Dorset Wildlife Trust project: Hibbitt Woods

 Storm Ingrid positioned herself off the coast of Cornwall, hunkered down and unleashed rain and wind across South West England. Maybe not an obvious day then to begin my Dorset Wildlife Trust (DWT) project, but an inclement day would be perfect for a muddy boots experience. Hibbitt Woods, just into Dorset,  a few miles south of Yeovil, was to be my destination, accompanied by my wife, with the hope of seeing a bullfinch in our mind as a target species.

 

 

I've been getting it wrong for weeks by calling this 7 hectare (22 acre) reserve Hibbitt's Wood. I'm not entirely sure why it is called Hibbitt Woods as this reserve comprises an ancient wood and meadow (known as South Clarkham Copse) lying to the south of a quiet lane to Halstock and  two parcels of woodland (North Clarkham Copse and Harper's Hill Copse) now merged into one wood to the north, on the opposite side of the lane. Who or what Hibbitt was shall remain a mystery.

 

  

Wet doesnt really do justice to our time here. To be fair the rain had eased from torrential to steady, but underfoot on entering the reserve, it was a sodden squelchy affair. Wellingtons were a necessity, yet even on this challenging winter's day I realised this was a special and uplifting place. A cursory glance as we crossed over the small meadow revealed a stand of mostly oak and ash with beech, hazel, blackthorn and holly, the latter providing an extensive understory.

 

 

 From the meadow you enter the wood via a gate and then cross a bridge over a small stream. Just a few footsteps but you enter another world. 

 

 

 Above us the roar of Storm Ingrid made herself known through the bare branches heralding, even on a dark midwinter day with the rain falling, a green oasis. Everywhere there was moss, over the ground, up tree trunks, dangling off branches, stumps and fallen trees. The colour was startling.

 

 

 

The rain added an extra dimension to this habitat. At one tree I watched rivulets of water trickling down through the luxuriant moss, drip upon drip. You could hear it. I posted a clip of it on my Instagram page. 

 

Although open access we kept to the single route around the wood. There was little evidence of other visitors, meaning this place felt unobserved, a small remnant of ancient woodland in a very rural area quietly just getting on with life.

 

  

 

Although for one unlucky woodpigeon life was cut short under the sparrowhawk gaze. Later we saw this predator darting across the meadow where numerous smaller birds flitted through the branches to make their escape.

 

 

 Of course this reserve is not unmanaged but from the couple of hours we spent here I'd suggest DWT are performing a light touch strategy allowing the woodland to exist at nature's, not humans', seasonal timeframe. The reserve is home to the silver washed fritillary butterfly which prefers sunny rides or open woodland edge habitats. Hazel coppicing was in evidence and with selective felling the wood felt open, helped of course by the bareness of winter. 

 

 

 

 Dead wood trees stood in places, fallen trees  littered the ground, slowly decomposing nutrients back to the soil. And everywhere there was ivy which I always enjoy seeing as it spreads over stumps or up trunks, ivy, like bramble, is such an important wildlife resource. 

 

 

 Also in evidence were Parmotrema spp. lichen, I'm no expert in identifying to species level. It was everywhere even happily growing it seemed on fallen branches, a sure sign of an undisturbed habitat with a clean atmosphere.

 

 

Doing my research before visiting, the best time to visit this reserve is in spring. Wild daffodil and bluebell provide a spectacular show I read. But even in deep midwinter life is returning. It is still early in the year and remarkably I only found one violet, host plant to the above mentioned butterfly, however lesser celandine, arum, bluebell and primrose were all showing signs of growth. A flash of pristine emerald amongst the fallen leaves.

 

  

 

That wasn't the only splash of colour on the woodland floor, these scarlet caps, or scarlet elf cups  Sarcoscypha coccinea were common across the reserve, even on the path, another lovely sign of an undisturbed habitat. 

