All the colours of the flowers

I love the variety of colours of flowers at the moment! I walked along the River Esk in Musselburgh today and then along the John Muir Walkway to Musselburgh Lagoons. The Walkway is a wonderful mass of flowers. I love seeing all the colours together.

 opium poppy with a hawkweed

 hairy willowherb with tall mellilot and scentless mayweed

 scentless mayweed with hardheads (knapweed)

red clover, white clover and birds foot trefoil

but sometimes its equally nice to see different species that are almost exactly the same shade as each other.

Mallow and hardheads (knapweed)

It really felt like summer today, a feeling that has been very rare so far this summer! There were several butterflies flying around - a small tortoiseshell, a few whites, a couple of ringlets and a couple of meadow browns. I also saw two common blue damselflies and a red damselfly which I'm guessing was a large red damselfly. 

As there have been the past couple of times I've visited, there were a lot of lapwings on the Lagoons, lovely to see as lapwings are declining drastically in the UK. There were also a lot of terns around in the Firth of Forth, I couldn't get a good enough look to see whether they were common terns or arctic terns. I saw one velvet scoter, though there may have been more further out. There were also lots of eiders as there usually are at this time of year. Several bar tailed godwits too, some in their wonderful summer plumage (which I love seeing, they're more commonly seen round here in their more drab winter plumage). Many other species too!

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On a different note, I'm delighted that one of my haiku took second place (and two others were joint 8th) in this kukai on Sketchbook.

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