During May, Scotland changed, possibly for ever.
In 1998, when the late Donald Dewar oversaw the passage of the Scotland Bill through the
Houses of Commons he set up a type of PR voting system which tried to ensure no one party would have an outright majority. For two elections this worked well. But, with inept leaders of the non-SNP parties, poor manifestoes or whatever, this didn’t work on 5 May 2011 and many experienced MSPs lost their seats to leave a majority SNP government in post and seemingly “anything but English” Alex Salmond in charge. With a whacking majority the push for an independent Scotland has started, with every opportunity taken since the election (and despite an independent Scotland not being a part of the 
election manifesto) to up the anti about perceived national policies that affect Scotland. I would suggest these are dangerous times for Scotland with a lack of experience in parliament and a majority that can allow bills to be steam-rollered through. And the man himself? Not that I would say we have a vain and pompous man in charge of Scotland but if you compare photos that appeared in the press and election leaflets with the non-airbrushed real thing, we have every reason to be worried. With everything now “free” in Scotland perhaps the country will just go bust before the 5 year-term is out. Less time spent pushing the ‘anti-this - anti-that’ agenda and more time governing this great country – Scotland, would be best for everyone.
A good pa
rt of the month was spent preparing and installing bee nest boxes with the tiny mason bee Osmia uncinata the target. In other parts of the world nest boxes are used successfully to ensure healthy populations of other Osmia bees used for the purposes of pollinating crops. An earlier trial of laminated type boxes in Abernethy during 2007 failed to attract any bee residents but it is hoped that this design of “box”, proven elsewhere for other bees, might be successful. The current boxes were supplied by the Red Beehive Company (http://redbeehive.coolitshopping.com/dbeehive.coolitshopping.com/ ) and comprise a section of 4” plastic drain pipe filled with cardboard tubes with internal diameters of 6 to 8mm. These are aimed at mimicking the natural long-horn beetle breeding holes found in dead trees within the forest which, once vacated, are used by the bees as their breeding sites. Very few of these natural bee sites have ever been found with Mike Edwards and Andy Davidson the only people I know who have ever seen them and numbering probably no more than 10. We know that the bee feeds heavily on bird’s-foot trefoil but there may also be other important flowers it visits for pollen and nectar and the only way of identifying foraging plants is to check breeding sites for residual pollen grains. Where the bee occurs it is therefore important to ensure enough lightly disturbed ground is available for the trefoil to grow (its preferred habitat) but the
re could be other important plant populations that need to be considered. If the tubes in the nest boxes are used, this would be a great help in allowing access to pollen which would be analysed for plant identification. In all 100 boxes have been installed at 17 locations where the bee was recorded during my survey in 2007 and at a couple of other sites where Murdo Macdonald has regularly seen it. We now just need a bit of prolonged sunshine during June (the bee needs temperatures of more than 16 deg C) and for the wee bee to find one or more boxes to its liking. In addition, I have drilled out a few Scots pine logs (right) with 6, 8 and 10mm holes and installed these to see if they might also be to the bees liking.
Installing the boxes had the added benefit of visiting a few locations where I hadn’t been for a while, including parts of the Forestry Commissions forest at Inshriach, Bognacruie at Abernethy and the wonderfully bog
gy woodland at Monadh Mor north of Inverness. The last run was to Culbin Forest near Forres. A singing whitethroat was the only bonus on a wet and windy day at Inshriach, and I witnessed an insect expert in action when I was joined by Murdo Macdonald at Monadh Mor where we saw our first white-faced darter dragonfly (Leucorrhinia dubia) for the year. The visit to Culbin was different as the bee was found here by the late Gill Nisbet and I had to spend quite a bit of time looking for the best stands of bird’s-foot trefoil before installing the boxes. One wander took me towards a boggy bit of land in an ex-quarry where an unusual clubmoss – Lycopodium inundatum the marsh clubmoss grows. A wee detour and I was in the quarry an
d there, creeping across the wet gravel, were lots of new shoots of the clubmoss (left). Culbin never fails to amaze me. Here we have a mainly conifer wood growing on former sand dunes but with nearly all the rarer pinewood plants present, and here in a fairly recently worked quarry, one of our rarer clubmosses. How did it and all the other plants get there? Amazing. After installing bee boxes near Loch a’ Chnuic in Abernethy a walk up one of the wee burns took me close to the highest sand martin colony I know of locally at 440m above sea level, and with about 20 holes (right) the birds seem to be doing quite well.
