I tried an experiment for my Dad’s (84th) birthday and made a traditional Scottish ‘High Tea’. For non-natives – this is a sort of combination between afternoon tea and dinner. You have a simple but filling cooked dish, followed by a variety of baked things (largely of the sweet variety). It is eaten about 6pm […]
The sheep have returned. Two of them this time – and although we have gently shoed them a few times (cats are scared of them and they keep eying up the plants) they keep coming back. We have a fragment of wall that belonged to the former house which burned down (we think immediately post-war), […]
I was out walking at around 7am today and just coming round the road near the loch I heard a loud drumming noise. It was a woodpecker – unfortunately I only got a brief glimpse of him (not enough to identify his exact species), but he was making enough noise to make up for his […]
These are the creatures we have seen in the immediate vicinity (our garden or within a mile of the Donich) since we moved in back in October. Pine Marten Badger Fox Otter Red Deer Red Squirrel Short tailed vole Field mouse Bat Heron Buzzard Falcon Garden birds -Tits (great, coal, blue), Robin, Chaffinch, Blackbird, Thrush, […]
This has been a very exciting week for us on the Wildlife front. Not only did we get to meet one of the badgers, and see the encounter between cat and pine marten – but yesterday we saw two new arrivals. The first was when we were sitting in the dining room watching dusk fall […]
Last night I had just put the nuts out for the wildlife when I happened to look out of the window. There was one of our badgers munching away. Luckily R’s sister who is an excellent photographer (her photo included below) was here – so we very quietly went outside to see if we could […]
Since before we moved here I have been a bit worried about the cats and some of the wildlife we have here. Although I have joked a lot about Tora having a girlfriend he can’t bring home because she is a Pine Marten, I did have it at the back of my mind how awful […]
As suddenly as they appeared – in one day all the frogs have departed. Where last week there was a writhing mass of slimy bodies ‘revelling in the joys of fornication’ now there is only a great mass of frogspawn. Let’s hope we get a decent crop of froglets which will eat some of the […]
I’d had it in mind to climb Benn Donich on Sunday – it seems ridiculous that we have lived here for nearly six months and haven’t managed to get up ‘our’ mountain (well it is at the back of our house). But when we got up in the morning, it was a typical Goil day […]
Spring iz sprung, De graz iz riz, I wonder where de boides iz? De boid iz on de wing – Dats absoid; De wing iz on de boid. Which is just as much as to say that spring has now arrived. There will be bad weather to come I am sure – and we even […]
