A warbler day, but a slug and beetle week

Monday was an absolutely brilliant day, a visit to a favourite village, lots of birds and warm sunshine. The rest of the week was a bit bogged down with survey work but lots of interesting things to see whilst doing it.

Aberlour was the village, right by the River Spey, surrounded by whisky distilleries and home to Walkers Biscuits. Fishermen were all along the river, and though I didn't see them catch anything it is always fascinating to sit and watch them flicking fishing line and fly way out over the water, only to retrieve it after about half a minute, and then start all over again. The village, which straddles the busy A95 is worth a visit and is also a great starting point for a walk along the Speyside Way ( red dots on map) to the next village of Craigellachie, returning on the opposite side of the river. Or, you can follow the Speyside Way in the opposite direction to Carron, again making your way back on the other side of the Spey. Conveniently, there is a suspension footbridge across the river by the car park in Aberlour, allowing the choice of two circular walks. This area gives a nice variety of birds and broadleaved woodland when compared to Nethybridge and Abernethy, and consequently a few more warblers are to be seen/heard on these walks. The warbler haul for the day was willow warbler, whitethroat, blackcap, garden warbler and sedge warbler and a total of 49 birds were seen or heard, though I always struggle with the difference between blackcap & garden warbler songs! I always like to produce as full a list of birds from an outing as possible for BTO Birdtrack recording, so I started off the walk by skirting the church graveyard, following the small stream back to the A95 (admiring the wee pack-horse bridge over the stream on the way) and walking back along the high street seeing lots of house sparrows and swifts, before turning left to get back to the river via the children's play-park. It was then a case of following the Speyside Way towards Craigellachie. The River Spey along this stretch is fairly wide and shallow allowing excellent opportunities for the salmon fisher-folk, many of whom wade well out into the river to fish the best rapids and slack water by the banks. The next good bird for the day was common tern, not one but two, dipping down to fish the river. With many shingle backs along the river there has to be a possibility that these birds could breed here. The Speyside Way actually follows the old Grantown- on-Spey to Elgin railway line and the old station buildings in Aberlour now provide office space for the Speyside Way rangers. From the path you get good views into the adjacent woodland where several pairs of starlings were feeding their young in natural holes in some of the older trees, and siskins, treecreepers and great spotted woodpeckers were also present. On reaching Craigellachie you leave the Speyside Way and enter the play-park to head towards the old road bridge over the Spey. This bridge is worthy of a visit in its own right, built as it was by Thomas Telford in 1814. Having crossed the bridge an old road takes you up to the B9102 which in turn takes you to the Macallan Distillery with its Visitor Centre where you might be able to taste a "dram" if you were to pop in before continuing your way back towards Aberlour! Check out their website at http://www.themacallan.com/ for more information. However, the best route to follow is the fisherman's track back down to the Spey just by the distillery entrance. A few yellowhammers were singing along this section of the walk, and both pied and grey wagtails were feeding young. Follow the river back to Aberlour and across the suspension bridge to get back to the car park. Brilliant.

It happened again this week, another violet ground beetle (Carabus violaceus) walking along a track with a wood ant attached to its leg! Why, I wonder, doesn't the beetle just turn round and grab the ant in its powerful jaws, and get rid of it? Is it actually quite terrified of this predatory ant? I found this a little odd when, later in the week I came across the same species of beetle killing a great big black slug. Certainly, if other ants followed the attached ants scent, the beetle would be in trouble (see left), but the beetle covered 15 metres in just a few minutes so it is unlikely that any ants would be following so quickly. But what about the beetle itself? Do you see these beetles around your garden? If so, do please leave them to carry on foraging because they are very beneficial to your garden. The violet (violent?) ground beetle is a member of the Carabidae family of which there are about 350 species in Britain. Many of this group of beetles are voracious predators and will attack and eat aphids, other pest insects and slugs and snails. By encouraging them to live in your garden you can use the beetles as a natural form of pest control. Unlike some other beetles, violet ground beetles can't fly, their wing cases (elytra) have become fused together, acting as protective armour. A few logs, leaf litter or the odd stone lying around the place will provide the shelter they require to hang around your patch. If you disturb the beetle however, it can discharge a noxious and highly irritant fluid from the tip of its abdomen, so just leave them to look after your garden. And the beetle with the slug about ten times its size? Well, having got its powerful jaws into the rear-end of the slug (see picture) it was able to release a fluid onto the slug from its jaws, disabling the slug and waiting for the digestive enzymes in the fluid to make the slug easier to eat. Eight hours later the pair were still together, the slug dead and the beetle with a large lump of food that it was going to stay close to until it had had its fill. Amazing.