 

 

The more we looked the more we found. A sudden movement showed a mouse, unidentified, as it scurried along next to this fallen branch and out of sight. Taking a closer look the decaying branch provided a well used 'tunnel' for safe passage. Out of the corner of my eye I then saw it exit and scamper off a few feet away.

 

  

 

Further on I noticed this collection of discarded acorns and nuts. The site of a grey squirrel feeding area I suggest, the discards accumulated on the floor over months of feeding on a branch above, or maybe feeding on the ground. The tree in question was thick with ivy all the way up to the canopy. How I'd love to explore what was lurking in there, though sadly my tree climbing days are long gone.

 

 

 

I've not mentioned birds much. In the rush to get out today I'd forgotten my binoculars, normally kept in the car but now languishing at home. Instead I had to rely on my hearing which revealed the woodland was full of song. Great, blue and coal tit were frequent. A jay, chaffinch, great spotted woodpecker, blackbird and robin less so. Woodpigeon flapped overhead. Sadly no bullfinch though, as we sploshed our way through the mud, they'd have heard us long before we'd seen them.

 

  

 

By now we'd been exploring for well over an hour. To be honest I'd have liked to stay longer but the weather was turning against us as was the light. A decision was made not to visit the other woodland to the north of the lane but to return here in the spring. There are two other DWT sites close by, we'll make a day of it on a sunny March or April day maybe. But for now we ended our visit exploring the meadow, which was absolutely waterlogged. I read that adder's tongue fern is found here, though I couldnt see any emerging today. That can wait for our next visit. 

 

 

So I'm off the blocks so to speak. I really enjoyed this reserve, if the remaining reserves to visit sre as good as this I'm in for a wonderful year.

 Back at the car while drying off with a flask of tea we discussed how important these lesser known and  isolated reserves are. The large honeypot reserves provide an excellent experience to the visitor but these hard to find reserves, like Hibbitt Woods, are the real gems of the natural world for me. Maybe on a drier day though. 

 

 

Date of visit : 24th January 2026, mid day to early afternoon.

 

Species encountered :  Great spotted woodpecker, great tit, blue tit, coal tit, robin, jay, long tailed tit, woodpigeon, chaffinch, sparrowhawk, carrion crow, blackbird. Primula spp, ivy, soft rush, male fern, harts tongue fern, arum, lichen, moss, lesser celandine, violet, bluebell, holly, hazel, ash, oak, scarlet elf cup, and not forgetting that mouse.

 

 And just as we were about to leave? I heard a bullfinch calling from a cottage garden we'd parked next to. I couldn't locate it without staring into their property, but that unmistakable soft call ticked off our target species for the day. 

For a Fistful of Raindrops

In A Fistful of Dollars, the arrival of a stranger brings with it six-shooter law to the township of San Miguel. Ultimately the dire situation the town found itself in, sandwiched between a feud between two families, is resolved through a gun battle in the parched dusty windblown town square before the 'man with no name' (played by Clint Eastwood in his first role) rides out of town, never to return.

You can feel the heat in this classic and well loved Spaghetti Western. Sweat drips off the foreheads of the main players, the sunlight blindingly intense, the sky is the deepest of blue, dust billows everywhere, energy sapping heat devoid of all rain. 

I was born in 1964. A Fistful of Dollars was released in 1964 and this week the Scottish Environment Protection Agency announced it had had its driest year since 1964. Even in a normally wet Scotland farmers are having to provide water to stock. I don't think there is any connection between these three, or is there?

In this part of Somerset, and across the whole of southern England, this year has been dry, exceptionally dry and warm. I've known dry summers, I've known hot periods. I well remember holidaying in Bournemouth  in 1976 characterised by heat and the scent of heathland fire smoke everywhere. But these were relatively short lived, a number of weeks. With just a few days to go before the end of the metrological summer, the breaking news is that 2025 will undoubtedly be the warmest summer on record due to daily temperatures above the seasonal norm for months. Part of what seems a rising trend, 1976 no longer features in the top 5 list of hot summers. The record-breaking dry year of 1964 with its 79% rainfall now an interesting footnote. 

