Buddleia Visitors

On Friday we welcomed the first butterfly to come in to our garden since the previous Friday, a tortoiseshell which spent its time contending with the bees that were massed on the marjoram flowers.

Then ,yesterday, we had the pleasure of seeing the first butterfly on one of the many buddleia which are bursting into flower, where it was joined by....

....the tortoiseshell, which was the one butterfly I was able to submit in my entry for the Big Butterfly Count.

Today is grey again and there's a gusty north-westerly wind blowing so, sadly, we're unlikely to see much in the way of butterfly visitors.

An Explosion of Creeping Lady's Tresses

We drove out to Littleferry this morning to follow one of our favourite walks. It goes from the Golspie-Littleferry road to the beach through several different habitats, starting with a mature pine plantation which has a ground cover predominately of grasses and heathers. We usually walk through this quite quickly but we were stopped, first by....

....three roe deer - one of them this young buck feeding in the farmer's field - and then when we noticed that, pushing up in and between the heathers....

...there were.hundreds of creeping lady's tresses.

Previously, we've regularly found a few of these delicate little orchids in one particular place which is close to where the path reaches the beach, but we have never seen anything like....

.... the abundance of this, in our experience, rather rare flower.

We are absolutely certain that this explosion hasn't occurred in previous years as we walk through these woods often if iregularly, so something has encouraged these orchids which have been dormant for years to leap into exuberant life. It may be the weather, which remains cold - 15C when we set off on our walk - and dry.

When we came out onto the links we were quickly cold, as a fresh north wind was blowing and the sun had yet to put in an appearance. Consequently, we saw just one butterfly, a small heath, and the only other one we saw was....

....a ringlet when we came back through the woods.

In this peculiar. weather there are other winners and losers on the links. The Scottish bluebells are doing well but the northern marsh orchids have all begun to die back, so the landscape is dotted with their dead flower heads.

What we hadn't realised until we came out onto the beach was that we had chosen to arrive at the lowest point of an exceptionally low tide. As a consequence, the few birds we could see were far out on the exposed sands and weed beds.

We didn't stay long. The wind was too cold and, although we walked for about a quarter of an hour along last night's high-tide line, we found nothing of interest except a single dead bird.

The Seep Again

Yesterday we had another day of rainless grey skies caused by a persistent haar brought in from the sea, but with the weather today at last showing some improvement I was up at the seep again looking, mostly, for the butterflies which still refuse to visit our garden, despite the buddleia and verbena which are just coming into flower.

There were several species of butterfly on the wing, though few of each - including small heath, painted lady (above, drinking at the seep)....

....this fritillary, which I think may be a dark green....

....a meadow brown....

....and a specked wood. However, the find of the day was...

....this golden-ringed dragonfly which was busy laying her eggs in the shallow water of the seep.

We've seen this species at the seep doing the same thing once before.

For her sake, as well as for our gardens, I hope we have some rain soon, and then some good sunshine.

The Seep

There's an aggregate quarry just off the track half a mile or so above our house which, at one time, boasted a small pond which was good for tadpoles and palmate newts. Since then, the pond has been filled in to provide a parking space for heavy vehicles but a small seep of water....

....rises in the middle of it and runs away to join....

....a ditch by the side of the track. Along this there are a couple of small, muddy and algae-filled puddles which offer a home to....

....a few remaining tadpoles - at one stage in the spring the pools were crowded with them -
and....

....a handful of pond skaters. 

In sunny weather some weeks ago it was also host to some large red damselflies but it hasn't been warm enough since for them to take to the air.

I'm guessing, but the seep - what a lovely word - is caused by rainwater moving down through the rock pictured here, a very coarse conglomerate of Devonian age, and meeting an impermeable layer, possibly of compacted red clay, which causes it to drain sideways until it surfaces in the quarry. There's probably enough water in the conglomerate for the seep to continue to flow, though it will be interesting to see what happens if the current dry weather continues for much longer.

Something New

With yesterday's considerable improvement in the weather - the thermometer reached a heady 19C at one point in the afternoon - and with light winds and some cheerful sunny intervals, we'd have expected to see some butterflies in the garden but we didn't see one. Frankly, I cannot understand this as there are so many flowers in bloom, flowers which the butterflies love.

We didn't take a walk yesterday and when I went out this morning the mist was down to treetops and the temperature struggling around 16C so I wasn't surprised to see only three butterflies; but I was surprised that all of them were ringlets.

There's a small area of meadow land on the coast path just north of Dunrobin Castle where we often see ringlets but they're unusual elsewhere so spotting these three was a treat.

Fungi at Littleferry

It was noticeable on our walk on Lttleferry links yesterday that fungi species were beginning to appear in larger numbers than we've seen over the past few months. The largest numbers were in this small area of short grass and wildflowers where....

....some of them made pretty groupings.

I have largely given up trying to identify fungi, there being something like 15,000 species in Britain, and confine myself to enjoying finding increasingly exotic varieties.

Some I do know. This is blackening waxcap which is fun as it starts in yellows and oranges and works its way through reds and browns until it finally reaches the colour after which it is named: black. It's a fungus which we particularly associate with these links as they were 'flowering' in unusually large numbers the first time we visited Littleferry, some six years ago.

This fungus, about the size of a tennis ball, is a puffball. In one particular area of the links, about 20m x 20m, several of these are 'growing', and we find them in the same place every year. However, yesterday they were joined by....

....this fungus, slightly larger than the white one, which so closely resembled a bread roll that, for a moment, I almost picked it up. It was so unusual that, on returning home - foolishly - I tried to identify it. After twenty minutes of hunting through books and the internet I was no further forward so gave it my own name, the bread roll fungus. 

Since fungi are often given simple names which describe their appearance, I may well find that this really is its name.

Butterflies at Littleferry

At last we have some calm, sunny weather, forecast to carry on though the rest of this week, though we are likely to miss the extremely high temperatures being recorded elsewhere. So, to welcome the sunshine, we drove out for a walk at Littleferry to find the tide coming in fast and hardly anything of interest along the strand line so we....

....spent most of our walk on the links where, for the first time in ages, we enjoyed a crowd of butterflies, particularly on those areas where the vegetation cover is short. There are no sheep grazing on this land so this is a natural feature which, perhaps because of the many small flowers growing on it - like wild thyme, eyebright, marsh cranesbill, kidney vetch and white clover - suit the butterflies.

The most abundant butterfly was the small heath. They spend much of their time arguing amongst themselves and chasing off....

....the common blues, which were almost as abundant, though very much more eye-catching.

Painted ladies were there too, in much smaller numbers, but looking very moth-eaten. This has been a year in which they have been one of the few species to do well in our rather cooler, damper weather - which seems strange in a butterfly which hails from North Africa.

The highlight of the walk was seeing this pair of fritillaries - I'm not sure which species - in such a state of high excitement, presumably because they were in the process of mating, that they completely ignored us.

The orchid season is, sadly, past is best with many of the flowers beginning to die back but there are enough to help support the few burnet moths that are still on the wing.