Poor slug, but please don't be too hard on this big black slug (Arion ater), it is rarely as destructive as the three smaller species you often see around the garden and your veg patch. Put out a saucer with some beer in it if you don't believe me, and see which species fall in. Like all slugs it has a fairly powerful set of mouth parts, well able to rasp away at rotting vegetable matter, fungi, manure and even dead animals! At this time of year I also see very acrobatic black slugs, keen to feed on the abundant flush of broom flowers on the many bushes around the place. Way off the ground, the slugs seem quite confident as they "slide" out along the broom stems to get at the emerging flowers, though it only seems to be on damper days that you come across this balancing act. Have a look next time you are out and about on a damp day and see if you can witness this "death defying" act!

Joan and Robert, our chalet visitors last week wondered what the yellow dust was covering their car. In previous diary entries I have shown and mentioned the new growth appearing on the Scots pine trees. The male pollen bearing "flowers" are now fully grown and, as the wind starts to blow, the pollen is wafted around and some of it will land on the new pine cone flowers ensuring fertilisation and new cones developing next year. The new shoots and pollen flowers are mini works of art and worth looking at in close up, mostly they are completely yellow but occasionally you find vivid red ones, both produce the same fertilising yellow pollen. A still, warm spell of weather at this time of year can create perfect conditions for visitors to the area to think that the forest is on fire if suddenly a breeze develops and the pollen from the pine trees is lifted high into the air above the forest. The pollen looks just like a swirl of smoke as it wafts across the tree tops. Deposits of the same pollen into Loch Garten can similarly provoke genuine phone calls of worry to the local environmental health department reporting a serious pollution incident at the loch as a thick yellow sludge washes up in the loch shore! It really does look like someone has deposited a tin of yellow paint in the loch. I had a bit of fun trying to capture a pollen "event" at one of our trees in the forest, I think you should just about get an idea of just how much pollen must be blowing around when you see how much appears from just a small, low-lying branch, shown left without pollen and right as pollen appears.

There is also a lot of evidence locally of the Scots pine leader shoots of new growth being eaten by capercaillies (left). It would appear, that over the years, the same young trees are targeted by the birds and they then start to develop a very bushy appearance. I have no doubt that eventually the nibbling away at the new growth helps form some of our characteristic round-topped Caley pine trees in the forest. Instead of the trees growing tall and pointy, they develop a very rounded crown much loved by cone feeding crossbills. Browsing by red and roe deer on the leading shoots of young trees will also produce the same effect. The tree on the left is typical of what the foresters and sawmills require whilst the one on the right is typical of many of the trees of probably higher conservation value, within Abernethy. Elsewhere in the forest the first crested tit families are appearing much to the relief of visiting birdwatchers. An evening wander through some restored bog woodland produced a nice surprise. An alarming mallard alerted me to the possibility of a water-borne predator being about, and lo-and-behold a foraging otter popped out of the clumps of reeds! After poking its head into many of the reed clumps, it swam off down the dammed up drain. Phew! As with the rest of the UK the weather of late has been changeable to say the least. On 25th I was surrounded by huge numbers of large red damselflies one minute and pelted with hailstones the next, not the best weather for progressing the mason bee survey (Osmia uncinata) even though lots of bird's-foot trefoil is now starting to flower. This wee bee likes the temperature to be in the high teens, and only starts to forage once the sun shines fairly continuously throughout the day. Fingers-crossed for next week.

