Speyside

Balancing out the perfect dragonfly weather at Chartley Moss earlier in the year, the weather today in Speyside was complete crap for dragonflies - cool, showery and windy. As a result I didn't see a great deal at the various pools around Abernethy Forest which are known to be good for the two species I particularly wanted to see - Northern Emerald and Northern Damselfly. At the first pool I checked I did find a male Northern Damsel cowering in the grass - I managed to coax it onto my finger, but it flew off before I could get a photo. The only other Odonata species on the pool were an ovipositing female Common Hawker and a pair of Large Red Damsels. All the other pools were far too exposed to the wind, and no further dragons or damsels were seen. No birds of note either apart from a Crossbill sp heard flying over at Loch Garten.

The forecast for tomorrow is similarly poor, so we've decided to give Beinn Eighe (a 100+ mile detour) a miss and just have a look for dolphins off North Kessock instead.

Hit the North

Tomorrow we're heading for Sutherland for 12 days - via Speyside and Beinn Eighe (weather permitting) to look for the Scottish dragonfly specialities. On Monday we should arrive at Laxford Bridge, where we'll be staying until the following Tuesday.

I strongly suspect that there will be no mobile phone signal here, at least not a good enough data signal to access the Internet, so blog updates will probably have to wait until I get back. In the meantime, here are some Google Streetview shots of Laxford Bridge:

Looking north: the house we're staying in is hidden behind the trees on the left, just over the bridge. The blob in the top right corner is probably one of the notorious Highland midges trying to eat the camera lens!

Looking north-east. The mountains in the distance are Foinaven and Arkle (as in the famous 1960s racehorses, which were named after them).

The north-west coast of Sutherland is very much like Shetland in habitat, and almost completely unwatched most of the time. Just imagine what must be turning up in isolated gardens like this one (at Oldshoremore, where there was a Black-headed Bunting the other day) in the autumn:

I'm sure the horizon doesn't really slope like that, but you get the idea

Or these gardens a few miles down the coast at Achriesgill. The white house in the first picture is where my grandfather was born, by the way:

Looking inland from the same spot (Foinaven again in the distance)

OK, it's in the shadow of the Isle of Lewis (but only just) as far as Yanks are concerned, but eastern vagrants must turn up along this coast. Someone needs to be brave and get up there one October...

P.S. I've enabled comment moderation while I'm away, to thwart the bastard Chinese spammers. Hopefully they might then fuck off altogether.

The Happy Moth

OK, maybe only hardcore Divine Comedy fans will get the title joke, but here are a couple of photos of a Buff-tip moth with a 'smiley face' caught last night in the garden (and spotted by Sophie. I just scribbled 'Buff-t 1' in my moth notebook, and then carried on going through the other 80-odd species in the traps). It looks a bit like Thomas the Tank Engine from the side.... if Thomas the Tank Engine was about 3 cm long and had wings. And legs instead of wheels. And had evolved to look like a broken birch twig.

New look

It seems to be fashionable to change one's blog template at the moment, so being a mindless herd-follower I thought I'd change mine as well.

Uncanny

Many thanks to John Judge for discovering that a well-known Leicestershire birder, blogger, comedian and now star of local radio is in fact a reincarnation of early twentieth-century German playwright, Bertolt Brecht:

A lucky escape?

Lagoon 4's recent run of form continues, with another county first this evening - a Broad-billed Sandpiper. I found out at about 20:50 when I looked at my phone and saw that I'd got five missed calls - it had been on silent for some reason. Arse. The last time this happened there was a Whiskered Tern at Eyebrook (also a county first) - technology's great, but it helps if it's switched on.

However, there was a huge silver lining to what at first appeared to be a very large and very dark grey cloud - just as I was cursing my luck, I got a message saying that it had flown off north-west at about 20:40. Had I got the first call from Matthew (at 20:00) I would certainly have set off for Rutland Water.... and missed it by a matter of minutes.

The fact that it's gone also means that I don't have to set my alarm for about 3 a.m. tomorrow morning. Hurrah.

See Matthew's gripping photos here.