Contrasts

In truly miserable weather - cold, wet and windy - our only excitement today was seeing three roe deer dash across the exit road from Dunrobin Castle, so suddenly that there was no hope of a photograph, so it seems a suitable sort of day to recall a totally contrasting animal whose home is equally contrasting....

....in the searing heat of the Namib desert, one of the hottest and driest on earth. It seems a miracle that any animal can survive in this environment yet a few, a very special few, manage it. One of them is a small lizard which goes by the names of....

....either the shovel-snouted lizard or the Namib sand-diver. That it has a shovel-shaped head explains the adaptation it has made to survive here: it uses it to push its way under the sand where, a short distance down, the temperature is far less extreme.

The conditions there are extreme yet, given the choice, I'd love to swap the north of Scotland for Sandwich Bay to the south of Swakopmund, looking for sand-divers.