Happy reading & have a nice Bank Holiday

Stewart & Janet

Firwood drainpipe in action as seen & queried by chalet visitors!

All photos © Stewart Taylor

Chapelton outing & Scalan Seminary

The week started with a great day out in one of our favourite haunts, Chapelton by the Braes of Glenlivet. We make the walk into a circular route leaving the car at the junction of the Chapelton - Clashnoir roads, walking along the road to Chapelton, along the track to the Scalan Seminary or College of Scalan on the map, across the fields to the ruined crofts before returning down the Clashnoir road. This is a super area for waders with lots of lapwings, oystercatchers and curlews and a total of 41 bird species were seen during the walk. Perhaps the highlight in this season of crossbill scarcity, was a group of twelve crossbills, possibly Scottish but also possibly Parrots! The party also had four juveniles, so the birds are breeding in some areas. At the end of the tarmac road you pass the distillery and the Glenlivet Spring Water bottling plant, and close by is a parking area with information about the Crown Estates Glenlivet Estate. A short walk of about a half a mile takes you to the College of Scalan, a building well hidden from view until you are almost up on it. To quote from information given on the Internet at http://www.glenlivet.org.uk/page19.html ; "Scalan (Gaelic for turf-roofed shelter) is a plain 18th century house in the Braes of Glenlivet. It is by far the most significant relic of the 'penal days' when the native Scottish catholic community kept the ancient faith alive in northern Scotland". More information can be found also at http://www.glenlivetestate.co.uk/history_glenlivet.html . In recent years a lot of effort has gone into restoring this building to its former glory to allow the visitor an insight into how Rectors and Bishops of the time lived, and to show where so many students over so many years came together to study their faith. Well worth a visit. The more adventurous can visit Scalan from the other direction - from the Lecht ski road via the old lead mines. The surrounding pictures give you an idea of the location, note the heavy burning of the heather moorland for red grouse in the background, and also the inside of the building.

As you walk across the fields towards the Clashnoir road, you pass through what can only be classed as a very sad sight, a whole township of buildings, long since vacated, but most still showing that not long ago, quite a large community of people lived here. The area is quite heavily grazed by sheep, possibly one of the reasons that so many lapwings, oystercatchers and curlews breed here. There must be a dozen or so ruins within the township, some of which look like they were only vacated a few decades ago. The ministers wife at the church in Chapelton is happy to provide more information about this township, if ever you are in the area.

The bus pass was in use again this week, inspired by Neil and Julie's outing from the chalet the week before. This time I took the bus the whole way to the Cairngorm car park, with the aim of walking back down to Glenmore before catching the bus back home. I had intended following the recently completed Allt Mor footpath from the car park, but with a need to check the road verges and the Ciore na Ciste car park for birds-foot trefoil plants and Bombus monticola bees I followed the tarmac down as far at the path to the reindeer enclosure. I saw plenty of the "blaeberry bumble bees" and saw that the trefoil was just coming into flower indicating that a visit in June would be worthwhile to look for a small mason bee called Osmia inermis. This wee bee is a solitary bee which builds its nest under flat stones in the areas where it is known to occur. People who have studied the bees at some of the few known UK sites know that it has an amazing life cycle, never putting all its eggs into one basket, literally. The cells under the stones where the larvae are reared are sealed at the end of the summer with fully formed bee larva inside. The larva start to emerge during the following summer, but only a percentage of the new bees come out. The next summer a few more emerge and a few more during the third summer, ensuring that some bees will survive even if conditions in one of the years is not optimum for the bee to breed! Amazing. Plenty of hailstones as I wandered down the path. As I walked along the path towards the reindeer enclosure a group of visitors were making their way over to see the reindeer and I was just in time to learn something completely new. At the bridge across the Allt Mor is a large rock and carved into the rock are a few words linking the bridge with the reindeer and with the man responsible for re-introducing the reindeer Mikel Utsi - "UTSI BRIDGE 1979". As I walked down the path towards Glenmore the woods were alive with willow warblers and there were plenty of small clumps of wood sorrel and wood anemone flowers and in one damp area a neat little group of horsetails were just starting to emerge, they looked so good I just had to stop and take a picture. This looks like wood horsetail Equisetum sylvaticum. This group of plants are close relatives of our ferns, the plant doesn't produce flowers but bears spores just like the ferns. Horsetails are relic plants from pre-history - "If the hero in H. G. Wells' story 'The Time Machine' travelled back ca. 350 million years, he couldn't fail to notice horsetails as he stepped out of the machine into a steaming swamp. The horsetails would have been a dominant part of the vegetation with magnificent specimens reaching 30m or more in height and 1m in diameter." (Dave Walker - Internet). Not quite as tall but still a very stylish plant.

