Category: Garden WildlifePage 6 of 9
On the morning of 29 June I arrived at the back door of the herbarium to start my day’s work and spotted two insects on the door. One…
In the week of 15-19 June six species were added to the Edinburgh Garden’s wildlife list, taking it over the 750 mark. “Species 750” was a minute black…
May began as April ended – chilly for the time of year. There were one or two warmer spells, and the Botanics weather watchers will tell you that…
Welcome to this instalment of the Botanics Sparrowhawks blog. The feathers above were found below one of the nests and Hugh Coventry, an expert on sparrowhawks who regularly…
Over the past four years I have been very fortunate to have been able to observe the activities of the sparrowhawks (Gaelic: speireag) in the garden. These beautiful…
April 2015 see-sawed in its weather, with a warm spell in the first week or so (till 9th, with temperatures up to around 18 degrees C in the…
March 2015 was another chilly month that ended, just after “Summer” Time began, with showers of hail and sleet. Two species were added to the Garden’s invertebrate list…
February 2015 was chilly for the most part with temperatures mostly not rising above 7 degrees C, and with a light snowfall near the beginning of the month….
Watching bees visitng flowers is something to look forward to in the run up to spring. Their choices are far from random and they will specialise in whatever…
The first month of 2015 started off mild, bringing out a few invertebrates, but turned colder from mid-month with some frosts and light snow. There were a few…
Last year, 2014, was a good year for bird recording in the Botanics. 63 bird species were recorded during 2014. This is one more than 2013 and the…
On 3 January 2015, Gavin Powell, one of the RBGE Visitor Welcome team, spotted an unusual bird with bright yellow head perched on brambles opposite the Cryptogamic Garden….
December 2014 was a month of varied weather, starting rather cold but sunny with some slight frosts, with a wetter, stormier period in the middle of the month,…
November 2014 continued to be mostly mild with no notable cold spells although there were several fairly typical days of ‘November gloom’ and indeed the second half of…
The first three weeks of October 2014 continued the warm theme of recent months but the weather broke in the final ten days or so when it was…
During the Sparrowhawk breeding season (and after) I have been keeping a diary of the activities of the Sparrowhawks in the garden which you can read below: …
Well alright not real hummingbirds. The closest thing we have in Britain is the equally spectacular humming-bird hawk-moth. This extraordinary day-flying moth put in an appearance in the…
Moth fly, Pericoma fuliginosa September 2014 was mostly dry and warm but there was a week-long period in the middle of the month when it was very damp,…
Discovery of a plant previously unknown in an area is not what you might expect to happen within a botanic garden. Such places have large managed collections of…
The last couple of weeks of September have been fantastic for Red Admiral butterflies. Six at a time have been seen on several occasions, and on Friday 26th…