed in their breeding attempts this year. When curlews lose their eggs, they frequently try for a second clutch within a week or two, but there is every sign that this first attempt (which should be the most successful) has been a total… Continue reading

Small celebration is due to the approximate first birthday of my four riggit galloway heifers. Although the grass has taken a long time to rise, they are finally getting a good bellyful and no longer require silage. I have a project to resurrect an old 1950s pattern cattle crush which has been abandoned on the… Continue reading

I can’t resist mentioning with a smidgen of pride that the nightjar has returned to the hill behind the house. Perhaps it means little to most people who have never heard of such an queer bird, but I find a real kudos and excitement to sharing my home with a creature so bizarre, obscure and un-birdlike.… Continue reading

Strange to see a single male lapwing return to the hill for a period of intense displaying over the weekend. There have been no truly viable attempts to breed in the glen for five years, and there have been no birds at all for the past three. This one bird added a lively fizz of… Continue reading

The past fortnight has provided food for thought. Longer days and a good deal of sunshine has brought much of the countryside swelling into life; we’ve even made huge progress in the past few hours. But where there has been progress, there has also been delay. The dryness and the heat has parched the hill… Continue reading

While stalking on Friday morning, I found myself high up on a steep face of granite and heather overlooking a single sitka spruce tree. This ground was all burnt out in 2012, and the scorched tree is now little more than a black gallows in a world of fresh young heather and blaeberry. A crow’s… Continue reading

  After a long, stuffy day indoors yesterday, it was an enormous treat to head up the hill in the evening to go around my larsen traps and see something of the real world. It was eight o’clock by the time I rolled to a standstill on the track, and as soon as the engine… Continue reading

Crucial to note the staggering encounter between a peregrine and a cuckoo yesterday afternoon on the hill. I don’t know how it began, but my eye was drawn to two shapes rushing across the white grass on the face above me. I recognised the latter as a young peregrine, but it was only when I… Continue reading

Worth recording the triumphant discovery of a snipe’s nest on the Chayne. I’ve been looking for a nest for the past few years and never quite pinned one down, but having found chicks and predated eggshells several times, this was the first I’ve seen on my home turf. It was beautifully tucked away in a little tussock… Continue reading

The past week has been a rushed haze of work, blackgame and illness, hence the shortage of time for writing on this blog. In the middle of it all, my beloved jeep has died and so my operational radius has been hideously limited. Suffice it to say for now that the extremely cold, dry weather… Continue reading