The weather was great this afternoon as Mary and I went for a walk with the dogs at the Forvie Nature reserve. Taking notice of the warning to keep dogs on leads during the bird breeding season, we set off through the dunes and past the little lochans than can be found there, one with a rather spectacular display of reeds. Everything was dry and the May flowers making their appearance among the heather clumps and the dune grass. Every so often we would spy a little bright blue dots of the violets beside the path and the occasional stalk of lady smocks.
As we sat in the heather for a little breather, a lark rose up above us with its distinctive piping song. Mary broke into song too, as she recalled a setting of the song from the Shakespeare play, Love’s Labours Lost. She had taken part in a performance of the play when she was at teacher training college at Jordanhill in Glasgow.
I had been thinking about the same song a couple of days before, although I had said nothing, when I spied some lady smock flowers blooming in the Hatton field, but I could not recall all the words of the song. I looked them up when we got home today:
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo!”
O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!When shepherds pipe on oaten straws
And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
I had to look up the cuckoo-buds reference…buttercups. All the elements were there with us today, daisies, violets, lady smocks, larks. The one thing that was missing was the Cuckoo. It’s been a long time since I have heard one, probably not since I was a teenager. I wonder if they are still present in Scotland?
On the way back to the car Mary spied a woolly caterpillar racing across the path. Poppy and Lily had a sniff. I reached for my camera and another song, this time a children’s one came to mind:
Little Arabella Miller found a woolly caterpillar.
First it crawled up on her mother, then upon her baby brother.
They said, “Arabella Miller! take away that caterpillar!”
I know nothing about caterpillar so it was back to the Internet. Our little woolly friend will grow into a Tiger Moth. In America they call it a Woolly Bear.