A Beauty and a Yellow Beast

We walked in Littleferry Woods in bright sunshine today, in the area between the road and....

....Loch Fleet where a rapidly falling tide was leaving....

....seals, like flotsam, on the emerging sandbanks.

These woods are pine plantations on sandy soils and very open at ground level, conditions which obviously suit the beautiful, delicate creeping ladies tresses orchids: the only other place we've found them is in Ferry Woods but in nothing like such vigorous profusion.

One of the characteristics of the pale, creamy flowers is that they emerge on only one side of the stalk, and one wonders why this should be, and whether the flower side is the down-wind side.

We also found four examples of this. It's about 3cm across and slightly soft and spongy. I think it's dog vomit slime mould, a rather revolting name that has a much kinder alternative, scrambled egg slime mould. It's strange stuff, seemingly half way between an animal and a plant. Wikipedia describes it as, "Like many slime moulds, the cells of this species typically aggregate to form a plasmodium, a multinucleate mass of undifferentiated cells that may move in an ameboid-like fashion during the search for nutrients." I don't understand this but the idea that these moulds are on the move is rather disconcerting.