The Old Kirk and the sea.

Looking South to St Boniface kirk on my first ever visit to Papay, Christmas eve 2013.

An island of light, to come.

#Orkney #Papay #islandlight #Spring

So good to be reminded that the depleted numbers in Orkney still rear a few young. Let's hope for a resurgence in numbers.

Bumblebee on yellow flowers

5 ways to get micro-rewilding in your garden or local area:
🌱Let the grass grow
☠️Ditch the poison
🐞Embrace some mess
🌳Plant trees
🕷️Look after the soil
More ideas: littlegreenspace.org.uk/features/rew...

A beauty - bird of the day but certainly not photographed today. Remind me, do they breed on North Hill? I presume so, but I just can't mind on. How bad is that?

Interesting afternoon on the beach. Chinese haemorrhoid cream. Russian topical antibiotics. French hand cream. And a flamingo and loads of other plastic.

...plus I have heard of a maritime influence helping things that otherwise like a calcareous setting - salt spray perhaps makes things interesting chemically. Is that possible? Talking shells, I did find a fresh largish Violet Sea Snail yesterday when searching for bits of plastic on the beach. Nice

Thanks so much Brian. Quite a few podetia but pretty short and stunted, and seemingly jumbled jaunty angles - i blame the uneven squamules they are sprouting from. We're acidic as anything here, but possibly there's an element of shell in the sand that gets blown around, plus...

Squamules mostly undivided with irregular margins. Smaller ones mainly uniform pale lime green above. Larger squamules with "giraffe" patterning. Squamules all cottony white below.
The whole thing was much smaller than I expected to C. rangiformis to be. Whole sample about 20mm across.

Is this stunted but fertile Cladonia rangiformis @brianecambs.bsky.social @britishlichensociety.org.uk? Some squamules, with small podetia coming from some. Podetia with green splodges on pale background - "giraffe-markings"? Better developed podetia ending in fingers tipped with dark tiny apothecia

The squamules were little divided to undivided (with irregular margins). Small ones were a uniform pale lime green above; larger ones had patterning of green splodges like podetia (giraffe markings?). Cotton white below.

Holm sound, becomes copper plate, long after the sun had left today.

#Papay
#holmsweetholm
#Orkney

Purple sandpiper feeding on the flood.

Weelies Taing.
Papay.
Orkney.
Today.

Great bird. Poor hyphenation.
Also sad memories of an old spill victim.

Purple sandpiper vs The Sea, tangled.