Hunting the Cuckoo

For the last four weeks a cuckoo has been calling intermittently from the ridge that runs behind our house, a ridge which rises to form the summit of Bheinn Bhraggie, so yesterday I took a little-used estate track to see if I could find him.

At first he was calling very occasionally but as the morning progressed he called more frequently, and moved from the high forestry to the more open land to the left in this photograph. Disappointingly, but not unexpectedly, I didn't see him, but that we have a resident cuckoo for the summer is better than last year, when we heard one on a couple of days early on, and then not again.

If the lack of a cuckoo sighting was disappointing, the walk was made well worthwhile because....

....on the side of one of the ditches which, despite the lack of rainfall, still had some water running in it, I found....

....eight heath spotted orchids, much darker in colour than the ones we found on the Loch Lunndaidh track ten days ago.

The weather, along with the small seep of water in the ditch, also seems to suit the common butterwort which, for a flower which normally seems to keep its own company, is suddenly blooming in dense masses.

Cotton grass is a common plant of most areas of the Scottish moorlands but we see relatively little of it here: in a two-mile walk I found just one patch.

I ran out of energy after less than an hour's steady uphill walking. The view from the point I reached looked across the mouth of Loch Fleet and the small village of Embo to the Moray Firth but I wish I could have climbed higher, to the summit of the ridge. I might then have seen the cuckoo.