Whooper Swans at Strathbeg

From the Tower Pool Hide at Strathbeg this afternoon we were able to watch thousands of whooper swans (wintering here from Iceland) and lapwings, smaller numbers of shellduck, mallards and greenshanks on the water. Several herons stalked the pools. Two  huge skeins of pink footed geese arrived noisily just as we approached the hide and settled in a field on the far side of the water. The whole area was as busy as an avian airport: there were constant arrivals and departures of plangently trumpeting swans. The lapwings grew restless and wheeled and tumbled in the air, the low afternoon sun catching their wings.

A small skein of geese approaching  Strathbeg from the North

In the wildlife garden near the visitor centre we saw a large flock of tree sparrows, one of the reserve's 'star species'. Alas, there was no sign, on the apples hung out for their delectation, of the waxwings we particularly wanted to see. It appears that almost the whole  contingent of migrants to Scotland is feasting on berries in Portsoy.

Linda Norgrove;The Guardian, 30.10.2010

Grey Granite finds the dignified stoicism of Linda Norgrove's parents to be highly refreshing in the culture of, emoting, sensationalism and blame in which we live.

Linda Norgrove's parents refuse to blame US for death

Parents give US credit for admitting kidnapped aid worker was probably killed by grenade thrown during Afghanistan rescue







Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 October 2010 09.59 BST Article history


John and Lorna Norgrove talk about their daughter Linda Link to this video The parents of Linda Norgrove, the aid worker killed during a failed rescue attempt in Afghanistan, said today that her kidnap was their worst nightmare but they did not blame US forces for her death.






In their first full interview since she died, John and Lorna Norgrove said it was "very creditable" for the US to admit their daughter was probably killed by a grenade thrown by a US navy Seal as they tried to free her in a remote mountain village in eastern Afghanistan.






"The rescue attempt it would appear to us was so close to being a total success and at the end there was what appears to have been a human error," John said.






Initially there were conflicting accounts about her death, with strong suggestions from western sources that she was killed by her militant Islamist kidnappers, possibly with a suicide vest, to thwart the rescue mission on 8 October.






But General David Petraeus, the commander of Nato and US forces in Afghanistan, revealed in an early morning phone call to David Cameron that she was probably killed when a Seal threw a fragmentation grenade close to where she was lying.






Video footage of the raid showed that Linda, 36, had been fatally wounded as she lay on the ground to shelter after escaping from her captors during the chaos of the battle with the elite US special forces unit Seal Team Six.






Speaking three days after her daughter was buried a few miles from their home, Lorna said the family refused to enter the blame game. "Linda is dead; there is nothing we can do to change that."






John revealed that the couple had warned Linda of their fears that she might be kidnapped, a possibility that was their worst nightmare. But he said she was committed to her work in Afghanistan, was experienced and knew how to evaluate risk.






They would never know whether Linda would have survived if the rescue had not been attempted. "We don't think anybody is ever going to have a really clear picture, taking into account both sides; whether it was better to mount a rescue attempt or to carry on negotiating for a ransom with extremely dangerous and militant criminals.






"We do think that it is very creditable of the Americans to own up that there has been a mistake when they could so easily have covered the whole thing up [but] we have obviously got to wait for the outcome from the report which the British and American military are making."






Today's interview was released to mark the launch of a new charity the couple has set up in their daughter's memory, the Linda Norgrove Foundation, which will champion education projects for Afghan women and children. The couple have donated $100,000 (£63,000) from their own and Linda's savings to launch the fund.






It is expected to pay for university places for women and support girls' schools, with guidance and support from the US aid company Development Alternatives Incorporated (DAI) that Linda was working for when she was kidnapped on 26 September.






Lorna said Linda's death "has changed our lives completely and we feel we need to move forward and do something to help continue her work, her humanitarian work, and to this end we are setting up a charity".






The couple, who run a croft on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, said they had tried to dissuade Linda – an accomplished and highly qualified aid worker with experience in Peru, Uganda and Afghanistan itself – from returning to Afghanistan with DAI.






"But there was no way as a parent I would stop her doing that. I knew that she had grown to love Afghanistan and love the people, and I knew that that's where her heart was," Lorna said. "She wanted to do humanitarian work there and I think that was what was so important to her and what she felt she had to do."






John said they had been apprehensive when she first went to Afghanistan for the UN in 2005. "At the time I said to her that our worst nightmare was that she might be kidnapped, but at the end we had to accept that she had been adventurous. She had done risky things before.






"After a while we accustomed ourselves to the fact that the risk was there and came to the conclusion that she was very capable at judging the risks and minimising them and she was far better at doing that on the ground in Afghanistan than we were at home on the croft in Scotland."






He said they heard of her kidnapping after climbing a nearby mountain on "a beautiful Sunday". They came home "to be met by the police who told us that Linda had been kidnapped. And from then on it was an absolute emotional rollercoaster.






