All posts by Ian Alexander

Natural History

All in a Day’s Work on a Highland Farm

Seeing that the Highland Bull is happy
Chookie and nine chicks: she’s an excellent mother
Roy and Wu Fixing New Gate Posts
Digging strainer hole with twin shovels
Roberto hammering in stones to fix a strainer
Antoine and Roberto setting a strainer plumb
Roberto driving in a fence post with post hammer
Wu and Roberto tightening a Radish
Roy and Antoine setting fencing wires
Digger lifting ton of feed over bin
Full English All Round
A mighty Full English on Sunday Morning (no lunch)
Natural History

In search of the Least Water Lily

Lochan Uvie

Well the tale began at Wakehurst Place, the country seat of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Their (splendid) open day showed off to perfection the many strands of their work, and their committed and enthusiastic staff.

One of the stands featured the rare Least Water Lily. Ok, I’d never heard of it.  It has one location left in Shropshire and is otherwise not found in England. But in Scotland, while it’s rare, small, and hard to find, not least because it hardly ever displays its yellow flowers, it has dozens of localities.

Curious, I nosed about the web. One good locality was Lochan Uvie. Since I was going right there…

Well, here it is. Beautiful, but surrounded by naturally wet meadow grading effortlessly into … swamp.

White Water Lilies in Lochan Uvie

So it’s hard to approach without getting very wet, and probably damaging the vegetation to boot. There are certainly plenty of White Water Lilies, but small yellow ones were not to be seen.

I’ll try again with gumboots and binoculars. Really, I’d need a boat.

Conservation, Nature Reserves

LWT Hedge-Laying Course with Clive Leeke at GT

Netty delighted to find a Tawny Owl feather in the reserve, for the first time
Margaret and the team delivering the binders to the meadow in front of the hedge site
The hedge before we started: tall, leggy, and apparently never cut or laid before
Clive demonstrating how to cut a pleacher, a Hawthorn stem that you can then lay to form a barrier. Somehow it looked quite easy when he did it.
… and down goes the pleacher, that’s all you have to do.
Well we managed it somehow, our first pleached Hawthorn (a complex job with a lot of stems to lay)
Clive Leeke showing us how to sharpen a stake with a few swift axe-blows
Hedge-Staker extraordinaire. The idea is to space them a cubit apart, in a straight line, trapping every pleached stem. The binders then retain the stakes. Well, that’s the theory…
Weaving binders around hedge stakes
Jules boshing down the nicely woven-in binders
First section of hedge completed
Natural History

Displaying Goldeneyes at Wraysbury

Five Goldeneyes: a male is displaying to the (brown-headed) female

It was a glorious winter morning at Wraysbury Lakes. The lakes themselves held few birds, but the Goldeneyes had arrived with the recent cold weather, and the males were giving their fine trumpeting call (they’re not called “clangula” for nothing, the duck with the resounding bell-like music) and displaying, too.

A few herons flapped lazily over the water; a small group of tits hopped through the bushes. My first fieldfares of the winter chack-chacked in the willows and obligingly gave good views of their handsome brown-and-grey plumage.

A sparrowhawk raced very low over the meadow. On the way home, a peregrine falcon perched on a streetlight.