The Isle of Jura, famous for George Orwell and a date, a whirlpool, and red deer.  The gentleman author dispensed alliterative similes and metaphorical allegories to the bemusement of Higher literary comprehension Glasgow schoolboys, the red deer dispenses ticks.  I know about ticks, for I am the tick magnet.  And knowing this I can’t explain why I took to the waist-high brittle dry bracken, in shorts, to find an interesting, imaginative angle for a photo of a fallen birch tree. It would appear that I was the first succulent to pass their way and twenty of them decided to hitch a lift.  Or just a long slow suck. A gross of opportunistic suckers.  Euphemism intended.

In an eco-world we’re encouraged to appreciate the interconnectivity of all life forms, where every life form has a part to play. However it is hard to see how a tick has any function.  But that’s an Anthropocentric view, from the perspective of a Lyme Disease microbe, the tick must be the perfect vehicle for replication and migration.  Get the timing right and the female tick could be birthing ticklets six Hebridean islands away.  Bio-transfer.  From the unmentionables somewhere up around The Butt of Chris to the exposure of The Butt of Lewis.

Addendum….I was trying to get an angle that would align the prone tree trunk just above the hillside horizon, a silhouette against the blue of the sky.  However the topography did not comply with the photography.  

Expletive geography.  Expletive biology.  Expletive tick.

This was a little while ago. Technology and its operators have been somewhat challenged by the availablility of electricity and/or mobile ’phone signal, by the ambient temperature and/or weather, and by the time and/or will to sit down and get the act together.