Evolution before my eyes

Dog minding has its advantages. It gets you out to the beach in the early hours when it's empty apart from a very few other dog lovers.

The sea was calm, the sun was warm but had yet to get hot enough to make exercise an effort.

Terns were fishing out on the bay, too far out to distinguish species. It was the same with a group of divers – birds that is, not sub aqua enthusiasts though we get plenty of those as well.

The fact that there were four together made me think they were black-throated divers which do sometimes gather in groups in the summer but, without binoculars, they were just divers.

These summer visitors are a welcome sight especially in a year when we have had so few swallows and house martins.

Common, Arctic, sandwich, little, or roseate terns must have all had a common ancestor before they evolved into their specialised species and so with great northern, red-throated and black-throated divers. or swallows, sand-martins and house-martins.

Darwin went to the Galapagos and studied the finches on the different islands before the penny dropped that they all arose from one original stock and yet it is plain to see, all around us, once the idea of evolution of species is accepted.

Following the burn up from the beach, I came across another visitor that has made its home here.

The monkey flower. Mimulus guttatus, which apparently started off as a wild flower in North America.

With one hundred and sixty different variants from annuals to woody-stemmed small shrubs, the mimulus species has become a leading model system for studying ecological and evolutionary genetics in nature.

A marmalade hover fly follows the "landing strip"  of red markers leading to the nectar and the pollen

There is to be an expedition to The Cradle of Storms, the remote Aleutian Islands off Alaska, to try and prove that the ancestor of the Scottish variety of monkey flower arose there and was brought back to Europe by a Russian -German explorer, Grigori von Langsdorff, in the nineteenth century.

There they were, growing in our burn, apparently a master of adaptation.

Evolution on our doorstep.