birds and bees

In Holyrood the swallows are teaching their young to swoop and dive. They definitely react to the human presence and will barrel towards you as you cross the grass, their grass. Difficult to know why they will use you as a marker, a turning point, but I like to think it is a celebration of their aerial dexterity. I have been trying to capture their fly-pasts in between the rain showers that are plaguing this summer. I nearly called this blog entry "swallow! (don't spit)".  

Mary did some stretches while I got dizzy spinning round as the aero bullets zipped by. I have been meaning to go there with the bigger camera set to fast shutter speed to see if I could get better images or video. They are an absolute delight. However Mary finished her limbering up and we ran round the back of St Margaret's Loch. Where there were a couple of juvenile heron. One stood on the path and told us since it had newly arrived on the planet it wasn't sure about who was a friend and who was a foe. We crept closer assuring it we were of the friend variety but it eventually thought better and swooped on giant wings into the safety of the pond. It promptly caught a fish (didn't realise this until seeing the photos later at home). Who knew there were 4" fish in that swan-poop loch? I thought it was just eating bits of pond weed and probably near starvation; doing a bit of freeloading and white-loafing off the tourists.

fishing

I had the notion while taking this photo that if I had enough time and energy, and Mary didn't run too fast I could get a photo of NB Law on her head like a hat. Might take some finagling as I don't have photoshop currently.

throstle smoking a pipe

is that seats behind the wee boathouse? Must check this out.

Person on Haggis Knowe looked like ex-PRCer Claudia;
her of the long black hair who didn't tie it back when running.

quite right! 

And lets have harsher penalties too.

Cinnabar Moth caterpillars on the ragwort

More swallowing