Nearer to home Loch Morlich on the way to Cairngorm used to be a site locally for the clubmoss but having m
ade several visits to the shores of the loch, I hadn’t managed to re-find it. Inspired by how easy the bright green new growth at Culbin was to see, I thought another visit to Morlich might pay dividends so a couple of evenings later I made my way to the loch. Nothing could be found in the boggy hollow between the road and the loch so I paddled my way across the loch’s outflow and searched the shore and adjacent boggy bits. The first thing that caught my eye was long-leaved sundew (left Drosera anglica), quite a good population right on the shore. This a fairly rare plant in our area. In fact as I walked along there were quite a few small clumps of this plant but not a sign of the clubmoss. An egg floating in the water looked like goldeneye or goosander – both were present on the loch, as was a distant wailing red-throated diver. In one boggy area a nice patch of flowering cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus) but just too dark to get a decent photo. As I push
ed my way through a few stunted bog-pines I found quite an amazing bog with a slight flow of water. On most of the wee “islands” I could see lots and lots of long-leaved sundew, perhaps the mother and father of those plants on the loch shore. However, some groups of sundews looked a little bit different, the leaves were neither as round and prostrate as the plentiful round-leaved sundew, but neither were they tall, and a bit curled, like the long-leaved plants, the leaves were best described as “paddle” shaped (right). Being early in the growing season I thought I was just looking at young plants of the long-leaved sundew but just in case I carefully removed one and popped it into my container for checking. All around the sticky leaves had plenty of insect “food” attached to them – hence their collective name as insectivorous plants (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivorous_plant for a description). It should really have been pretty obvious, growing side by side were round-leaved and long-leaved sundews and in between was a perfect hybrid called Drosera x obovata (right) named as “Ivan’s Paddle”, and it had even been recorded from this area in 1956. 1956! I think the keen botanists need to get out a bit more.
So, as is usual with me I wondered if the one known site in Abernethy with both sundews present, might also have Ivan’s Paddle amongst them. The hybrid plants found weren’t as big and bold as the Morlich ones, but the paddle shape was obvious so a new species was added to the RSPB list. Anywhere else?
A check with BSBI colleague Andy produced another couple of local sites where long-leaved sundews had been recorded in the past and usually if the rarer one is present the common round-leaved should also be there. I failed to find anything at one site but the other site, in the hills above Aviemore, turned up all three species along with a pair of nesting greylag geese, a few flimsy flowering spikes of alpine meadow rue and the rare moss Dicranum bergerii, though a group of Bryologists had found this moss in the same general area a few years earlier. So you know what the moral of this tale is – remember to look for Ivan if you see the other two species present. The photo above should help you with L to R, long-leaved, round-leaved and Ivan’s Paddle (D x obovata).
Installing the bee boxes also had another major spin-off. As a trial I put up 5 boxes at one of the Osmia sites close to the Speyside Way in Abernethy Forest. Job com
plete I walked a few adjacent tracks to see if there were any good patches of bird’s-foot trefoil where another group of boxes could be installed. Along the side of one track were large mounds of spoil left over from the time the track was installed about 10 years ago and they looked like they could provide a home for brown shield-moss capsules (Buxbaumia aphylla). Sure enough, there were a couple of capsules on one mound and a few more on the next, quite a find I was thinking. Compared to the major finds of the rarer green shield-moss, few brown shield-moss capsules have been found in r
ecent years, so I was feeling quite pleased with myself. A few hundred metres along the track and the verge itself also looked suitable and as I looked down I first saw a dozen capsules (left), then a few more, and a few more. A quick count gave a figure of around 150 capsules, something probably unheard of in the UK. I returned a couple of days later with pegs and tapes to do a “proper” count and thankfully, a hand tally counter because after a couple of hours of bent over counting the track had revealed it was home to 680 capsules, definitely unheard of before in the UK.
