Starting with a bang...and a butterfly...

Last year was paved with the good intentions of completing my John Muir Award. I was to follow in the footsteps of 4 of our adult volunteers who had done theirs through Sustrans' Citizen Science programme. This is part of the Greener Greenways project, part-funded by SNH since 2013, aiming to improve and enhance biodiversity on traffic-free sections of the National Cycle Network. There are about 600 miles of traffic-free NCN in Scotland which often act as green corridors linking up fragmented habitats and, as such, they provide a great arena for people to see and record wildlife. What can I say? I started, I stalled and I have regrouped in 2018 determined to start afresh and to spend the summer discovering, exploring, conserving & sharing the NCN. I will be surveying bumblebees and butterflies, learning new birdsong and flowers, picking up litter, and recording my wildlife sightings as I travel the country supporting our routes volunteers. And I will be telling people about it...here and on Twitter. I started with a butterfly-fest. On the morning of the sunny Bank Holiday Monday, NCN754 along the Union Canal in Edinburgh was awash with newly-emerged Orange-Tip butterflies as we litterpicked along the towpath with Scottish Canals. Feeling my luck was in, I headed straight to the Roseburn Path (NCN1) in Edinburgh for my weekly UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme survey, thinking I'd find them there too. But it's a different habitat, and there was nothing nothing nothing. And then there was this. A Comma. The first one I have seen there in 3 years of surveying, and only the second one I have seen ever. Smuggy McSmugface. Where will the Award take me from here?