Good old EJ and Henry. I said last week watch this space, and sure enough the Loch Garten osprey pair have made their own wee bit of history. The one egg from last week has been added to and the pair are now sitting on three eggs. This has, we think, happened only once before in Britain - ospreys re-laying, but such was the significance of the Garten birds repeating the feat that national TV in the form of the BBC came to record the event. Throughout Tuesday the ospreys were on the telly, five to six, five to seven, eight, nine - lunchtime - and even the main news at six thirty in the evening. I hope you managed to catch one of the broadcasts, if not, you can still catch up with all the comings and goings via the RSPB webcams. We even had our own satellite dish for the day and staff, visitors and volunteers were all interviewed and staff member Dave, who had predicted a re-lay now has even more "amazing" facts to impart to Centre visitors. Just as amazing was the sighting of three males and one female capercaillie, on Monday afternoon, at 5.30!

Speaking of capercaillie it has been a week of tracks and signs, a few clues appearing around the place to show that the females are now mostly on eggs. Earlier in the year I mentioned how important bog cottongrass was as a food source for caper and black grouse. Well, the food supply (in addition to the norm of Scots pine needles) for the birds has had a welcome and very nutritious addition over the last week via pine pollen flowers as well as the new shoots on the tips of the branches (picture right,). On some low pine bushes you can see where the capers have been eating the newly emerging shoots, but the pine trees are now starting to "flower" ie flowers that will develop into new pine cones, but for the "flowers" to grow, they need to be pollinated and trees throughout the forest have masses of yellow pollen bearing flowers developing just below the new shoots (picture left). These pollen flowers look a little like sugar puffs, all stuck together along the new shoots, and both male and female capercaillies are eating these to gain a rich source of protein. How do we know? Well you just need to look down and in some places in the forest large, strange coloured droppings have started to appear. Male dropping are more or less normal size but yellow, however, the females, who are now spending long hours incubating their clutch of eggs (the males don't do any of the incubation) eventually have to leave the nest to feed and to go to the loo! And boy, do they go to the loo - after all, they might have been sitting on eggs for twelve hours or more. So, in the females case, you get very large dropping affectionately known in the trade as "clocker droppings", very yellow and very big (see picture right with yale key for scale). They are so unusual that visitors often ask what they are when they have encountered them on their walks. How do we know that the yellow is pine pollen? Samples have been analysed and the microscopic pollen grains have been identified. I hope you managed to have your dinner BEFORE you read this weeks diary. Another feature of capercaillie behaviour at this time of year is dust bathing, whether it is under the roots of wind-blown trees or along the sides of some tracks, the birds spend some time each day dust bathing. It isn't easy to see, but the picture right shows two dust baths complete with normal pine needle filled droppings on the left and yellow "pollen" droppings on the right. What a topic!