Just as the last of the bee boxes was installed (20th to 23rd) we had lying s
now down to 1500’, sleet on the A9 and winds of over 100 miles per hour on the summit of Cairngorm. What happened to the hot weather we enjoyed in April? This change to cool, windy weather made for poor results from the butterfly transect after such a promising start to the season, and the weekly weather forecast had to be studied quite a bit to ensure some of the ongoing bird surveys could be carried out in reasonable conditions. Not ideal. The second round of visits were made to the BTO breeding bird survey squares with little to report apart from more flowering cranberry (right) but in the dawn daylight this time. I also accepted a request to undertake a farm bird survey (mainly waders + other key species) for a local farmer needing breeding bird information for a grant application he was making. “Within an hour of dawn….” states the survey rules, and with 3 visits to be made, each start time got progressively earlier. The farm is in a known good wader area so the possibility of good numbers of breeding lapwings, oystercatchers and curlews w
as appealing. Wrong! The farm comprises a mix of stock, crop and heathery bog totalling more than 100ha. All three species are present but with just 1 family of lapwings, 1 family of oystercatchers + 1 on eggs and possibly 1 family of curlews, this is nothing less than a disaster. There should be dozens of successful waders in this area but something dramatic is or has happened and even the farmer is wondering where his birds have gone to. Personally I think we are seeing the results from a slow but progressive change from wader friendly farming to the modern mono-crop system and despite the farmer saying we are not doing any different crop rotations now to 20 years ago, subtly I think lots of things have changed. Someone needs to really get to the bottom of what is happening otherwise the loss of ALL the skylarks (do you remember them?) over the last 20 years will be followed very shortly by all the waders. A ‘Silent Spring’ is not that far away and no-one seems to care. The big problem is that the folk who know what is happening are those who walk the miles and see and record things, the folk who are trying to “address” the issue tap out tales of woe on their PC’s from within their offices. Sorry, but it is depressing.
Despite the weather there are lots of family parties of birds in the forests locally, 3 families of crested tits on one outing last week along with all the coal tits and treecreepers, and around the house blue and great tits and the family of robins from next to the chalet. After a depressing meeting
about houses planned for School Wood in the village, I hopped on my bike and pedalled onto the Dorback Estate to re-visit the area close to the Bridge of Brown lime-kiln in the last Diary. This is my third visit to the area in the last few weeks to try and find a plant that hasn’t been seen at its previously known locations for 15 years, and if you take into account records in the wider area, 30 to 50 years. Most of these older records didn’t have the benefit of modern GPS recording equipment and are quite often given as 10 kilometre map square locations, or 1 km or 2 km squares, so there can be lots of potential sites to search. The plant is the hairy stonecrop Sedum villosum, and is one that keen botanists locally know of its decline and a few have had a go at finding it. On my last visit I had a pretty good description (at the top of a small waterfall) of where it had been seen by a couple of well known botanists in 1972, but nothing was found. Vegetation local to the site had obvious signs of sheep grazing, so this could be part of the plants demise. It likes to grow on the gravels by small streams or on wet rocks in similar situations, so it’s a case of starting at the bottom end of any running water and them make your way up the hill searching as you go. The bike ride out along the moorland track was quite eerie with very little bird song to be heard. Lapwings had chicks on improved grassland by another lime-kiln and close to where I was going to start my search (the waterfall again) there was a very noisy curlew 
with chicks. Thankfully it got used to me and quietened down. Again, nothing at the small waterfall site nor in the next gully with a wee stream, though the moschatel (Town Hall clock above right) from an earlier visit were a bit sheep nibbled. The next wee stream looked really suitable in patches with lots of wet gravel but it was only when I looked closely at something growing from the rock that I though I had found what I was looking for (left). The plant was certainly a stonecrop with the characteristic “inflated” looking leaves, but to be sure I would need to see if the alternately growing leaves were “glandular-pubescent” meaning that on the tip of each leaf hair there was a tiny drop of liquid (enlarge photo to see). With my hand-lens this feature was confirmed and amazingly, hidden under a tiny rock outcrop was a single stem of hairy stonecrop. Phew! Being a single plant I couldn’t remove anything so my evidence would have to be obtained through my camera lens – thankfully I had brought the bigger D80 + macro lense with me rather than the infuriating compact with its hit and miss method of focusing. I had to lean against and sit on wet rock to get the photo but to hell, what’s a wet bum after 15 years! And that was it, further searches of streams and runnels yielded nothing, so the current population remains at a single plant - still a bit more searching to do.
That’s it until after the longest day, enjoy the read.
