St Cuthbert's Cemetery

 After a few beautiful, unseasonably warm days, it's back to chilly weather! I braved the low temperatures today to revisit St Cuthbert's Cemetery to continue my work of surveying the wildlife in all the cemeteries managed by Edinburgh City Council. 

St Cuthbert's Church is at the West End of Edinburgh's city centre and the graveyard sits right next to that of St John's Episcopal Church (which manages its own cemetery independently of the council). So the photo below shows St John's Church but St Cuthbert's Churchyard.

The cemetery is definitely coming into bloom with daffodils 

and Glory of the Snows 

If the weather had been as warm as it was on Monday I might have seen some butterflies, but as it was, the only colourful insects I found were a couple of ladybirds, still hibernating including this Harlequin. If you look carefully there's another ladybird behind it, one of the variant forms of 2 spot ladybird, I think.

Two mistle thrushes were wandering around the cemetery. This one posed so long on this gravestone, I began to worry it might be ill

but then it flew down to the grass, energetically poked around for worms then flew into a tree, so I think it was probably okay. 

You can read about my previous (much sunnier!) visit to St Cuthbert's in this post.