If you want to find out about the best bird watching sites in the Highlands there are plenty of sources giving a wide range of information. Perhaps the best is the RSPB “The top 52 bird watching sites in the Highlands” published in 2006. Speaking to the RSPB office in Inverness this morning they tell me it is still available. Looking through the various pages I was surprised just how up to-date this excellent booklet still is. Even in a revision there would be very little change to make although in some cases numbers of birds may have fallen. I still use this publication backed up by any regional reports available.
If you look at other groups such as mammals, butterflies and plants there is less information available although all of these have national or regional atlases at least showing distribution. We are more fortunate with wild flowers as the country and regional floras often give a good idea where to look. One group of plants that is always popular is the wide range of orchids and this is just about the best time of the year to look for them. At one time there was a great deal of secrecy about sites for orchids as some of them are quite rare. The collectors used to prize them and put them in their herbariums and it was detrimental to the rare species. Now the situation has improved so much there are guides in various books to the top orchid sites.
At one time, for example, in a site just north of Ullapool, we would talk in hushed tones of the rare orchids there such as dark-red hellebore, frog and small white orchid. Now it is listed in one of the sites in the superb book, “Orchids of Britain and Ireland – A Field Guide” by Anne & Simon Harrop, Pub 2005. For the Highlands various sites are listed indicating a wider range of orchids and some quite rare. Some are to be expected but not Beinn Eighe and Torridon as we associate these more with iconic birds such as golden eagle and the ancient Caledonian Pine Forest. Inchnadapmph is one obvious site as is Invernaver, Glen Affric, Abernethy Forest and Loch Garten. Further east there is the ever popular Culbin Forest that always seems so full of surprises with birds, wild flowers and butterflies.
At present one of the commonest and most widespread of the orchids is the heath spotted orchid and the blossoms of one in the photograph was taken in a roadside field near Inverness. Its name comes from the spotted leaves but this is very variable and you can find specimens with no spots at all. The flowers are also very variable but are often a pale shade of pink or pinkish-lilac and marked with variable fine dots and dashes. In the swarm where the photograph was taken there were two specimens with no markings on the flowers so they looked pure white. They were growing with some fine stands of fragrant orchids and, surprisingly, about two dozen small white orchids. The small white orchid is now localised in the Highlands whereas further south in Britain it has been lost from many of its old sites. In wetter areas the heath spotted orchids may be growing with the northern marsh orchid which is the most commonly encountered magenta flowered orchid. It sometimes grows in very large numbers and can transform the landscape. In most areas it is now at its best and the plants are often characterised by the sheer size of their flowering heads.