Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Day 12 of the flu - and it was much too nice a day to stay indoors. A visit to what I think of as the eternal bogs in hopes of an azure hawker, brought instead a female northern emerald dragonfly - a welcome sighting, as I failed to see one last year.
Yesterday, I drove out there again; I didn't bother with the beach but walked over the cliffs in the opposite direction, as there was some dolphin activity farther out. On the drive back I found a parking place and walked on along the road to the pool for another look at the flowers, which I'd learnt were water lobelia.
Bog cotton was growing at the far end of the pool, its fluffy white seed-heads much larger and more conspicuous than the lobelia; but tiny though they are, there's an appealing exuberance to the lobelia flowers and a raggedy quality rather like bogbean. Each is found (as far as I can tell) in only one of these roadside pools. Growing in a tangle with the lobelia were (I think) northern deergrass (which is actually a sedge) and a sprawling, yellow flower which might be lesser spearwort.
Tuesday, July 09, 2024
The bee beetle was delving deep into a fading rhododendron(?) flower. A low but spiky fence prevented me from getting closer, which is probably why I failed to see the ant at the time.
The beetle was spotted from the car park at the masts, above the Braes of Ullapool; it's only the second one I've seen, the first being at Rosehall in the dreaded Covid year of 2020. It made up for the dragonfly-poor walk I'd just had, sloshing through bogs to record two golden-ringed dragonflies and one common hawker. I was surprised at one point by a tiny pale creature wriggling away from me and into water; I thought "newt" but newts don't move that fast on land - and it was in fact a lizard. I usually see these among the dusty rocks around the quarries, or higher up, in the heather of the drier moorland.
Yesterday we went on the ferry - but the sea was fairly calm and we saw very little. One nice thing was that the ferry took the alternative route through the Summer Isles, and looking back we were able to see the Shearwater (which had gone out before us), edging into Cathedral Cave, on Tanera Beg.
Long ago - well, in the 1990s - we went on the Shearwater's predecessor the Summer Queen (Dad was with us), and I remarked that on that occasion, we too nosed into the cave a little way; but Greger can't recall doing that, so maybe I'm "misremembering". Today, he managed to spot the only Manx shearwater of the trip - otherwise interest lay mainly in good numbers of puffins, a pod of common dolphins, a few porpoises, four common terns, and a couple of bonxies.
The day before that, a walk up the quarry road brought a Helophilus sp. of hoverfly.
It's probably H. pendulus. Nearby was a new fly for me, and I've identified it as a mottled thistle fly (Xyphosia miliaria).
We had been thinking of going down to Cornwall this week, but as the weather wasn't any better than here we've stayed put. When England had a heatwave earlier this year we couldn't travel south, and Greger will soon be tied up again with electricians and solar panels - I seem fated never to experience warm sunny days and balmy evenings again. Never mind, at least we have (in Westminster at least) a Labour government. :o)
