There was an appeal for an ORCA Team Leader to lead some surveys to the Western Isles in mid-June. I offered to covered a couple of them, using the surveys as a plan to tour up the West Coast of Scotland along the West Coast 500, look for a UK Orca and try to see the remaining British breeding Dragonflies: Azure Hawker, Northern Emerald, Highland Darter (which now is treated as a subspecies of Common Darter) and Northern Damselfly. All of these plans were weather and sightings dependent. I left Dorset on the afternoon of 15 Jun. The following morning I woke up to sunshine and largely blue skies in the lakes. However, it was solid cloud as I crossed the Scottish border and raining, by the time I reached Glasgow. Not good weather for Dragonflies. I had a number of potential sites to try and checking the forecast, I headed for the Beinn Eighe area of the Central Highlands: where the rain was predicted to be lighter. But the time I arrived, the weather had improved to full cloud cover and it had stopped raining. I had another good night's sleep in the Focus Hotel in the Beinn Eighe area and awoke to dry, cloudy conditions, with the forecast suggesting the sun light break through later in the morning. There wasn't a rush to get going quickly, given the target species were Dragonflies, so there was time for a leisurely chat with some fellow travellers in a campervan over breakfast. The first stop was the nearby Bridge of Grudie where I spent a couple of hours looking for Dragonflies with limited success. But I did bump into a few Large Heaths, which I've only still a couple of times before at English sites: Crowle Moors (2012) and Foulshaw Moss (2018).
When I compared them to the photos, I've taken at the English sites, I saw they were paler with less obvious eye markings on the underwing. This is because they are the scotica subspecies, which occurs in the Scottish Highlands. Without planning to photograph the two English subspecies, I've actually managed to do that.
