Christine's walking & birds blog

It was warm enough to convert my walking trousers into shorts, and having stuffed the "legs" into my backpack, I set off up the hill path. When I reached the turnoff to Maol Chalaisgeig (that's a blooming long name to type for a very small hill - 301m!) I decided to go up. It got more and more windy as I climbed, and at the top it was really quite cold. I put my fleece on, but didn't bother with the trouser legs as they're much harder to zip back on than off! 

A gorgeously yellow bumblebee nectaring on now-fading bell heather made me wonder if I'd found my first heath bumblebee. The yellow hair on the face apparently means it's a male.

I'm not 100% sure though; it could be a white-tailed bumblebee, although I've seen several of those in the garden this year and this one looked different. More research to be done, as usual. There was also a Sericomyia silentis (referred to sometimes as the bog hoverfly, but tagged yellow-barred peat fly by Steven Falk on Flickr).

 
Further down the slope, a nice tawny/chestnut moth fluttered into the sparse undergrowth, but I got enough of it in the picture to identify it back home - although it took some time. It's a chevron moth (Eulithis testata).

I was pleased to find that I coped okay with the walk, and Greger (having had another, shorter, bout of his cold) decided he would do it today - in fact, we agreed to do it together. However, we woke up to grey drizzly weather that didn't invite walking anywhere, so I sat down to write this blog instead. The question is, will we get up a sizeable hill this summer? I would love to do a hill-walk for its own sake, but if I don't, there's also the risk that ptarmigan won't make it onto my year list - for the first time since we came to live here. :o(