September has, so far, brought dry days and settled weather. The past midweek days especially, were a late Summer bonus, sunshine and wall to wall blue skies. Out on the islands of course you shouldn’t tempt fate, I’m writing this sitting in the car on the deck of the inter-island ferry that runs between Hoy and the Orkney mainland. We’ve just left the island of Flotta and are now passing the uninhabited island of Cava, a low grey shape, just visible through a thickening sea fog….
The clear skies coincided with a full moon. There’s no street lighting in this neck of the woods, from the garden there are a few pinpricks of light from the windows of houses across the bay and there’s the spinning on-off beam of a lighthouse at Duncansby Head, some four miles distant, just visible at the tip of the Scottish mainland, but that’s about it. To wander around outside after dark without a head head torch is to risk either walking into something or twisting an ankle, but on a clear night with a full moon all is transformed. The garden and landscape are lit with a silver light, the parish lantern, bright enough at midnight to cast dark shadows. Whitewashed houses, a mile or more distant, are clearly visible.
The recent warmth brought an influx of butterflies to the garden. Newly hatched Red Admirals, fresh and vivid in reds, whites and blacks, feasting in groups on the nectar of reddening sedums, a pair occasionally rising up to engage in a brief twisting ballet. Perhaps a courtship dance or perhaps a territorial dogfight. Slightly frayed at the edges Small Tortoiseshells are also being seen, together with Peacocks, who flash eyed wing warnings at passing bumblebees.
September brings Giant horntails to the the garden. Members of the sawfly family that are often given the name Giant wood wasp. They grow up to one and a half inches, 4cm, in length, and have a slow meandering up and down flight that gives the impression of having no real aim or destination. They’re completely harmless, the fearsome looking ‘sting’ is an ovipositor, used for laying eggs into rotting pine trees. Once hatched, the larvae will spend five years munching away before finally emerging as adults. Rinse and repeat. Despite knowing that they are harmless, when they land on you there’s a moment of apprehension, the huge size and yellow and black markings triggering an urge to do the ‘wasp dance’, before common sense kicks in.
In the meadow most of the wildflowers have turned to seed. One or two scabious are still in flower and there’s a single pink splash of ragged robin but at this time of year it is down to ox-eyes to keep the show going. A friends house along the way takes its name from the ox-eye daisies that once grew along the verges here, sadly lost over past decades. We reintroduced them as plugs grown from seed, crossing fingers that they wouldn’t die out after a season or two. So far so good, three years on from first reintroducing them, they have gone from strength to strength.
On a nearby favourite walk, in an area known as the Hill of the white Hammars, areas of coastal heath that a few weeks ago were lit lilac-blue with the pom-pom flowers of devils bit scabious, are now also cast with a confetti of pale dry seed heads. Grasses are turning dun brown. Dockens have thrown up dark spires of black seeds, a winter food source for Twite and Goldfinch. I walked there on Wednesday, a day of bright sunshine and big skies. I’d slung a camera with an ultra wide lens, a fisheye, over my shoulder. The lens has an angle of view so wide that it is easy to accidentally get the toes of your boots in the frame. Tilt the camera and you’ll get wild distortions, see the horizon in the ox-eye picture above, but keep it level and the lens just about behaves itself. In the photographs below only the curved boundary post in the seascape gives a clue to the lens used. In reality the post is straight as a die.
A garden in Orkney 
Brilliant prose as usual Chippy – I love the photo September Skies, has an Anselm Adams quality to it. A parish lantern? Sounds very evocative, I’ve never heard of one before. Round this part of Suffolk it’s also inky black at night, making the appearance of the moon in whichever phase very dramatic. When there’s no traffic rushing past the house, and if you get a whiff of woodsmoke on the breeze, it’s easy to believe you’re in a different century. Have a good week.
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Morning Bob, parish lantern came from an uncle, I must have been around five or six at the time, standing in an unlit street with him as he pointed out the full moon, one of those childhood memories that pops up decades later.
After too long a gap I’m thoroughly enjoying photography again, especially black and white, Ansel Adams is a favourite, hard to believe that some of his images were taken almost a century ago, so timeless. I thoroughly enjoyed seasonsshift this morning, it felt as if I was walking around with you. I did leave a comment but wordpress wouldn’t let me post until I signed in, hopefully awaiting approval and not lost somewhere in the WP ether 🙂
Enjoy your week.
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Hi Gary! Lost a long comment so trying again….
Those horntails look mighty scary, harmless you say….Hmmmm…
Even down here the moon looked incredible. Some years ago I was walking home and the supermoon seemed to fill the sky as it came over the sea. Incredible and magical. No wonder our ancestors were in awe of the skies. Made me feel very puny and insignificant.
