A Hair’s Breadth.

A walk locally earlier this week gave us some sightings of Green Hairstreak. Thanks to friend Mark. They were flitting around the tops of the trees so didn’t offer brilliant views but they were good to see never the less. Especially so for Tania. Almost everything that’s new for my year lists is brand new to her.

The event reminded me of a trip to Mull a few years ago when I took a small party of people on tour. Exactly six years ago to the day to be precise we’d been watching White tailed Eagles under a beautiful blue sky and had got back in the car only to be joined by a Green Hairstreak which landed on the dash. Probably my best ever views of one of our most beautiful butterflies. It was carefully extracted and shown it’s true environment non the worse for its visitation, but not before it had been photographed of course!

 

Winging it

A nice surprise during one of our morning walks on the Scottish Birders Tour last weekend was a small flock of Waxwings. I heard them before they came into view; their ‘boiling kettle’ calls are quite distinctive. The flock stopped no more than a few hours before they continued their journey north back to their Scandinavian breeding grounds.