Sandwich Terns

We walked along the Sutherland coast this morning under a sky of fair-weather cumulus, the clouds standing over the land as one so often sees when at sea. These are the clouds of the trade winds but of much warmer weather than we're experiencing, the temperature dipping still further as soon as the sun is obscured.

The butterflies and moths really should be out in numbers but they persistently refuse to appear. The ragwort continues to do its best to attract insects, like the silver y moth in this picture, but butterflies we really should be seeing are absent. To give one example, there's a grassy clearing near Dunrobin Castle which is home to a small colony of ringlets but we haven't seen one this year.

We do keep seeing species for the first time, albeit very late. Small heaths are an example, of which we saw two this morning. They, along with three common blues, were the sum total of our report to the Big Butterfly Count - until we discovered that the small heaths aren't included in the survey.

There are plenty of sandwich terns along the shore but few seem to be fully-grown adults in breeding plumage, which have black heads and black crests. The ones we're seeing have as much grey on the top of their heads as black, so they're either juveniles or, if they have a yellow tip to their bills, non-breeding adults.