Despite the wet winter of 2024-2025, Spring arrived abruptly bringing with it drying winds and sunshine. I've been looking at my diary. On the 15th of February we were in Thenford Arboretum in Northamptonshire and 'today's weather was more like mid December - horrible grey, foggy, wet weather'. There seemed to be a lot of cloudy dark days before I then wrote in my diary on February 28th 'Weather has settled in to a dry sunny spell at last'. The following day I wrote 'what a fabulous and beautiful day - not a breath of wind, the sun had heat to it'. I remember the last few weeks at work before I retired on the 19th of March were wonderfully sunny, even warm. Quickly however by mid April I recall being worried about the dry conditions while walking on the Quantock Hills. Again in my diary I wrote on the 11th of April, 'everything is tinder dry on the Quantocks - the soil is either baked solid or blowing away in the quite gentle breeze - I notice farms are supplying water to sheep up here'. But we assumed the rain would come. 

Yet four months later we've had hardly any rain. In Somerset just 1% of the average monthly rainfall for July. Over the summer around a third of the average expected rainfall has fallen. What has fallen, sporadically in hefty showers, evaporated quickly in the warm sunshine. As I write this on the 28th of August many trees and shrubs are showing serious signs of stress, branches being shed, leaves dropping quickly with the landscape looking more October golden than late summer. It won't be until next summer that we'll see the full effect of this dry season on tree health but looking now it's not good to witness and I sadly predict many trees will not survive.

A walk we did over the recent August Bank Holiday weekend has highlighted, and provided the impetus to write a few words, on how significant this dry spell has become. If you will an aide-mémoire to this remarkable year before all too soon the autumnal rains will return, or at least we sincerely hope so.

This walk began in the nearby Somerset village of Winscombe, with a plan to walk to the hamlet of Winterhead and return. All too soon as we left Winscombe the first field was the colour of bleached champagne. Underfoot the soil unyielding, it felt like walking on concrete.  

After a few fields the walk follows a myriad of lanes up towards Sidcot Hill. What struck me was the number of fallen leaves and how, as in this image below, the beech tree leaves are turning orange. I had to remind myself this was August 23rd, not October 23rd.

 

 

Worse was to come. We left the lanes and entered the countryside proper, firstly horse paddocks, which seemed to have virtually no grass left in them. Usually in dry periods the grass yellows but the root systems lie dormant waiting for the the next wet spell. These fields though were showing extensive areas of dusty dirt. What has happened to the grass, have the roots died too? I looked across the fields. Yes trees and hedges were retaining colour but the landscape looks tired, a beige hue of exhaustion, it has looked like this for a long time.

Beyond the paddocks we headed up onto Sidcot Hill on the way to joining the West Mendip Way. In this heat, which has defined the summer of 2025, it was a long slog up onto the hill. The views up here are astonishing, across to Wales, but it was how dry the fields looked that caught my attention. These fields still contained sheep, sheltering in the shadow of a hedge, but fields with little grass growing, though plenty of dock plants or thistles surviving due to their long tap roots.

We eventually joined the West Mendip Way where by chance we had a long chat to the farmer here, Mark Heal. The track this medium-long distance path follows is usually muddy even in summer. As we chatted by the gate Mark confirmed many of the issues I'd already heard about affecting farming elsewhere. He told us that he has now used up the last of his winter feed as he has been supplementary feeding his organic beef and sheep all summer long. Lambing during the warm weather in April, he added, was something of a treat, but with no rain of note since then all his stock has needed to be fed, when they should of course be feeding naturally on the summer grazing. Economically this is disastrous. Worse still, he continued, every farmer he knows is in the same position and if replacement winter feed can be found it is both scarce and very expensive, a situation which can only be made worse by the poor harvest this year, yields are significantly down with hay and silage crops almost non existent. There will be a fodder shortage this coming winter. For someone who is struggling to keep his animals alive and healthy Mark seemed quite optimistic about the future, as long as it rains that is.