"It's very difficult to explain to anybody who has not been through it but it felt like sometimes when you are busy and talking to people the pain almost seemed to go away and then it would just come in floods of emotion."






He said he pulled through that period "by imagining the elation of meeting up with Linda when she returned home in Stornoway airport and just imagining how that would be. So it came as an absolute nightmare to us two weeks later to have a visit from the police at 3 o'clock in the morning one day to say that she had been killed in a rescue attempt."






• Donations to the foundation can be made online at the www.lindanorgrovefoundation.org.uk website or by cheque to the Linda Norgrove Foundation, 3 Mangersta, Uig, Isle of Lewis, HS2 9EY.

Walk round the Pits of Hell

This morning was the first time that Rufus has walked on Rosehearty beach, the sand is remarkably white and is often littered with cowrie shells. Grey Granite remembers collecting these lucky shells, called John o' Groats, for their supposed place of origin, when  she was a very small child.  There were many waders , including  ubiquitous oyster catchers, along the shoreline.

As we turned up by Mains of Pittullie, the sun broke through the clouds. The bright blue flowers are monkshood.



Pitulie Castle, memorably described by Charles McKean as being in, 'the delectable flatlands round Fraserburgh and as, 'sitting like a stranded battleship in the midst of fields within sight of Pitsligo Castle'. This small but pretensiously ornate chateau was built by the Frasers of Philorth from 1596.

Trees at Peathill, almost all the sycamores and ash trees are now bare the alders seem to retain their leaves longest.  There were rooks circling and cawing above the wood as we passed

The ruins of the auld kirk at Peathill, built by Lord Pitsligo (1632) in response to a ranting sermon by an Aberdour minister about the 'three Pits of Hell - Pitsligo, Pittullie and Pitendrum' The birdcage bellcote was carved by Dutch masons and erected firstly in the courtyard of Pitsligo Castle so that the dying Lord Pitsligo could see it from his deathbed.



Bare autumnal trees but the new green shoots of recently sown grain are already forming a mantle of green over the fields. The cycle of constant regeneration of life continues as on Darwin's tangled bank.



Pitsligo Castle, a gradually decaying treasure, the square tower on the right is the original part of the castle and dates from 1424

One of the Burgh of Rosehearty boundary stones, Grey Granite is irked by the recent sanctioned vandalism, which in the misguided interests of clarity, resulted in the clumsy daubing of black paint on each of the stones.

Ivy flowering on the manse dyke at Peathill and elder (bourtree) berries opposite the castle, both plants have magical powers to ward off evil.

We returned to our starting point down the Cassa Brae returning the Fraserburgh through Pittendrum.

Emporers and Admirals

Grey Granite very much enjoyed this review by Richard Mabey in yesterday's Guardian and empathises with Patrick Barkham's enthusiasm .She wonders if Barkham was inspiredto carry out his quest by reading Charlie Elder's 'While Flocks Last'

The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals


by Patrick Barkham

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that he loved to "drop in, as it were, on a familiar butterfly in his particular habitat, in order to see if he has emerged, and if so, how he is doing". This was an untypically chirpy remark from the doyen of literary lepidopterists, and not quite in the mood of Guardian journalist Patrick Barkham when he set out on his extraordinary odyssey.


In 2009, strung out by urban angst, he decided to try to see every one of Britain's 59 species of native butterfly in a single summer. As an achievable task, slugs, at 23 species, would have been easier, but might not have made such a beguiling book.


Why do men – especially men – take on such acquisitive challenges? "Because they're there" would be an odd answer for such exquisite, myth-bound creatures as butterflies, and smack of bathos. But Barkham has a more powerful motive. For him the universe of butterflies is like Alain-Fournier's Lost Domain, a place of elusive and endangered beauty, charged with the lost freedoms and magic of childhood. In a brilliant opening chapter, he recalls a summer's day when he was eight years old on the north Norfolk coast. He is butterfly-hunting with his dad (a heroic character throughout the story) when they spot "a grey arrow flying low over the clumps of marram". It resolves into a Brown Argus — tiny, unprepossessing, difficult to distinguish. But when it spreads its wings it is a revelation: "A deep chocolate colour spread from the orange studs bordering the wings right into the soft brown hairs of its delicate body" – a metamorphosis as astonishing as that from caterpillar to butterfly.

Nearly 30 years on, he is still in thrall to the paradoxical beauty of insignificant things. It's a magnetism that depends partly on particularity (which makes his desire to collect a full suite perfectly understandable) but also on "fit". His evocative descriptions of the baking sand-dunes, and the Argus's flight through them, are intimations of a deeper vein of connectivity that unfolds during his summer's quest.

