Decorating.

I've been decorating our other bedroom upstairs. And the snow has been decorating the landscape, white. For a couple of days our road was treacherous, and the main road not much better. Yesterday afternoon getting the pony in was mad as everything had had rain on it and then started to freeze again, fortunately I managed to get him to walk up the verge to a cleared crossing place, but it was a tricky exercise.

From the fields north of the house looking to Hoy.

During the coldest spell the bird feeders were busy with Chaffinch reaching double figures, two Brambling and wee flocks of five or so Goldfinch and Greenfinch. Fieldfare reduced in number and then vanished, Redwing reduced in number and eventually the large flock of Golden Plover left. Once The Shunan froze the ducks left so just flyby Mallard. However, on the one day of thaw, Goldeneye and Teal returned, but briefly. 

During a trip to Kirkwall for decorating supplies etc I had a look at the PDC, lots of gulls but no particularly interesting ones, some posed nicely mainly due to some intense bread feeding (not by me).

Black-headed Gull, 1cy

Black-headed Gull, adult.

Herring Gull, 3cy.

Herring Gull, 1cy.

Herring Gulls, 1cys a 3cy and finally an adult, left to right.

Decorating the bedroom has been a bit of an epic. We'd not dealt with this in 13 years and the carpet was in a bit of a state. The room has largely been used for storage with the occasional guest being squeezed in when necessary. We'd always thought that the floor beneagth was a mess, Louise reported it so but when we actually pulled the carpet and the underlay up, Louise realised she'd thought the underlay was chipboard. There was a floor-boarded floor. It had been treated slightly oddly with wood stained/varnished boards on three sides, the middle to one long edge was untreated though. The staining was not deep stain, so sander in hand, a new one purchased, thus the trip to Kirkwall, I set to, once we'd thrown the carpet and underlay out of the window! I've finally finished the third coat of varnish this evening. There are bits of skirting board I'll have to re-paint and I might put a bit of trim around the skirting, but now it is just waiting for the final coat of varnish to dry.

Anyway, there's a bit of a point to this story as during the decorating I took the cover off the ceiling light. This was fairly new, we'd had it replaced with a decent LED a few years ago, but it had a build up of dead things within. I had a quick look through, Pterostichus melanarius, unsurprisingly, various bits of Brown House Moth and White-shouldered House Moth, various more bits of woodlice species, a surprising Lithobious forficatus, and a live beetle. An interesting thing. I took a proper look at it today, Ptinidae. These can be bad news as some of them are wood munchers, but not this one. My usual method these days with things that look fairly distinctive is to go to Beetle Recording and look at the family illustrations and then go to Beetles UK and look at the various species. Ptinus tectus seemed to fit. It was still alive, so awkward to photograph and view but I'm sure of the ID. This species is an adventive, colloquially, Australian Spider Beetle, and in the UK it is a pest of museum collections where it eats unprotected specimens. There are only 134 UK records, and of the few Scottish records none have been confirmed. It has been found in Orkney previously though, and the records will be good. Indeed, LL informs me she found one, a dead one, in the cutlery drawer of her Stromness house, nearly as good as live in the lampshade! Shows that this is a species worth looking for in hidden corners of the house.

Ptinus tectus, Australian Spider Beetle.

I will kill it and photograph it properly, shouldn't let adventives like this go anyway.

The Shunan, Loch of Bosquoy, Loch of Harray hidden by mist.

Loch of Harray, orange.

Looking back to home from the north.