Wednesday 3 July 2019

You red that write

After our inadvertently-lengthy hike, on the following day we opted for a gentler plan. We took the short drive to Cluny House Gardens, almost a bit of an annual pilgrimage for us, to wander around a steeply-sloping site full of lovely blooms. The weather was still keen on being rain showers with sunny intervals, but that did have some compensations.



There weren't many hoverflies around, and although we did see our first ever Tree Bumblebees, insects were quite hard to find. During one particularly-extended Our Lass/Himalayan Poppy moment, my attention was eventually taken with a spider and its web. Then it was time to spend a bit of quality time with the garden's Red Squirrels.




After lunch, we returned to the Birks Cinema, for the afternoon showing of 'Rory's Way', an aged-Hebridean-goes-to-San-Francisco story starring Brian Cox. The demographic of the audience was quite interesting too, as we were very much in the lower 5th percentile. When the titles came up and the rating was shown as "infrequent strong language, moderate sex references", an elderly female voice happily called out "Oh goody!"

In the evening, with a little more sunshine, we headed back out to the Moness Gorge to investigate a flower we had seen a few days earlier. At that time, we had been unable to capture decent images of the plant, as it was tipping down with rain. When climbing the hill behind the cottage, a distant flutter caught my eye. I managed a couple of photos of the bird in question, which turned out to be a male Redstart. 


Once in the woodland and narrow paths of the gorge, we soon re-found out target plant, two specimens of a Bird's-nest Orchid. We were rather chuffed to have spotted and eventually identified them.



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