Stewart & Janet
In 1998, when the late Donald Dewar oversaw the passage of the Scotland Bill through the
Houses of Commons he set up a type of PR voting system which tried to ensure no one party would have an outright majority. For two elections this worked well. But, with inept leaders of the non-SNP parties, poor manifestoes or whatever, this didn’t work on 5 May 2011 and many experienced MSPs lost their seats to leave a majority SNP government in post and seemingly “anything but English” Alex Salmond in charge. With a whacking majority the push for an independent Scotland has started, with every opportunity taken since the election (and despite an independent Scotland not being a part of the 
election manifesto) to up the anti about perceived national policies that affect Scotland. I would suggest these are dangerous times for Scotland with a lack of experience in parliament and a majority that can allow bills to be steam-rollered through. And the man himself? Not that I would say we have a vain and pompous man in charge of Scotland but if you compare photos that appeared in the press and election leaflets with the non-airbrushed real thing, we have every reason to be worried. With everything now “free” in Scotland perhaps the country will just go bust before the 5 year-term is out. Less time spent pushing the ‘anti-this - anti-that’ agenda and more time governing this great country – Scotland, would be best for everyone.A good pa
rt of the month was spent preparing and installing bee nest boxes with the tiny mason bee Osmia uncinata the target. In other parts of the world nest boxes are used successfully to ensure healthy populations of other Osmia bees used for the purposes of pollinating crops. An earlier trial of laminated type boxes in Abernethy during 2007 failed to attract any bee residents but it is hoped that this design of “box”, proven elsewhere for other bees, might be successful. The current boxes were supplied by the Red Beehive Company (http://redbeehive.coolitshopping.com/dbeehive.coolitshopping.com/ ) and comprise a section of 4” plastic drain pipe filled with cardboard tubes with internal diameters of 6 to 8mm. These are aimed at mimicking the natural long-horn beetle breeding holes found in dead trees within the forest which, once vacated, are used by the bees as their breeding sites. Very few of these natural bee sites have ever been found with Mike Edwards and Andy Davidson the only people I know who have ever seen them and numbering probably no more than 10. We know that the bee feeds heavily on bird’s-foot trefoil but there may also be other important flowers it visits for pollen and nectar and the only way of identifying foraging plants is to check breeding sites for residual pollen grains. Where the bee occurs it is therefore important to ensure enough lightly disturbed ground is available for the trefoil to grow (its preferred habitat) but the
re could be other important plant populations that need to be considered. If the tubes in the nest boxes are used, this would be a great help in allowing access to pollen which would be analysed for plant identification. In all 100 boxes have been installed at 17 locations where the bee was recorded during my survey in 2007 and at a couple of other sites where Murdo Macdonald has regularly seen it. We now just need a bit of prolonged sunshine during June (the bee needs temperatures of more than 16 deg C) and for the wee bee to find one or more boxes to its liking. In addition, I have drilled out a few Scots pine logs (right) with 6, 8 and 10mm holes and installed these to see if they might also be to the bees liking.Installing the boxes had the added benefit of visiting a few locations where I hadn’t been for a while, including parts of the Forestry Commissions forest at Inshriach, Bognacruie at Abernethy and the wonderfully bog
gy woodland at Monadh Mor north of Inverness. The last run was to Culbin Forest near Forres. A singing whitethroat was the only bonus on a wet and windy day at Inshriach, and I witnessed an insect expert in action when I was joined by Murdo Macdonald at Monadh Mor where we saw our first white-faced darter dragonfly (Leucorrhinia dubia) for the year. The visit to Culbin was different as the bee was found here by the late Gill Nisbet and I had to spend quite a bit of time looking for the best stands of bird’s-foot trefoil before installing the boxes. One wander took me towards a boggy bit of land in an ex-quarry where an unusual clubmoss – Lycopodium inundatum the marsh clubmoss grows. A wee detour and I was in the quarry an
d there, creeping across the wet gravel, were lots of new shoots of the clubmoss (left). Culbin never fails to amaze me. Here we have a mainly conifer wood growing on former sand dunes but with nearly all the rarer pinewood plants present, and here in a fairly recently worked quarry, one of our rarer clubmosses. How did it and all the other plants get there? Amazing. After installing bee boxes near Loch a’ Chnuic in Abernethy a walk up one of the wee burns took me close to the highest sand martin colony I know of locally at 440m above sea level, and with about 20 holes (right) the birds seem to be doing quite well.Nearer to home Loch Morlich on the way to Cairngorm used to be a site locally for the clubmoss but having m