I watched Mark drive off up the dusty track, on his way to check his South Devon Black cattle we'd seen earlier. I was touched by his optimism as we headed off in the opposite direction across what should have been a muddy ford, which today simply featured the well preserved baked hard mountain bike tyre tracks from a previous season.

He's right, we need to be optimistic to the changes in Britain's weather. My own take is that with Climate Change Britain is becoming much more continental in its weather patterns, meaning prolonged spells of the same conditions rather than the hotchpotch of weather changing daily we've all considered the norm for a century or more. Personally I have enjoyed weeks of predictable dry days this summer but I know many, my wife included, have struggled with the prolonged heat day in, day out, dominated by four heatwaves of exceptional temperatures. 

Wildlife has had mixed fortunes too. Dry soils mean earthworms and soil invertebrates have buried down deep, out of the reach of birds, hedgehogs and other animals who rely on these for survival. Slugs and snails have found hidden corners and gone into what is called Aestivation, a form or dormancy that allows them to tick over their metabolism before the rain returns. Our swifts departed about two weeks early, partly a sign of a successful and early season, they arrived a week early. Bats around the house have been very active however due to the abundant insect life which has bucked some of the negative trend with second broods of butterflies doing well in some species for example. Earlier in the summer there was a ladybird population explosion, short lived as the aphid population was supressed. I've seen more harvestmen in the garden than for years.

Now though it has gone on long enough. As I write this  unsettled weather brought to us by ex-hurricane Erin is trying to make inroads but it is not really producing what we need. Yes it is a little cooler, a little more cloud in the sky but the rain of yesterday was in the form of short lived showers and as has been the case all year, rain evaporated in an hour or so leaving the landscape dry once more. What we need is a few weeks of steady medium intensity rain, not heavy downpours, to begin the water cycle again.

We eventually finished our walk last weekend taking in the views and the scenery and finishing at Winscombe Cricket Club where for about an hour we watched Wedmore 2nds playing Winscombe 2nds on a very dry pitch - perfect weather for cricket while watching the wind ruffle the piles of fallen leaves beside us.

I don't think I'll forget this year for a long while. The rain will of course return one day, and, if my predictions are accurate for a continental climate, it will probably rain every day for weeks non stop, if not for months. Then, possibly following the arrival of a stranger riding ahead of a weather front, I'll look back and say, was the hot dry summer of 2025 actually real?

Christmas On The Move

It has, for want of a better phrase, been a mad-dash Christmas week. Those of a pedantic disposition could argue it was nine days rather than a week, but I for one am not counting the days, just the season. However I did do a lot of driving.

And so it began on December 23rd.

Sunrise was almost two hours away as we set off from Somerset at 6.35am. By the time we reached this road up to the village of Slaley in Northumberland it was half an hour to sunset and getting dark.  Not only dark but wet and quite windy. That wind would accompany our week in this remote cottage, all of which added to the atmosphere of festive escapism.

Our home for the week sat in splendid rural isolation hard by Slaley Forest. So rural at one point a flock of crossbill flew over the garden and on Christmas Day the sad remnants of a woodcock slain by a passing vehicle interrupted our visit to Tyneside with the fatted goose. Located on a hill farm of suckler cattle and sheep (plus four alpaca) the landscape was alive with wildlife, even in December. Rook roosted in the Scots pine shelter-belt, with the usual garden species on the feeders. A kestrel was a daily visitor but due to the volatile weather proper observation was tricky, however over the woods a regular scrap took place between a buzzard and carrion crow. Fieldfare, redwing and a single mistle thrush added variety to the huge gull flocks heading to roost each evening to what I assumed was to Derwent Reservoir about four miles away. 

Not everything involved wildlife. We managed to stagger down to Hexham a couple of times taking in and enjoying the Christmas atmosphere of the Abbey and catching up with friends.

