I have great difficulty minding my own business. It’s surprising what you learn by being nosy.
All sorts of things have appeared in this column because I stopped and asked daft questions.
Walking with Inka along the bank of the River North Esk at The Burn, near Edzell, I saw a man kneeling down studying a fallen tree.
I just had to know what he was up to.
Neil Cargill from Forfar, but originally from Arbroath – well, he had to be with the name Cargill – is a keen amateur wildlife photographer.
He showed me a very good picture of a jay with its beak full of peanuts.
Jays are notoriously wary birds and difficult to get close to.
I hear their harsh warning cry in the woods much more often than I actually see them.
Neil was trying to get a picture of the gills on the underside of the caps of a group of small mushrooms growing on the old stump.
I had to show him my picture of what I think were two velvet brittlegills which I had snapped just minutes earlier.
The whole question of fungi identification is a minefield so far as I am concerned, so I can’t be certain what they were.
They were growing beneath beech trees which, according to my fungi book, they favour and they appear from summer to late autumn – so they ticked two of the boxes.
Fungi Season is here! 🍄 Now is the time to start exploring the damp woodlands for some of our fantastic #fungi species – In preparation, you can watch our ‘Introduction to Fungi ID’ talk on our YouTube channel 👇https://t.co/6G7ywdFhm2
#FlashackFriday #NaturalHistoryLive pic.twitter.com/qyfd058A5Q
— FSC BioLinks (@FSCBioLinks) September 17, 2021
Some of our fungi have been blessed with the most outlandish names.
There’s mousepee pinkgill and weeping slimecap.
Poisonpie sounds delicious but you might be better off with plums and custard.
Then there’s dog stinkhorn, toughshank jellygall, bitter bigfoot webcap… There must have been some tortured minds around when they were handing out names for our mushrooms and toadstools.
Fisherman’s tea party
As we carried on down the riverbank a plume of smoke rose from the rocks below us where the river narrows at The Loups, the series of waterfalls that migrating salmon must negotiate as they make their way each spring to the headwaters of the river system to spawn.
The smoke was coming from a fisherman’s Kelly kettle, a marvellous camping kettle which boils a litre and a half of water in about four minutes.
The kettle part is a water jacket surrounding a fire chamber so that the heat source comes from the centre of the kettle rather than beneath it like a pot on the stove – making it incredibly efficient.
For fuel it uses just a handful of small sticks, pine cones, bark – even dry grass.
Inka was agitating to get on his way though so we left the fisher to his cuppa and carried on down the river.
Grey goose has landed
The grey geese are back.
Regular readers know how excited I get when their raggedy chevrons beat down the Howe of Strathmore and I hear their bugling calls.
They’ve left their summer breeding grounds in Iceland and Greenland and, following immemorial flight lines, flown more than a thousand miles over lumpy, leaden seas to escape an arctic winter for our more benign climate.
Their last sight of land will have been by the light of the midnight sun and they won’t see land again until they pass over our northern coast.
Some will make landfall at the Loch of Strathbeg, south of Fraserburgh, others head for Montrose Basin.
It’s reckoned one tenth of the world’s pink footed geese use the Basin either as a staging post on their way south or as a permanent roost each winter.
They talk of goose fever, though it’s usually in relation to wildfowling.
I have a love affair with the grey geese – the hounds of heaven, someone called them, and it’s easy to understand why when you hear their yelping calls blown in on the wind.
Denys Watkins-Pitchford, who was a prolific writer on the countryside under the pen-name BB, wrote – I do not think that any man who has a spark of imagination within him can fail to be moved by the almost unearthly music of a large skein of wild geese upon the wing.
For me the grey geese are the authentic voice of winter.
Black lab is green with envy
The little green devil of jealousy was up to his tricks in the Whitson household recently.
We were looking after son Robert’s dog, Tiggy, for a few days while he and Katie had a short break.
Suddenly Inka wasn’t the golden boy and it didn’t half put his nose out of joint.
We wanted Tiggy to feel at home and kept to her normal timetable as much as possible.
Her mealtimes and Inka’s didn’t coincide and Inka went into a deep huff when she was fed and he wasn’t.
And when Tiggy looked for a pat and a tickle a black nose was soon thrusting her out of the way.
But harmony has descended on the Whitson household once more – Tiggy has returned home to Rosemarkie.
MAN WITH TWO DOGS: Days of dog roses, and a dog, by the river