Photos taken yesterday at Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh, Click on the photos for more detail - particularly recommended for the foxglove!
I was delighted that Angela of Art Life Stories and A Note from Your Mother , awarded me the One Lovely Blog Award. This award should be passed on to fifteen (count them 15!) good looking new blogs. I may play fast & loose with the "new" part (as Angela did before me!) but these are beautiful blogs I enjoy, which either started within the last eighteen months or which I have only recently discovered. Now this may take some time and is a very difficult choice to make. So let's look for beautiful blogs:
Also magnificent this year is the wild garlic, which fills the wooded riverside with the smell of, well, garlic. 
The air was full of birdsong too, song thrushes, chaffinches, robins, wrens and blackcaps being the main singers.
One of the places we visited in Skye, was the wonderful forest garden Rubha Phoil. It's a lovely place to wander round, being a delightful mix of woodland and coast, with vegetable and herb gardens. There's a wonderfully eccentric feel to it, with paths covered in a variety of materials, including one stretch being covered in sheeps fleeces. There is an otter hide, delightfully homemade (watch out for the nails!) overlooking Seal Island. We were entertained by the seals, who were swimming and playing but we didn't see an otter. 
I made my first patrol of the Water of Leith today, after a brief induction meeting, during which I was presented with my official Water of Leith Conservation Trust volunteer badge. It was raining for most of the time while I was walking along the river, but that certainly didn't stop the birds from singing, including song thrushes, blackbirds, great tits, chaffinches and chiffchaffs. I saw loads of robins, a couple of dunnocks, a wren, two grey wagtails and a dipper, which was hopping along this pretty tributary. 
This evening there was a meeting for all the volunteers who patrol the river, to keep us all up to date with what's happening on and around the river. It was nice to meet the other volunteers! 
Skye itself is quite a sizeable island, with a mountain range all of its own (the Cuillins) and stunning seascapes, with views that look over to other islands in the Inner Hebrides and also to the mountains of the Scottish mainland. The Cuillins are visible from every point on the island, it seems - below is the view from our B&B.....
Skye is a great place to go walking and also birdwatching. We walked through the woodlands and along the coast around Armadale, visited Rubha Phoil (more on that later in the week), walked from Orbost down the coast towards the Macleods Maidens, though we didn't manage to get close enough to get the best view of the seastacks. We also walked along the river Lealt into some very dramatic mountains. 
We also spent time in Portree, the main town on Skye, which itself has some very nice walks and a small and lovely wild nature park.
We saw lots of birds, including white tailed sea eagles, a golden eagle, mergansers, buzzards, a peregrine, a raven, wheatears, stonechats and a group of gannets fishing plus getting good views of a number of birds normally only heard - willow warblers, whitethroats and cuckoos. The whole island seemed to be full of the songs of the willow warbler and cuckoo. The swallows seem to have settled in well for the summer in Skye! To find out more about birds on Skye, you can visit the Skye Birds website. Wonderful flowers too, woodlands full of bluebells (see the new banner image!), river banks thick with marsh marigolds, fields covered in lesser celandines, plus a few orchids and butterwort in the marshy places. We also saw lots of tadpoles in ponds and large puddles. Deer and rabbits too in the fields. No otters, whales or dolphins....
(All species that appear in lighter green are hyperlinked to pages describing them)
(I'm featured on A Handful of Stones today, here, nothing to do with Skye....)
We're going over the sea (though nowadays there's a bridge) to Skye, back soon....
but became wet and dull later on. Driftwood and Sugar took a break from chasing each other round the rabbitry to say hello, watched by Ebony who is still in a separate cage
the other rabbits meanwhile were sitting quietly in the shed. Fudge the Jersey calf seems to have made friends with the cow sculpture, donated from the 2006 Edinburgh Cow Parade:
while the doves pecked small stones for their crops, to help their digestion:
We spent a while searching for Dexter, the Farm Cat but couldn't find him.
