Monday 27 February 2023
I thought the extractor fan mouse had gone. It had been over a week since it left its calling card (a solitary poo), but this morning I found another one. I mind less about it now and am still surprisingly okay about mice seemingly entering the roof at dusk and leaving at some point in the night/early morning. While we don’t have sight of them and the only trace of them is hopefully the one poo through the extractor fan, I can cope with them. Heard but not seen.
On Saturday, Chris and I had a flurry of activity and put up more pictures. In the afternoon, we drove to Peebles for a talk by a representative of South of Scotland Golden Eagle Project. There are three breeding pairs of golden eagles within the Borders area, though their nest site is kept secret. However, we know they have been spotted in our area and there are quite a few sightings “around” Peebles. People are invited to send in photos/videos of sightings, but apparently most of them are large buzzards rather than eagles. We were shown video footage of some buzzards, clearly darting around in a disturbed way. Then, the twenty or so of us in the audience gave a collective gasp as an eagle suddenly emerged from the side of a hill and flew towards the buzzards. I realise that seeing an eagle would not be a case of, “Ooo, do you think that’s an eagle?”, rather, “Oh my god, that’s an eagle!”. Their wingspan is more than two metres and they can dive at around 170 miles per hour. Their diet is more varied than I expected and includes badgers, herons, buzzards and quite a few other birds of prey, hares and any kind of carrion. Part of the project is to translocate golden eagles to the Borders area so hopefully there will be more over the coming years. Unfortunately, one female golden eagle managed to kill two of the males and they need to form breeding pairs to settle somewhere. They think that she killed them over competition for food. On the way home after the talk, we looked out for eagles, fully expecting to see one. We mainly saw crows – I have been saying “crows” in a generic corvid way, which is inaccurate; I think most that we see are ravens, maybe also rooks. There are a lot of very large corvids around here, as well as buzzards.
Yesterday, we returned some things to IKEA and went to Edinburgh. I was surprised how excited I was to wander around shops, mainly just window shopping. We walked around Edinburgh New Town, including Dean Village and around Haymarket. I have always really enjoyed Edinburgh and often thought it was one of only a few cities I’d want to live in other than London. Yesterday, I liked it even more, though I hadn’t realised Dean Village was on some kind of Instagram tick-list. I’ll not be going there on a sunny day or over summer. I would love to live there for the prettiness of it but could never live there for all the people taking photos, selfies and what seem to be mini photoshoots, the kind where people take along a photographer to secure the ’best’ shots of them in certain places. Dreadful, and horribly oblivious to all the people who live in the area.
Edinburgh, for me at least, is not a substitute for a London fix, but it is a great city fix. And I am increasingly realising that city life is something I love. Currently, I feel roughly 75% rural/remote and 25% city. If I could live in our Scottish home but click my fingers to transport myself immediately back to our flat in Lewisham, I think that would be perfect. I would enjoy popping back to London for short chunks of time over a day, but always sleeping in the quiet, dark (or bright if it’s a clear night and there are stars and the moon on display) and clean air of Scotland.