Wandering

Mostly, Mrs MW and I walk together on the many and sometimes rather long walks we do round Golspie but sometimes, as she did today, she leaves me to do my own thing. So I was left in the meadow just the village side of Dunrobin Castle and spent my time....

....wandering around looking for beautiful things to photograph, which included this meadow brown male, which is, unusually, rather dowdier than....

....the female.

Between the occasional light showers the common blues were on the wing. There seem to be plenty of males around but I have yet to find a female, which doesn't bode well for the continuation of the local species.

The six-spot burnets were also buzzing around, in pathetically small numbers compared to Littleferry, but this, the only one I managed to photograph, seemed, like others around Dunrobin, to have its rear two spots close to or actually fusing, so perhaps this is a local feature.

The beach, with the tide almost high, was largely deserted except for....

....a ringed plover and a pair of dunlins working the seaweed line.

I re-checked the area around the orchid growing just at the back of the beach and found no others, so it has flowered alone this year. I'm still struggling with orchid identification but I'm more than ever inclined to lump all the local purple orchids into the northern marsh species.

Rather more people than usual seemed to be out walking this morning. I don't know what they thought of someone chasing insects around a field but I can't have seemed much more peculiar than the man who was busy dismantling a pallet which had been washed up on the foreshore.