WEE BITS...(CONT.)   

 MIDGES…aaagh! 

A not very well-kept Scottish secret…midges (or as we say - Midgies) …one of our resident wildlife chums! Many of our most welcome visitors – especially to the West Coast – have met these wee chaps. “Culicodes impucantus” to give them their proper titles. More than one of the people – local or tourist – to meet them has remarked that “You can kill one of the little blighters but thousands of their relatives turn up for the funeral!” It’s really unfortunate that the ten weeks of their breeding season coincides with the main tourist season!

Midges prefer areas where there is good annual rainfall – so the West of Scotland is its favourite haunt as many places there have over 50 inches of rain a year (Lochaber had 220 inches in 1990!). It is only the female of the species that bites, having first detected its prey from the carbon dioxide which they produce. The insect scrapes the skin, then inserts a hollow hypodermic-style needle under the skin to draw blood – a nourishing meal for the midge prior to laying its eggs.

Over the centuries, many remedies have been formulated to deter the little demons and the British consumer magazine “Which” has even run tests on brands of insect repellents. Surprisingly, the US army has found that a cosmetic product “O So Soft” works wonders!

Smoke is also a good deterrent – Queen Victoria is said to have smoked cigarettes on her Highland visits for that very reason! A system has now been developed by Advanced Pest Solutions, based at Edinburgh University, which collects known densities of midge populations in various locations and combines that with weather forecasts to predict the worst affected places – similar to the pollen index of hay-fever sufferers. The forecast is refined by midge catch data provided by a network of traps at weather stations located from Shetland to the Borders. The forecast is being reported each day in the Aberdeen-based Press & Journal newspaper and is available online at www.midgeforecast.co.uk. 

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 America's first newspaper, the Boston News Letter, was published in 1704 by Islay-born bookseller and postmaster, John Campbell 

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...THE most northerly point in the United Kingdom? Muckle Flugga?  

  Not so, indeed, though most folk think it is. The honour goes to Out Stack or Ootsta in Shetland. Out Stack is the northernmost of the British Isles, lying immediately to the north of Muckle Flugga and 1.8 miles (3 km) north of the island of Unst. It is one of the North Isles of the Shetland Islands and lies within the Hermaness National Nature Reserve.

Out Stack is little more than a rocky outcrop, and is uninhabited. It has been described as "the full stop at the end of Britain". Travellers do not encounter any further land masses between Out Stack and the North Pole if heading directly north.

It can get gey windy up there: in 1972, the wind gauge went off the scale at 150 knots (173mph), and estimates made the top windspeed around 194mph.

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