ade several visits to the shores of the loch, I hadn’t managed to re-find it. Inspired by how easy the bright green new growth at Culbin was to see, I thought another visit to Morlich might pay dividends so a couple of evenings later I made my way to the loch. Nothing could be found in the boggy hollow between the road and the loch so I paddled my way across the loch’s outflow and searched the shore and adjacent boggy bits. The first thing that caught my eye was long-leaved sundew (left Drosera anglica), quite a good population right on the shore. This a fairly rare plant in our area. In fact as I walked along there were quite a few small clumps of this plant but not a sign of the clubmoss. An egg floating in the water looked like goldeneye or goosander – both were present on the loch, as was a distant wailing red-throated diver. In one boggy area a nice patch of flowering cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus) but just too dark to get a decent photo. As I push
ed my way through a few stunted bog-pines I found quite an amazing bog with a slight flow of water. On most of the wee “islands” I could see lots and lots of long-leaved sundew, perhaps the mother and father of those plants on the loch shore. However, some groups of sundews looked a little bit different, the leaves were neither as round and prostrate as the plentiful round-leaved sundew, but neither were they tall, and a bit curled, like the long-leaved plants, the leaves were best described as “paddle” shaped (right). Being early in the growing season I thought I was just looking at young plants of the long-leaved sundew but just in case I carefully removed one and popped it into my container for checking. All around the sticky leaves had plenty of insect “food” attached to them – hence their collective name as insectivorous plants (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivorous_plant for a description). It should really have been pretty obvious, growing side by side were round-leaved and long-leaved sundews and in between was a perfect hybrid called Drosera x obovata (right) named as “Ivan’s Paddle”, and it had even been recorded from this area in 1956. 1956! I think the keen botanists need to get out a bit more.So, as is usual with me I wondered if the one known site in Abernethy with both sundews present, might also have Ivan’s Paddle amongst them. The hybrid plants found weren’t as big and bold as the Morlich ones, but the paddle shape was obvious so a new species was added to the RSPB list. Anywhere else?
A check with BSBI colleague Andy produced another couple of local sites where long-leaved sundews had been recorded in the past and usually if the rarer one is present the common round-leaved should also be there. I failed to find anything at one site but the other site, in the hills above Aviemore, turned up all three species along with a pair of nesting greylag geese, a few flimsy flowering spikes of alpine meadow rue and the rare moss Dicranum bergerii, though a group of Bryologists had found this moss in the same general area a few years earlier. So you know what the moral of this tale is – remember to look for Ivan if you see the other two species present. The photo above should help you with L to R, long-leaved, round-leaved and Ivan’s Paddle (D x obovata).Installing the bee boxes also had another major spin-off. As a trial I put up 5 boxes at one of the Osmia sites close to the Speyside Way in Abernethy Forest. Job com
plete I walked a few adjacent tracks to see if there were any good patches of bird’s-foot trefoil where another group of boxes could be installed. Along the side of one track were large mounds of spoil left over from the time the track was installed about 10 years ago and they looked like they could provide a home for brown shield-moss capsules (Buxbaumia aphylla). Sure enough, there were a couple of capsules on one mound and a few more on the next, quite a find I was thinking. Compared to the major finds of the rarer green shield-moss, few brown shield-moss capsules have been found in r
ecent years, so I was feeling quite pleased with myself. A few hundred metres along the track and the verge itself also looked suitable and as I looked down I first saw a dozen capsules (left), then a few more, and a few more. A quick count gave a figure of around 150 capsules, something probably unheard of in the UK. I returned a couple of days later with pegs and tapes to do a “proper” count and thankfully, a hand tally counter because after a couple of hours of bent over counting the track had revealed it was home to 680 capsules, definitely unheard of before in the UK.Just as the last of the bee boxes was installed (20th to 23rd) we had lying s
