We took the long road up to Loch Lunndaidh this morning in the hope of seeing the kingfisher again. Going up to the loch is hard work: it's uphill almost all the way and today we were walking into a stiff westerly breeze. However, there was lots to see and interest us, including....
....enjoying the start of the ling flowering - which, it seems to me, is very early this year, so the hills are carpeted with ling, bell heather and cross-leaved heath.
We spent half-an-hour at the weir where we first saw the kingfisher, without any joy. The chances of seeing it are pretty remote when one considers that it has miles of the loch's banks to hunt along, and also downstream on the Culmailly burn.
However, we did see one of the things I'd been hoping to find - the first of this season's devils's-bit scabious. There were half-a-dozen or so plants in the early stages of flowering.
Conditions weren't ideal for butterflies but we saw three common blues, three whites - we were unable to identify them more closely - and a speckled wood. This is hardly a good count for a sunny day in July.
Disappointingly, and perhaps a bit worryingly, we saw no dragonflies at the loch but, on our way home, we spotted two, one an unidentified hawker but this one possibly a ruddy darter.
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