Caterpillars

I visited the Wards Estate on the shores of Loch Lomond, which the RSPB has just acquired to manage jointly with Scottish Natural Heritage and the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park Authority - the first partnership of its kind.

The Estate's quality lies in the range of diverse habitats it includes: grazing farmland, oak and beechwoods, wetlands and, I thought most impressively, one of the largest areas of fenland in Scotland. This was a shifting, waving-in-the-wind mass of grasses, reeds and sedges - home to a huge variety of invertebrates and birds. In other places we saw patches of flattened grasses where the resident Roe Deer had been resting. The range of birds is impressive too, including pairs of breeding ospreys, one of which we glimpsed across the Loch. And all with the impresssive mountain backdrop of Ben Lomond.

There is something to see at every scale. I had never before seen writhing clumps of wriggling caterpillars like this before - only one sample of the incredible wildlife of this beautiful place.