We drove out to Littleferry this morning to follow one of our favourite walks. It goes from the Golspie-Littleferry road to the beach through several different habitats, starting with a mature pine plantation which has a ground cover predominately of grasses and heathers. We usually walk through this quite quickly but we were stopped, first by....
....three roe deer - one of them this young buck feeding in the farmer's field - and then when we noticed that, pushing up in and between the heathers....
...there were.hundreds of creeping lady's tresses.
Previously, we've regularly found a few of these delicate little orchids in one particular place which is close to where the path reaches the beach, but we have never seen anything like....
.... the abundance of this, in our experience, rather rare flower.
We are absolutely certain that this explosion hasn't occurred in previous years as we walk through these woods often if iregularly, so something has encouraged these orchids which have been dormant for years to leap into exuberant life. It may be the weather, which remains cold - 15C when we set off on our walk - and dry.
When we came out onto the links we were quickly cold, as a fresh north wind was blowing and the sun had yet to put in an appearance. Consequently, we saw just one butterfly, a small heath, and the only other one we saw was....
....a ringlet when we came back through the woods.
In this peculiar. weather there are other winners and losers on the links. The Scottish bluebells are doing well but the northern marsh orchids have all begun to die back, so the landscape is dotted with their dead flower heads.
What we hadn't realised until we came out onto the beach was that we had chosen to arrive at the lowest point of an exceptionally low tide. As a consequence, the few birds we could see were far out on the exposed sands and weed beds.
We didn't stay long. The wind was too cold and, although we walked for about a quarter of an hour along last night's high-tide line, we found nothing of interest except a single dead bird.
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