I have found tentred and a couple of others online in the G. in a Friday column, dunno if it’ll be weekly.
Best wishes to you and Jacqui and have a good week. Margot
Please forgive me if this is a repeat. I don’t know what causes “The vanishing!”
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Hello Margot. The “vanishing” is a mystery, I replied to Bob on his blog today and my comment promptly disappeared, it must be a word press glitch.
The moon looked amazing this week, it rises so quickly though, I saw it peeping over the hill and by the time I’d set up a tripod in the garden it was already well up above the sky line. We should look to the skies more often, as you say, to remind ourselves how puny and insignificant we are.
The Horntails really are harmless but as someone who reacts badly to wasp stings standing still when one lands on you takes some effort, my inner “wasp dance” of flailing arms takes some controlling 🙂
Have a good week.
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Just read what happened to your message. The same thing happened to my message for your blog this morning. Very odd.
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Whatcha bob! Hope you are doing OK. x Margot
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Feeling bereft this morning, as I was away grizzly watching in a remote part of BC last week and didn’t know until now that Plot 29 is gone. However, glad to see your blog has a new and very interesting post. Love the butterflies, but especially love the black and white photos.
I had exactly your experience of a post vanishing when I wrote my first comment on here – I thought it was my lack of media expertise!
I’m also a fan of black and white photography. When in Los Angeles I stay at a hotel backing onto the magnificent LA Library, so I always go in to see what exhibition they have on, even if I’m in a mad rush between the 10pm arrival of Amtrak’s Pacific Starlight train and the early next day departure of the Pacific Surfliner. In 2019 they had on exhibit a huge collection of Ansel Adams photos that he gave them when clearing out his studio, many of them never before seen. Almost made me miss my train.
If you haven’t come across this documentary or photographer, I highly recommend both:
UNCROPPED (uncroppedfilm.com)
So refreshing to see someone who could have made a lot of money, specifically avoiding jobs that would have made him rich in order to take black and white photos of everyday life and develop them in his tiny New York kitchen.
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Hello Penny, the Grizzly watching sounds amazing. I think everyone will miss Plot 29, it was a rare thing and without Allan at the helm I think impossible for the Guardian to replace, such a friendly spot.
My first post to Bobs blog disappeared, second attempt was fine, it must be a glitch.
I would think the work of Ansel Adams in the flesh so to speak, is wonderful. I have a few of his books but to see his work as large prints on a gallery wall must be next level.
Thank you for the link, unfortunately I can’t get it to work in the UK but I did find a four minute short about it on the BBC iplayer, I also found his website, I’m sure you have it but I’ll link it just in case, I have also added a link to a favourite UK photographer, for someone who grew up in the working class North his work is a record of a now lost world that I recognise. His seacoal images date from the year I left school, I remember seeing them in a photography magazine a few years later and being amazed that he shot them on a, far from spontaneous to use, sheet film camera, very similar to the kit that Ansel Adams used for his landscapes.
https://www.jameshamiltonphotographernyc.com/
https://www.chriskillip.com/
Have a good week.
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Those Chris Killip photos are evocative for me too, especially the miner’s strike one and ‘Don’t vote – Prepare for the Revolution’ (I’m still waiting for that!). Lots of the pictures of the teens remind me of my Rural Studies students back in the day.
I see that The Getty in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles has some of his photos and will go seek them out next time I’m in LA.
Have a good week, and I’m looking forward to the pictures of you solar array in due course,
Penny
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Great photos Gary, including the close-ups. We have mainly had peacock butterflies this year, plus the small brown ones with the quarter orange, but they were earlier in the year. I’m trying to make sure there is caterpillar food here for them.
We have lost the swallows some time ago, but are hearing more geese every day, plus gatherings of starlings. The bay in front of our house is starting to get the normal influx of birds for the autumn, oyster catchers, curlew, various ducks, gulls and I’m glad to say our swan couples are back. They hardly ever seem to have cygnets though so no juvenile birds with them.
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Hi Geraldine, still a good few Swallows here, SSB said they had left Suffolk as well, I mentioned to Bob that I’m sure I read somewhere that some Swallows start their migration by initially heading North, that would explain why we are still seeing them, the other option is that we are seeing Shetland birds moving South, but if that was the case you would also be seeing them, odd that Orkney still has them.
We haven’t seen many skeins of geese yet, there are some big flocks of Greylags here but they will be resident birds that breed here. We are starting to see large groups of Curlew out on the shore. After a quiet spell Starlings are back in the garden, mostly juveniles who are just moulting into their adult plumage, they seem to have had a very good breeding year. We’ve yet to see a blackbird, absent now for quite a few weeks.
The butterflies were a welcome sight, few and far between this year.
Have a good week.
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