I went to a hill north of Dunvegan today to have another look for Pyrola media (Intermediate Wintergreen) that I failed to find last year as part of the Threatened Plants Project. No luck. The heather in the area is quite young and I fear it has been lost to muirburn since the last record in 1993. However, the first record of this population was in 1985 and was in recently burnt moorland, so the wintergreen can survive muirburn. Perhaps a more recent event was in conditions of lower moisture and hence higher temperatures. There again, perhaps I just missed it. Again.
Lots of skylarks singing, a few snipe and flowering primrose, lesser celandine and hare’s-tail cottongrass made the trip a pleasure. Some frogspawn had succumbed to this morning’s frost – the first for some time. This happens every year but there are always plenty of frogs later in the year.
Plants of Skye, Raasay & The Small Isles 
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