Christine's walking & birds blog

Where the ditch widens and deepens into a couple of pools, I counted at least 70 frogs.


In the shady, murky pool opposite there were at least ten more; and further along the track, where a black plastic pipe served as a culvert, there were at least another ten. This time, I heard them singing - I suppose it must be a series of croaks, but it was difficult to hear and impossible to record above the noise of the wind, and sounded to me like a sort of gruff purring. Quite pleasant to listen to.

Although there was some welcome sunshine, the wind was very cold, and I wasn't tempted to a long walk. The only birds I saw were four whooper swans on Loch Craggie and three pairs of stonechats on fenceposts along the road.

I'm lucky that I can drive out to several places and get some fresh air and exercise without encountering crowds - today, I didn't see another soul. Earlier, I decided to be a bit more positive in my shopping efforts and was at Tesco half-an-hour after they opened. This paid off, as they still had half-a-dozen small packs of loo-rolls on the shelves, and about a dozen jumbo-sized kitchen rolls. I took one of each. But they were clean out of hand-sanitizing gel (and have been since the start of the panic) and clean out of tissues, so I hope we don't get colds!

We'd planned to put the bungalow on the market in May, but coronavirus will probably scupper that. Oh well. At least if we're still here in the summer I'll be able to look for a northern emerald dragonfly - the glimpse I had last August (not to mention the poor picture I got) was not enough.