Natural highs and lows

As may have been discerned from the comments at the end of the previous blogpost, we have been away on our "Summer" holiday, fortuitously discovering some balmy weather but sadly missing out on a serendipitous meet-up with Mark, the beinn bicycling bard of Blogger . Whilst he and Deb were pedalling by our home in Stromness, Megan and I were driving by their holiday accommodation near Melvich. For 2025, our holiday location was Blairgowrie, on the south west side of the River Ericht in Perth and Kinross. This was a little further south than our usual jaunts but, as the meteorology proved, was certainly near enough to the Equator for this scribe. The journey down through northern Scotland and the Cairngorms was done in several sections, with overnight stays in Dornoch and Aboyne, before finally arriving in leafy and blossomy Blairgowrie. Whenever the narrowness of the road or the speed limit dictated that we keep below 40mph, the car windows were opened and we listened intently...

This is by far the most tenuous Nature Notes post yet, but bear with me. A much-anticipated trip south to Inverness finally came to fruition, despite a fraught few days immediately prior to the journey when the ferry broke down for 36 hours.  Fortunately, on the allotted day all was well, and we sailed serenely across the Pentland Firth, followed by a leisurely drive through Caithness and Sutherland. En route, we stopped off at Golspie for a bit of early Autumn colour, then Skelbo for a picnic lunch. At both sites we found the increasingly-misnamed Southern Hawker dragonfly, a woodland species which is expanding its range northwards, and one has to wonder if it will make it to Orkney before too long. The trip was occasioned by a fervent desire to see Elephant Sessions, a  band who seamlessly blend trad, funk and electronica. W e decided to make a long weekend of it and risk the company of 998 other music lovers at a sellout gig  at the Ironworks in Inverness. I could be w...

These opening paragraphs are going to have to ramble on for a while, as the first photograph is of a spider, and I wouldn't want to make you jump without at least giving you a bit of a warning. If it helps at all, it is a super close-up, taken with me kneeling on a boardwalk and reaching across and down to the water's surface, so that my fingers were only a few centimetres from the spider. Just in case we don't all know, I am not good with spiders, so if I can put on my brave pants to stare down an arachnid and  take a photo , you can probably manage to view it from the safety of your device screen. Just ignore that tickly sensation which has suddenly begun behind one of your ears. Happily, the remaining nineteen photographs on this blogpost are a lot less scary, some are just plain cute, and the whole shebang encompasses the last four days of our Nethy Bridge holiday and a broad swathe of wildlife. But back to the first image, the beast in question is a Raft Spider, sat on...