Landscapes are powerful presences throughout the book. He begins in the scrubby wasteland outside Bullingdon prison in late February, searching for the minute eggs of the Brown Hairstreak, whose emerged imago is the very last of the 59 species he sees in August: "I lightly held a slender branch of blackthorn, turned it gently to the light and systematically ran my eye along it, checking at every joint of a twig." Every thing in its exact place. In the months between he criss-crosses Britain, recording his search in this same vivid, adept, unapologetic voice, wonderfully catching the spirit of these ethereal creatures. He hopes, like Tove Jansson's Moomintroll, to see a lucky yellow butterfly, a Brimstone, as his first of the spring, but is baptised instead by a Small Tortoiseshell in his mum's garden, "the labrador of the butterfly world". In May he is caught up in the epic migration of Painted Ladies, a scarcely credible diaspora that takes them from north Africa to Iceland. On Start Point in Devon he and his dad find Pearl-bordered Fritillaries, distinguished by a single lustrous silver cell on the hindwing.


The minutely detailed patternings of butterflies are one of their mysteries, as the sexes find each other chiefly by smell. The male Adonis Blue (pictured) becomes so intoxicated by the female's pheromones that he punctures the pupa and mates with the female before she has hatched. Humans can sometimes detect butterfly odours, too. Barkham is tickled by the image of venerable professors "inhaling deeply over [a] prone downy body", and reports that the Meadow Brown is like "old cigar-box", the Wall Brown "heavy and sweet, like chocolate cream".

And a few butterflies can indisputably smell the odours of the human world. Picture this scene in an ancient hunting forest in the Midlands. Five tables covered with white cloths, and set with paper plates of rotten banana, dead mudfish, and Big Cock shrimp paste. The maître d' is the National Trust's rumbustious butterfly adviser, Matthew Oates, sporting a purple notepad and a purple band in his sunhat. The feast is an art event run by a local gallery, designed to attract the fabled Purple Emperor, whose gothic glamour is enhanced by the fact that it is, so to speak, more of a necrophile than a nectarphile.


Oates is one of many extravagant butterfly lovers (including Grimaldi and Churchill) to flutter through the book, but is most important because he introduces Barkham to the Welsh concept of cynefin – "a place of personal belonging". Butterflies have intense cynefin, which is why they are so vulnerable to change. The larvae of the Large Blue, whose life-cycle and rescue from extinction makes for the most extraordinary story in the book, can only exist in intimate partnership with one particular species of red ant.


And in the end Barkham discovers his own sense of cynefin. Suffering from "butterfly burnout" and dumped by his girlfriend, a reluctant "butterfly widow", he finds his senses – as they can in times of distress – start bristling like antennae. He finds he has become a dowser. Lost in a dark and rain-sodden Surrey wood, inexplicably scared, he discovers his grail, the ghostly Wood White, "the shape of a droplet of water, hung on a leaf nearby". He understands that its "ability just to be, and live fully in the present" – and in the present place – is exactly what he gets from butterfly watching. He has become butterfly-brained – not, in his case, a term of derision, but exactly catching the way his darting and discursive narrative reflects the lives of his familiars and his sense of empathy with them.

A Grand Day Out: Boat of Garten to Aviemore and return

We decided to take Rufus on an expedition, travelling by steam train from Boat of Garten to Aviemore and then walking back along the Speyside Way to Boat of Garten. This expedition was, of course, weather dependant. Despite our misgivings Rufus coped admirably with both the long car journey to Speyside and the adventure of the steam train.

Boat of Garten Station retains the features of a pre Beeching rural Station

The Ladies Waiting Room at the station is amazing - attractively set out with a sofa, fireplace and suitable reading matter. We were issued with sturdy cardboard tickets of the sort Grey Granite fondly remembers from childhood journeys to Scotland.



The train was quite crowded, Rufus sat on Grey Granite's knee and took an intelligent interest in all that was going on. He  permitted his fellow passengers to admire him and was given his own (red) ticket to look after by the ticket collector



The first part of the walk was along the main street in Aviemore, passing this bronze sculpture of an osprey

Beyond Aviemore Golf Course the Speyside Way passes through birch woods then crosses open moorland with spectacular views

The walk is quite close to the Speyside Line for much of the way. We saw the steam train as we crossed under the line near Kinchurdy farm road

After walking for about 6 miles Rufus appreciated the facilities of Boat of Garten Station

Eiders return

This morning Rufus and Grey Granite were pleased to see and hear two large rafts of eiders, one just off the Piper's Gwyte, the other close to Craig Ogston.There are herons over the Wastart and in the Philorth flood waters, oyster catchers and peewits on the edge of the floods. Pheasants are constantly wandering across the Line and there are several charms of goldfinches feasting on the thistles along the Line embankments. A pair of buzzards has been wheeling and crying over the Cairnbulg Castle woods. The occasional swallow still swoops over the Broch beach but the numbers are vastly down. Each morning and evening the geese fly over head, late afternoon brings shape shifting starlings.

Populating the floodwaters

The floods from last week have receded slightly but now support a population of 6 swans, these arrived yesterday, and a large flock of unidentified ducks as well as many gulls.