now down to 1500’, sleet on the A9 and winds of over 100 miles per hour on the summit of Cairngorm. What happened to the hot weather we enjoyed in April? This change to cool, windy weather made for poor results from the butterfly transect after such a promising start to the season, and the weekly weather forecast had to be studied quite a bit to ensure some of the ongoing bird surveys could be carried out in reasonable conditions. Not ideal. The second round of visits were made to the BTO breeding bird survey squares with little to report apart from more flowering cranberry (right) but in the dawn daylight this time. I also accepted a request to undertake a farm bird survey (mainly waders + other key species) for a local farmer needing breeding bird information for a grant application he was making. “Within an hour of dawn….” states the survey rules, and with 3 visits to be made, each start time got progressively earlier. The farm is in a known good wader area so the possibility of good numbers of breeding lapwings, oystercatchers and curlews w
as appealing. Wrong! The farm comprises a mix of stock, crop and heathery bog totalling more than 100ha. All three species are present but with just 1 family of lapwings, 1 family of oystercatchers + 1 on eggs and possibly 1 family of curlews, this is nothing less than a disaster. There should be dozens of successful waders in this area but something dramatic is or has happened and even the farmer is wondering where his birds have gone to. Personally I think we are seeing the results from a slow but progressive change from wader friendly farming to the modern mono-crop system and despite the farmer saying we are not doing any different crop rotations now to 20 years ago, subtly I think lots of things have changed. Someone needs to really get to the bottom of what is happening otherwise the loss of ALL the skylarks (do you remember them?) over the last 20 years will be followed very shortly by all the waders. A ‘Silent Spring’ is not that far away and no-one seems to care. The big problem is that the folk who know what is happening are those who walk the miles and see and record things, the folk who are trying to “address” the issue tap out tales of woe on their PC’s from within their offices. Sorry, but it is depressing.Despite the weather there are lots of family parties of birds in the forests locally, 3 families of crested tits on one outing last week along with all the coal tits and treecreepers, and around the house blue and great tits and the family of robins from next to the chalet. After a depressing meeting
about houses planned for School Wood in the village, I hopped on my bike and pedalled onto the Dorback Estate to re-visit the area close to the Bridge of Brown lime-kiln in the last Diary. This is my third visit to the area in the last few weeks to try and find a plant that hasn’t been seen at its previously known locations for 15 years, and if you take into account records in the wider area, 30 to 50 years. Most of these older records didn’t have the benefit of modern GPS recording equipment and are quite often given as 10 kilometre map square locations, or 1 km or 2 km squares, so there can be lots of potential sites to search. The plant is the hairy stonecrop Sedum villosum, and is one that keen botanists locally know of its decline and a few have had a go at finding it. On my last visit I had a pretty good description (at the top of a small waterfall) of where it had been seen by a couple of well known botanists in 1972, but nothing was found. Vegetation local to the site had obvious signs of sheep grazing, so this could be part of the plants demise. It likes to grow on the gravels by small streams or on wet rocks in similar situations, so it’s a case of starting at the bottom end of any running water and them make your way up the hill searching as you go. The bike ride out along the moorland track was quite eerie with very little bird song to be heard. Lapwings had chicks on improved grassland by another lime-kiln and close to where I was going to start my search (the waterfall again) there was a very noisy curlew 
with chicks. Thankfully it got used to me and quietened down. Again, nothing at the small waterfall site nor in the next gully with a wee stream, though the moschatel (Town Hall clock above right) from an earlier visit were a bit sheep nibbled. The next wee stream looked really suitable in patches with lots of wet gravel but it was only when I looked closely at something growing from the rock that I though I had found what I was looking for (left). The plant was certainly a stonecrop with the characteristic “inflated” looking leaves, but to be sure I would need to see if the alternately growing leaves were “glandular-pubescent” meaning that on the tip of each leaf hair there was a tiny drop of liquid (enlarge photo to see). With my hand-lens this feature was confirmed and amazingly, hidden under a tiny rock outcrop was a single stem of hairy stonecrop. Phew! Being a single plant I couldn’t remove anything so my evidence would have to be obtained through my camera lens – thankfully I had brought the bigger D80 + macro lense with me rather than the infuriating compact with its hit and miss method of focusing. I had to lean against and sit on wet rock to get the photo but to hell, what’s a wet bum after 15 years! And that was it, further searches of streams and runnels yielded nothing, so the current population remains at a single plant - still a bit more searching to do.That’s it until after the longest day, enjoy the read.
Stewart & Janet
Fire tender heading to try and save Rab's Forest Lodge sawmill
Narrow-bordered Bee hawk-moth visiting Firwood honesty flowers
Wow, chickweed wintergreen in afternoon sun
All photos © Stewart Taylor
