Friday, July 24, 2020
Our plan to go up Ben Wyvis came to nothing when we woke up and just didn't feel like it! We went to Rosehall again, instead - where tourism, as elsewhere, was much in evidence. Still, we managed to have a fairly quiet walk, using a grassy ride that isn't on the official trails; and this time we saw a bit more wildlife. The bee beetle landed beside us as we set off from the car park.
A pale moth fluttered past and was snapped hanging upside down; after much research on the internet I've identified it as a barred straw. (Why do insect names look wrong with a lower-case first letter, while bird names look okay?)
A juvenile stonechat was seen on high, open ground. Dropping down, we paused at the black forest junction before turning left to look along the dead-end track to the right. Several small birds were fly-catching along a fence; and then two birds scything through the air with swallows made me exclaim "Swifts!" Except that it came out as more of a shout, with an echo bouncing back seemingly from the black forest itself. These were our first swifts of the year (we'd normally have seen them by now over the river in Inverness, but my last visit there was well before lockdown); and when we walked up the track into a more open area, we could see that the small birds were a meadow pipit, a young willow warbler, a dunnock, and a family of spotted flycatchers.
On the way back to the car park we heard crossbills, and a small party of perhaps ten birds came flying over.
At the pond, a few emerald damselflies had emerged, a large bluish hawker was tirelessly active (southern hawkers were here last year), and a probable common darter landed on the wooden platform. A moth fluttering about on the pond vegetation was not, as I first thought, an injured moth in trouble, but a brown china-mark in its natural habitat whose larvae live underwater. Something else learnt today.
But the lovely flowers of ragged robin, I was sad to see, have had their day.
// posted by Christine @ 2:49 PM 
