Christine's walking & birds blog

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.

But this wasn't my first trip out during my latest bout of flu. On day 6, Greger suggested he drive me somewhere for a short walk, so we went first to Loch Glascarnoch - where we were entertained by swooping house martins, back to breed on the dam. We drove on to Silverbridge, where I felt well enough to do the round river walk.  Towards the end of the walk, Greger pointed out our first spotted flycatcher of the year. I paid for this outing on days 7 and 8, when I felt worse and slept for much of the time; but on day 9 I was restless again and we drove out to Achnahaird. When Greger pulled into a passing place to make way for an oncoming car, I glanced across at one of the drainage pools by the side of the road and saw some tiny white flowers. We went on to have our usual walk across the beach and machair; it was almost dead, and the only good thing was back near the car park where we heard a snipe "chipping" from the long grass.