Golspie isn't a great place for warm, sunny days even at the height of summer but today started with bright sunshine and and not a breath of wind, so traces of mist were rising off Loch Unes as we made our way through Ferry Wood to Littleferry beach. The loch was buzzing with dragon- and damselflies, mostly emeralds, but the finest was found not on the loch but....
....basking in the sun on the trunk of a pine tree. It's a male common hawker, a species we've seen on the loch before, but this is an exceptionally fine specimen.
We walked out onto a gloriously empty beach and wandered along the waterline for half a mile or so with the sun warm on our skin. We are becoming accustomed to there being nothing washed up on the beach, not even a single, small jellyfish, so it was just as well that, offshore, the birds decided to entertain us, starting with....
....twenty or thirty gannets performing aerial acrobatics over a shoal of fish which they had found a hundred metres or so offshore.
Nearer the mouth of Loch Fleet, on a sandbank shortly to be inundated by the fast-rising tide, we noticed large numbers of sandwich terns mixed in with more oystercatchers than we've seen in ages. On a sandbank a little further into the loch we counted 84 oystercatchers in a separate group.
As we re-entered the wood on our way back to the car we spotted this ichneumonid wasp. A quick search on the internet suggests it may be a female
Rhyssa persuasoria, the aptly-named sabre wasp, which is found in pine woodland and uses its exceptionally long ovipositor to inject its eggs into the larvae of wood wasps.
We are becoming used to a farewell from the resident roe hind as we leave Ferry Wood but this time she had two young with her instead of the one we've seen before. They were feeding in a field adjoining the forestry, a field belonging to an exceptionally neat and well-worked little farm.
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