Christine's walking & birds blog

This was a welcome sighting as I didn't manage to encounter any azures last year. A second dragonfly zoomed in and buzzed it, and off it flew, not to be seen again. I think the buzzer was a four-spotted chaser.

We had coffee and biscuits at the top of the climb, with grey wagtails and dippers busy on the river below. A juvenile dipper was spotted. As we walked back down the dusty road, an unseen cuckoo entertained us with its slightly out-of-tune call; but once again, no spotted flycatchers or wood warblers were evident.

Yesterday: A beluga whale was reported (and briefly filmed) in Loch Broom! This gave me a focus for the day, and I drove up the loch to a lay-by beyond the salmon farm and then made my way slowly back to the village and West Terrace, meeting various other people also on the watch. We were unlucky - but the fact that the whale appeared to have headed back out to sea perhaps suggests that it wasn't in trouble, anyway. (Info from Shearwater Cruises, Ullapool, on Facebook.)

Three days ago I remarked to Greger that I'd always fancied the near end of Loch Glascarnoch for Temminck's stints if the water level was low - so off we went. We could see no stints, but were happy with ringed plover (5+), a common sandpiper, and a very close dunlin.

Making our way back up to the road, I noticed how the messy, bouldery area that's usually under water has become colonised by plants, including sundew.

I also identified what I think was a variety of clubmoss, while tiny bog myrtle bushes were everywhere.

I've used a semi-colon in this post, in protest at reports that this punctuation mark is dying out, with lots of silly talk about pretentiousness. Semi-colons simply help the reader to understand the meaning of, and fluently read, a piece of text. In the same article I read that some people refuse to use the full stop, on the grounds that it seems abrupt and therefore rude. FFS. Instead, they use much more annoying endings for their sentences, such as irritating emojis - especially those blooming bobbing ones which drive me mad - or several exclamation marks, aptly known in the newspaper industry as screamers.