And to close. I had a report of a visitor finding a pole trap, yes, a spring-loaded trap placed with the jaws open, on top of a pole, in an area where birds of prey breed. Birds of prey like to perch on posts - whack - one or two broken legs and death by hanging upside down legs held firmly in the trap. This is actually 2007 not 1907. Green hairstreak butterflies are out and about, four-spot libellula dragonflies on the wing and, at last, spotted flycatchers arrived (16th), a little late. On Friday evening I had a violet ground beetle walking along a track with a wood ant firmly attached to one of its legs, a bit like one of the adverts recently seen on the telly. A single ant wouldn't be able to kill a large beetle, but a gang of ants certainly could. I didn't have time to await the outcome but do wonder whether there is a beetle still wandering the forest with ant attached!

That's it. Happy reading.

Stewart & Janet

Carex nigra - black sedge growing in a bog

All photos © Stewart Taylor

An historical week

A week ago it rained, at 9pm on 4 May, great relief as the parched ground was wetted and I
didn't need to water the garden. However, the rain heralded the onset of a very cool and cloudy spell of weather with regular rain - perhaps more like the weather we should be getting at this time of year, but it would be nice to have the odd hour or two of sun! With the rain the bright greens of new growth throughout the forest have been brilliant, blaeberry on the forest floor, and birch trees, mainly, above ground and into the canopy. Dodging the showers on Sunday I went to have a look at an odd patch of clubmoss growing well up into Abernethy Forest that looked like it should have been alpine clubmoss (Lycopodium alpinum) but had many of the characteristics of Issler's clubmoss (L. issleri). A tiny piece sent to our local expert confirmed it to be "odd" alpine clubmoss, growing well below is usual mountain haunts. Whilst out in that part of the forest I dropped down to the river to see how a rare moss I had found way back in February was faring. At the time I had set myself a wee project to check out previously known sites for the green shield moss (Buxbaumia viridis) when I came upon its close relative - the brown shield moss (B. aphylla) see centre of picture right. Both species are unusual in that they don't have any obvious leaves but produce an odd shaped capsule on a short stalk, normally found growing on decaying wood. When I got to my decaying log the two original capsules had gone, probably eaten by slugs, but, on the side of the same log was another capsule which has escaped detection first time round - and the slugs! And my original wee survey? Twenty known capsules of the green shield moss increased to 72, with seven new logs sites located! A brilliant couple of months spent crawling around many decaying logs, and the brown shield moss was new for Abernethy.

The warm weather of April has left a great legacy of masses of blossom and flowers on trees and bushes. In the garden the old apple tree is a mass of pink and white flowers, which, sadly because of the cooler weather, might not get pollinated. We are still eating the apple pies from last years crop! A walk along the Explore Abernethy path from the village to Broomhill on the River Spey took me through masses of bird cherry trees (left) white with blossom which hopefully will produce a good crop of small black berries later in the summer, much loved by the birds. Geans or wild cherry trees have already finished flowering, and these trees will produce the more familiar red cherries in July. The broom bushes (right) are also at maximum flowering with their strange "spring loaded" flowers attracting a few of the bees that are out and about. Once at Broomhill, you could catch the Strathspey Steam Railway train to Boat of Garten or Aviemore, this is the station that featured as Glenbogle, in the recent TV series Monarch of the Glen.

