There is an odd assortment of nest boxes high under the eaves of our house, facing north across the meadows:

Lovely though they are, it was not the house sparrows that we were really after. Since 2019, from May to when the swifts leave again for Africa, we have been playing swift calls from speakers placed on the flat roof just below these boxes. This has become one of the sounds of the summer here and the hope was to attract the swifts attention to the boxes.

Almost from the beginning, the calls were very successful in bringing in small screaming parties of swifts that flew round and round the house for a while before heading off across the meadows to catch insects in their enormous gapes:

Often they repeatedly flew very close to the boxes but we never saw them actually going in.

But then, just before they left at the end of last summer and nearly four years after the calls first went on, I saw a swift going into the right hand side of the semi detached box and it remained in there for ten minutes. We hoped that this was a bird checking out the box to use the next time it was back in the UK. Sure enough, once the swifts finally returned this spring, they have come back to that same box and I strongly believe that they are now on eggs in there. By now there should be two or three eggs in the box and incubation will have started from the laying of the first egg, which will hatch nineteen or twenty days later.

We have seen the swifts go into the box many times this last week but they do so without really slowing down and I haven’t yet managed to get a photo. Once the eggs hatch, they will be coming and going more frequently to feed the chicks and perhaps I will have more of a chance. After hatching, the young swifts will remain in the nest for 37 to 56 days, depending on weather conditions, and I will have a reasonable window of time to attempt some photography.

Swifts are faithful to a nest site and like to nest in groups and hopefully this is just the beginning, leading to a small new colony establishing here in the coming years. There are four swift boxes up on the house, but we are also in the process of building a new garage with a wildlife tower:

Our recent Orkney holiday meant that we were away for eleven days. When we left for Scotland, buttercups were dominating the floral landscape of the meadows:

On our return the buttercups have been subsumed amongst the grasses that are growing very tall this year. It is now the turn of the oxeye daisy to take centre stage:

The flower of the oxeye daisy is a wonderful viewing bowl to photograph visiting invertebrates:

There are always a few pyramidal orchids in the meadows every year and they are now just coming into flower:

We planted several alder buckthorn whips here seven years ago because this is the food plant of the brimstone butterfly. Although alder buckthorn is a tree of wet places and weren’t likely to do very well in our dry chalky meadows, against the odds a few are thriving and are now two metres tall. At this time of year they are gratifyingly covered in brimstone butterfly caterpillars:

There were no young badgers in the meadows this year and there has only been a single fox cub. It is very elusive though and, although I see that mother all the time, this is the only sighting I have had of the cub:

The cub hasn’t been coming to the nightly peanuts which is where the best views of the resident foxes are to be had:

The One-eyed Vixen, with her entourage of magpies, has started coming up close to the house at dusk to try to hurry me along with the peanuts

The swift calls that we have been playing these last few years is only one of the sounds of summer here. Another is the iconic sound of the Merlin engine as Spitfires, now adapted to take a fare-paying passenger, regularly fly along the white cliffs, often barrel rolling over our heads. Sends the dog wild, of course.

We have also been treated to fantastic views of P&O’s new ship, The Pioneer, as she dropped anchor alongside us for three nights this week and proceeded to run through a noisy series of procedural checks involving the tannoy and the ships horn. She was built in China and has just arrived into Dover and is now undergoing tests and inspections before she goes into service this summer:

I am seeing a lot of fox cubs in the wood. Here is one sweetly peering out from under its mother:

Although the cubs are mostly seen wandering around on their own:

Squirrels are a scourge of the wood and currently there is no way to control them, short of shooting them for which we don’t have the stomach. Therefore, I’m afraid that I was rather pleased to see a squirrel in the mouth of this cub:

I would so much rather they caught squirrels than rabbits who don’t cause any harm to the woodland, don’t predate bird eggs and chicks and don’t compete with owls and woodpeckers for nesting places:

Green woodpeckers are not nesting in this hole following confrontations with squirrels, but they are still occasionally seen going in:

There are a lot of great spotted woodpeckers in the wood:

And their young have fledged already:

There was a big battle between the owls and the squirrels for this box and in the end I don’t think either are now nesting in there. However, the owls sometimes use it to roost by day:

Today is the summer solstice and from now on the days will get shorter. I leave you with a terrific sunset over the meadows this week, seen as I was taking the peanuts down for the foxes:

This was after 9pm, a fact that will be almost incomprehensible once we are once more plunged into the short days of the winter.

Fifteen years ago we enjoyed a very memorable and successful family holiday to Orkney and had always wanted to return some day. This is the year that we finally made it back.

Previously we had flown up to Inverness and then caught a coach up to the John O’Groats ferry taking us to Mainland Orkney where we hired a car. This time we decided to drive what is practically the entire length of Britain and so we allocated three days for the journey. The second day was spent pootling up through Scotland in the sunshine with time to make a couple of interesting diversions. We came across a large family of goosanders on the River Tay:

In Perthshire we went to see the Fortingall Yew, a male tree estimated to be 5,000 years old and is possibly the oldest tree in Britain and the second oldest in Europe. In 1769 the tree’s girth was measured at 52 feet but since then a lot of the tree has disappeared, having been stolen by trophy hunters. In 1785 the tree was given a protective wall and it still appears very healthy, although now split into several separate stems.

Clippings from the Fortingall Yew have been taken to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh to form part of their mile-long yew hedge. This conservation hedge has been created out of cuttings from threatened wild populations of yew as well as from famous heritage trees and is a way of conserving a biodiverse selection of yew DNA for the future.

