Coul Links Fight: "The billionaire vs. the fly"

Thanks to reader Steven for Chris Baraniuk's pretty one-sided take on Coul Links and the efforts to block this proposed Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw design near Dornoch.

It was hard to forge through the piece after seeing the architects identified as "developers." And I am curious about branding Mike Keiser a billionaire, but mostly I was struck that the fight now seems to be over preserving the site due to a fly.

Now, I love all critters and never want to see golf invading a rare habitat but...

The specimen is a few millimeters in length, but it’s easy to make out the chunkiness of its thorax and the proud shape of its wings.

This is Botanophila fonsecai, Fonseca’s seed fly. It was caught in 1996 on a beach beside Dornoch in northeast Scotland, and it’s part of a collection being cataloged by Stephen Moran, an entomologist who lives nearby.

Presented in a box full of remarkably similar species, the fly does not look particularly special — and yet it is.

As far as we know, Botanophila fonsecai exists in only one place in the world: a roughly six-mile strip of coastline, adjacent to Dornoch and the nearby village of Embo. Its entire world is estimated to be less than a single square mile; its population size is unknown.

If this fine project dies because of a fly, then we know co-developer Todd Warnock was right, this was about the current American president and his course near Aberdeen.