Hazel catkins

Afternoon walk through the Botanics. Lots of tree work going on. The paths have all been swept clean and are mostly open. Found hazel catkins, Corylus avellana, well on.

 In extra, the big Himalyan cedar @Chamfer took it from another angle.  It's close to the location where there's another decaying stump, left to see what happened, so that's a possibility for this one too. There's another mature deciduous tree just on the North side of the main pond which split about 6 feet from the ground. BBC report

In Inverleith there are a few trees down, but they seem to have come up at the roots, with very shallow and narrow root plates. Swans and ducks on Inverleith pond in good order, gulls and oystercatchers on the sports fields.

We were amused by a black labrador deciding whether or not to plunge into the pond to retrieve a floating ball; its humans got the ball out with a long stick, whereupon the dog put the ball back in the pond, then did finally go in after it.