On the third day of the journey, we caught the car ferry from Scrabster to Stromness, a route that took us past the famous sea stack, the Old Man of Hoy:

The Orkneys lie about ten miles off the north coast of Scotland and, although there are seventy islands, only twenty of them are inhabited. There are no foxes, badgers, weasels or squirrels, allowing ground-nesting birds to thrive there, along with the Orkney vole, found nowhere else in the world. In 2010, around the time of our last visit, there was a first sighting of a stoat on the islands and their numbers have increased rapidly since then. The stoats, with no natural predator there themselves, live off bird chicks and eggs and compete with the short eared owls and hen harriers for Orkney voles all of which is seriously bad news for the islands’ native wildlife.

A stoat eradication programme is now underway and, since it became fully operational in 2019, around 7,000 trap boxes have been deployed with 4,400 stoats now removed from the ecosystem. The programme employs thirty people and four sniffer dogs, trained to detect stoat scat.

We didn’t see a stoat on the island ourselves but we talked to people who had and so the programme clearly still has a way to go. I am sure every last one of these non-native predators will eventually be removed from the islands – but how on earth did they arrive there in the first place?

It’s not just the incursion of stoats that has happened since our last visit. There are now many more tourists on Mainland Orkney, not least arriving in large numbers off the cruise ships that regularly dock and disgorge their passengers at Kirkwall. We had seen the main visitor attractions previously and could mostly steer away from the crowds this time but we did revisit the atmospheric Ring of Brodgar one evening when we had it to ourselves:

This far north in June, it only gets dark for perhaps two hours overnight and we went out every evening after dinner looking for short eared owls and hen harriers when we appeared to have the island entirely to ourselves.

We also got good views of Short eared owl on our evening drives around the island. This owl flew close to the car but I couldn’t get myself mobilised in time for a photo:

The rough grassland in damp valleys was used as a nursery for thousands of greylag geese. But if they heard a car slowing down, they desperately scurried for deeper cover:

We were initially bemused as to why we were seeing cars parked in farmers fields like this…

…until we asked an islander and discovered that they are being used as mobile scarecrows to keep geese away from the crop.

Our home for the week was a secluded Airbnb with gardens reaching down to the Loch of Stenness, and with small islands of nesting arctic terns and lounging seals just in front. It was a beautiful and isolated location:

The peaceful garden had lots of flowers but we mostly only saw one species of butterfly on them, the large white. In fact it was predominantly only the large white that we saw as we ranged over the entire island. Perhaps it is this reduction in butterfly and presumably moth numbers, that leads to fewer caterpillars being around to feed chicks – and in turn meant we didn’t see any blue tits, great tits, robins or thrushes. We were also delighted not to see a magpie all week. The summer bird populations in Orkney are heavily weighted towards ground nesting species taking advantage of the absence of many predators.

Hobbister Moor is a RSPB reserve but it is also where peat is cut and dried to be used to flavour the whisky at the nearby Highland Park Distillery.

We really like Highland Park whisky and had done a tour around the distillery on our last visit, made most memorable because our son, who was just a few months short of his 18th birthday, had to have orange squash rather than whisky at the subsequent tasting much to his absolute disgust. That son is now thirty and this time we visited the smaller Scapa Distillery. We hadn’t heard of this one before but their whisky is entirely unpeated and it felt good to support a whisky for which Hobbister Moor does not have to be ravaged. I can report that we also very much like Scapa whisky and purchased two bottles of different types to enjoy when we get home.

The Old Man of Hoy is the famous sea stack, but we thought that the Yesnaby Castle sea stack on the west coast of Mainland Orkney with its window at the base was possibly the more impressive:

And there was another incredible sea stack just a bit further south at North Gaulton:

There is an absolute wealth of archeological interest in Orkney. At Birsay in the north west corner, a causeway leads across to The Brough, a small island that has the remains of a Viking settlement:

Scapa Flow is a large sheltered area of water cradled by several of the Orkney Isles and which was used by the British fleet in both World Wars. The German fleet was held here for seven months after the Armistice in 1918 until they scuttled their own ships to stop them passing into British hands.

At first, blockships were sunk into the gaps between the islands in an attempt to better protect the British ships and some of these hulks can still be seen. I understand that they have now become artificial reefs providing a home for interesting marine life:

But, in October 1939, a German U Boat sneaked through the gap between Mainland Orkney and Lamb Holm and torpedoed the Royal Oak with the terrible loss of 835 lives. After this, Winston Churchill decided to build a series of barriers to connect up islands and protect the eastern side of Scapa Flow.

The remaining entrances into Scapa Flow were then heavily defended with a mixture of booms, nets, search lights and gun batteries. Many of these defences can still be visited such as this gun battery at Hoxa Head on South Ronaldsay:

A lot of infrastructure still remains at the Ness Battery near Stromness including some of the accommodation huts.

The canteen hut was covered in murals painted by one of men:

The short and springy coastal turf was often covered in these spring squills which was a new plant for me:

Early purple orchids were to be seen throughout the island:

The moss carder bee is an incredibly rare bee in Kent and is the subject of intensive conservation endeavour. But this beautiful bee was to be seen everywhere in Orkney and it is so cheering that it is doing well there:

I had been hoping to see the rare great yellow bumblebee while we were on Orkney but it is a late flying species and the queens do not emerge until mid June. Flower-rich areas in the Orkneys are now the only place in Britain that these large bees, that have a distinctive black band between their wings, are to be found and I was sorry to have missed them.

There is much about Orkney that is very appealing, not least the absence of the dreaded Highland midge and the lack of deer ticks since there are no deer on the islands. It is also good to realise that all of the islands’ electricity needs are now usually being met by local renewable sources. There is much we still want to do and redo there and, although there are many Scottish islands that we are yet to visit, it is to Orkney that we think that we will return once more.