Around nine this morning the sky filled with skein after skein of pink footed geese all, for a change, flying in the same direction, north, but....
....as we set off for Backies to collect some croft eggs at around eleven thirty we were stopped by a terrific noise from the direction of Dunrobin Castle, the sound of hundreds of geese taking to the air in alarm and flying south.
For a keen and knowledgable fungus forager the local woods must be a paradise at the moment but it's frustrating for people like us who are old and cautious knowing that chanterelles are such good eating yet so problematic, because there are both true and false chanterelles and, although the latter probably won't kill you, they can give a bad experience. From my understanding of the websites I have visited, the main way of telling them apart is from the colour of the interior of the stem: the upper one, being bright orange, is a false chanterelle.
Our route home took us down through Golspie Glen where we stopped off for a few minutes at the skating pond in the hope there might be a last, lingering dragonfly of the year - and there was. It was patrolling a section of the pond which lay in warm sunlight but the only way to identify it was by catching it on a photo. I succeeded by taking about thirty pictures of which four showed a dragonfly - it's arrowed in this one but....
....the wonders of digital photography enabled me to blow one of the pictures up to reveal a very handsome male southern hawker.
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