The banks of the river close to the bridge are home to more than fifty pairs of sand martins, the floods of winter cutting a new face for the birds to dig into each year. This section of the Spey is very "active", with water rushing out from the River Nethy a few hundred metres up river depositing sand and gravel into the centre of the Spey. This in turn is forcing the Spey slightly side-ways, cutting into the farmland on its southern bank, maintaining a home for the sand martins each year. A big flood on the river in January saw the Spey a mile wide at one point between Nethybridge and Boat of Garten, with "tide-lines" still visible in many fields and lots of debris stuck in the timbers of Broomhill bridge. A pair of dippers have made good use of this, and have built their nest in one of the legs of the bridge (left) on top of the debris. The birds are currently feeding young. The sand martin bank can be seen in the distance. A kingfisher has been seen here, so who knows if we will be able to prove breeding, not a regular occurrence in this area. In one of the areas of bird cherry a couple of singing blackcaps were new arrivals, the walk to the bridge and back producing 44 species of birds. Young lapwings are starting to appear in the fields and oystercatchers are still in the process of laying eggs (right), perhaps some have lost their first clutches? The catchment of the River Spey between Kingussie and Grantown on Spey is the best mainland site for farmland waders in the UK, with ongoing surveys keeping track of the numbers of waders breeding. So it was that on Wednesday, yours truly was out on his bike early, pedalling to one of the survey sites noted for good numbers of lapwings, curlews and oystercatchers. Throw in a few redshank, snipe and skylarks, and the site (right) is exceptional. Ian and Donnie use plenty of "muck" and try to keep to the old fashioned "traditional" way of farming, and the results are there for all to see. Not too sure about the push for beech hedges via grants though, the Scottish Executive should really ask the farmers what would be the best way to spend tax-payers money to help wildlife rather than introduce a practice which might be sensible south of the border but in the Highlands of Scotland?

Stewart became a Research Assistant this week, but don't worry, he won't be giving up the day job! Over the last couple of summers searches for a small wee mason bee (Osmia uncinata) have produced a few new sites so, with the help of a few sunny days, the search area will be extended outwards to see if the bee occurs outside Abernethy Forest. So, for a week or so, looking down at bird's-foot trefoil will be the main pass time as the search for the bee progresses. The bee experts are also keen to know what plants the bee forages on so a few bee-nestboxes have been erected to see if we can tempt the bee to breed in them and find out what pollen is brought back to the breeding hole. If pollen is found, this will be identified and management for the bee can then be targeted, ensuring the bee has areas with the right flowers to provide a suitable food supply in the future. Amazing! I will leave you to guess what this picture is about, but the holes visible in the lump of wood give a clue.

And the historical bit? I am sure if you were listening to the radio over Saturday or reading some of the papers, you will be aware that what I was hoping for last week actually came to fruition - EJ and Henry, the Loch Garten ospreys, have another egg! This is virtually unheard of in the osprey world, an osprey laying a second clutch, so yet another chapter has been written in the comings and goings of the Garten ospreys. Staff at Loch Garten are over the moon, as Ellie and Faith show. Remember you can keep up with events at the nest site via the RSPB webcams. Can the birds produce more than one egg? Watch this space.



Happy reading

Stewart & Janet

this really is just a dandelion

All photos © Stewart Taylor

It was a yellow flower week

It's been a week of early mornings with Sunday seeing the first round of recording for the British Trust for Ornithology's breeding bird survey (BBS). Throughout Britain volunteers will be doing the same, to gather annual information of breeding birds in a random selection of Ordnance Survey map one-kilometre squares across the country. This information builds, over time, information on the health of the UK's breeding bird populations, and, because the one-kilometre squares are random you get "good" squares full of birds or others which are (like mine) in MAMBA country (miles and miles of bxxxxx all) fairly remote patches of heather moorland. However, being given a survey square which on the surface, looks uninteresting bird-wise, takes the surveyor into areas where they would rarely go, occasionally providing some interesting records. Driving to my square I was in a bit of a pea-souper mist in the strath, close to the rivers and lochs, but I was hopeful that higher up everything would be clear - and it was. To get to my "square" it's about a half-hour walk from the nearest road, and the views of mist-covered valleys and clear-blue skies above were amazing. Being at the start of the survey area by six-thirty in the morning, meant that I was traveling as the sun was rising, again an amazing sight as the big red ball slowly appeared through the mist. Once at the "square" a transect line is walked following the north-south grid one-kilometre across the square, returning back across the square on the second transect line some five-hundred metres away. The commonest birds were meadow pipits, a couple of red grouse, a single blackcock, an unlikely skylark, a nice breeding pair of stonechats, and, very unusual for this area, three ravens. The real bonus though, was the view from the "top of the hill" out towards Ben Rinnes - well worth all the effort. In addition, all the other birds encountered, outside the square, were also recorded for BTO Birdtrack, forty species in all.

