Scout Scar, nature notes

Squinancywort

 Squinancywort flowers above Scout Scar escarpment,  at your feet,  unremarkable unless you stoop and contemplate the detail of its tiny flowers.
A whirr of red and black on the wing announces the six-spot burnet moth, not seen here in numbers for the last six years.  Some years entirely absent.  It's a striking moth and its underwing is scarlet, its clubbed antennae silvery blue.

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 A skylark came down in the top of a tree, his beak full of food, his crest erect. A male watchful until the coast was clear and he might take food to his fledglings in their nest among the  tussocks.  So both parents share in rearing their young. The breeding crest of the male skylark is distinctive, but he can raise or lower those feathers  at will.  On a skylark photo-shoot whilst writing Cumbrian Contrasts, I found a male who sat in the top of a hawthorn through some 200 images. As for his crest, now you see it, now you don't.  Spending hours contemplating those hard-won images ( always searching  for  skylark that show well) I saw the beauty and subtlety of his plumage and his cryptic colouring.  The backdrop is his  habitat where his nest is concealed on the ground amongst tussocks and sedges.
In the afternoon, we heard and saw a willow warbler flitting through the bushes- carrying insects to its young, signalling  them to keep quiet.

Squinancywort of the deep pink centre.  It shares the same micro-habitat of bedstraw and thyme, the outcropping limestone of the path where it has little competition.  Squinancywort is a woodruff,  petals marked with pink. Bedstraw is a bright white. The colour- contrast is often more subtle - squinancywort can appear rather pale.
Lady's bedstraw is budding and soon its honey-scented yellow flowers will be abundant.

Click on images to enlarge, to read captions

White butterfly orchid mingle with blossoming dropwort.  The sun releases the nectar of  slender fragrant orchids.  Two fly orchids in the grass in a spot where I always find them.  Dark red helleborine buds and will soon flower- if the flower stems aren't nipped off first. Not sure of the culprit but it often happens.  Tiny strawberries amongst the limestone clitter.  Sun-warmed and sweet sensation, or tasting of nothing.  Wood sage and limestone fern in the clitter too.

To find bilberry growing amongst heather is a first up here.  Scout Scar has the flora of limestone grassland and bilberry and heather are plants of peatlands, acid soils. They grow in loess, a fine glacial deposit that gathers in hollows.  We began our walk with a visit to the blue stone, one of the larger glacial erratics to be found here.  Erratics occur in a scatter over Scout Scar, often with pistachio coloured lichens that indicate their different geology.  One is patterned with colourful lichens and fragments of the same rock lie close about it,  shattered over the centuries by frost erosion.
After weeks of hot weather with the ground parched for lack of rain  the Jet Stream shifts, Atlantic Weather and Storm Hector is on its way.  Strong winds more of a feature than rain, perhaps.  Due  14 June.  How will all those nestlings fare? The young skylark amongst the tussocks, young willow warblers.  Several reports of adders basking, not today.
On Cairngorm, winds reach 104 mph.  Think of those snow bunting and dotterel, with eggs, with young.