The other early mornings were helping to staff the Capercaillie Watch at the Osprey Centre, with fifteen keen visitors waiting for the gate to open at five-thirty! At least it is now light at that time of the morning. Sadly for the visitors, the overnight frost had created very misty conditions, and try as hard as we could, no capers could be seen, in fact, we had a job to see EJ and Henry on the osprey nest! All very atmospheric, but not when 30-40 visitors are desperate to see a capercaillie. Not all the mornings during the week suffered the same fate and cottage guests Anita, David and son Christopher saw capers on two occasions during their week, helping them to a clean sweep of all four grouse species during their weeks stay. Black grouse lek counting on Friday saw the end of the early mornings and despite a bit of mist about the place lots of birds were counted and it is just so good to be out at that time of the day. Robins kick off the dawn chorus, the same bird being the last to be heard at the end of the day.

The early flowers of the new growing season seem to be mainly white, but just about now we start to be aware of great splashes of yellow everywhere. On Monday Janet dropped me off on the edge of Grantown on her way to work, to allow me to walk back along the River Spey & Speyside Way back to base in Nethybridge. The walk usually takes a couple of hours but not when you take a camera with you! Depart Grantown 9am, arrive Nethybridge - 2pm! Firstly there were the huge swathes of dandelions along the road verges, I am sure there are more than previous years. Full of flowers on Monday, lots of dandelion "clocks" by Saturday. Have you ever had a close look at how intricate the seed-head is, nature really is pretty amazing producing something so delicate to ensure the seed get the best chance to blow away with the wind to find new places to grow. By the River Spey the first groups of marsh marigolds were well in flower, bigger showy flowers when compared to the smaller flowers of lesser celandines which were found growing in similar locations. I hope the two pictures help you with your identification, marigolds left, celandines right.



By the Spey and on the edge of one of the farm fields a huge willow tree was in full flower (possibly crack willow?) hanging thick with catkins which were attracting lots of buzzing insects. Bees I thought, and as I am interested in trying to record which species are appearing and what they are feeding on, I looked up into the tree to see which species were there. However, there were very few bees and most of the buzzing was coming from hoverflies, some being perfect bee-mimics. Two that were identified by a colleague were Eristalis arbustorum & Eristalis pertinax. I suggest you type their names into Google if you want to know more about these amazing insects. One is a close relative of the larvae found in the water-filled "pots" covered by one of my earlier diary entries.



However, not all the recent flowers are in the yellow category, and everywhere currently, there are blue violets and in some areas, the first mountain pansies are appearing, usually in shortish grassland. Brilliant colours, extravagant petals, this is a flower that is not easily missed. In the same areas more butterflies are appearing, green-veined whites, peacock, small tortoiseshell and most recently green hairstreak, if I get a chance I will try and get a picture of the latter which is a 'now you see me, now you don't' butterfly. Nice green wings when the wings are opened flat but brownish once they are closed. You know one has just flown past but you have a bit of a job re-finding it. Oddity of the week had to be a photo report of a Camberwell beauty at Culbin Forest, up by the coast. I have recorded one in Nethybridge in the past so lets see if more turn up.

Little to report on the ospreys save to say no more eggs have been laid - yet, but the pair do seem to be trying hard, so watch this space. No spotted flycatchers yet or swifts locally but both should have arrived by this time next week. Sadly our neighbour's swallows haven't made it this year. Presumably, the same birds have been nesting in Bill & Rita's stick shed for the last decade, but don't seem to have returned from their winter quarters for this breeding season. Let's hope a new pair take up the vacancy. A few house martins feeding over the garden currently where we have a wonderful show of flowers on the Clematis Alpina growing through the bushes in front of the cottage.

Have a nice Bank Holiday & happy reading.



Stewart & Janet

Our Postlady Grace by a misty Loch Garten

All photos © Stewart Taylor