We were fortunate to be staying during a full moon period. This is dark skies country and on Boxing Day morning at 4am I couldn't resist a short walk in the moonlight, moonlight which was strong enough to read a book by. It made for quite atmospheric walking too. Of course what this image does not show is the wind. Without exception every day provided strong winds, on a couple of days gales with sustained windspeed nudging 50mph, gusting higher. It simply never stopped blowing and as the farmer said they'd had three weeks of what the weather forecasters called volatile, I'd call it stormy, and rain, the rain was a frequent accompanying phenomenon with occasional breaks often at night. The last time I'd been in such relentless wind was on Orkney, very similar.

We also had snow. Admittedly this was wet snow, not enough to make a snowman but as with the Met Office's definition of a white Christmas, on our cottage one snowflake fell confirming a white holiday stay. How we realised it was snowing came by chance. Mrs Wessex-Reiver was looking out the bedroom window while it was still dark. I looked to where she was and thought the light coming in looked odd but then the moment passed. It wasn't until half an hour later when some daylight had appeared that we realised snow had fallen. Not crisp and even sadly as by mid morning it had mostly turned to rain.

It was the same day as the snow fell that we headed to Tyneside to see my father for a second day, the first being Christmas Day. On the North Sea coast by Whitburn we still had the wind, the sea was rough, however it was 11oC (7oC by the time we'd returned to the cottage). Quite a contrast to the morning.

All too soon our week was over, possibly as we'd had enough of the weather and returned south a day early. Not before another visit to Hexham where we not only discovered a fantastic independent bookshop where we could have spent hours perusing their stock but quirky little asides such as this advertisement for a clock restorer - these clocks are all broken but used in an alleyway display. And, as in many places these days the post box had a knitted hat. Hexham is a lovely market town.

By Saturday the 30th we were back in Somerset and after the eight hour drive the day before a quiet morning was required. We stayed local in Weston Super Mare having brunch at the Revo Kitchen which now occupies the former Sealife Centre. A bustling place a million miles from the remote area around Slaley and remarkably in the garden we have three daffodils in flower and a snowdrop almost about to open. Springtime in December.

Which all neatly brings me to New Year's Eve. We needed to stretch our legs so where better to head to than the Hawk and Owl Trust reserve on the Avalon Marshes. I'd heard short eared owl were here before Christmas, though on this visit despite there being plenty of other activity, no SEO's were to be seen. I'm fond of this reserve having watched it develop from arable farmland and peat workings. On our short four mile walk I realised I'd not been here for about a year, and therefore witnessed many changes including the maturity of the dragonfly pond which I'd last seen newly dug. Some nice hedge laying going on too. And the sun was out.

And so we reached the end of our walk, and the end of the year. A year in which many wildlife watching trips were curtailed due to other commitments, something I plan to rectify in 2024. How on earth we got to the year 2024 is beyond me. I'll be sixty in April and so need to rekindle the childlike naturalist spirit of encounter as I become Wessex-Reiver the sexagenarian. In fact it's starting tomorrow in earnest as I'm off to Slimbridge to kick start the birding year with some friends, I can't wait.

Happy New Year.

 

During Wind And Rain - Watching Butterflies

To badly paraphrase that well known lepidopterist Jane Austen “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Northern man in possession of a good guide book, must be in want of a butterfly.”

I read somewhere that the reason butterfly watching was so popular in the Victorian era was partly due to the lazy hot days of summer when the well clad gentleman in linen knickerbockers (or occasionally a lady in fetching taffeta) would roam the sweet vernal grass meadows near the homestead, swishing a butterfly net with abandon while dreaming of cricket, and a return home on the Penny Farthing to an afternoon tea on the terrace, maybe with the vicar. How things have changed.

July 2023 has arrived. I look out of the window. Strong winds and grey skies with rain so heavy you could launch a boat in the resulting flood. Not ideal weather for butterfly watching then? Well, yes it is, in some ways it is perfect. 

Hodder's Combe - where the sunlit butterflies begin

As I am that Northern man of Austen's  my target butterfly for this July has been the silver washed fritillary. Before dear reader you continue with this narrative I may as well confess to having failed spectacularly to see a single silver washed fritillary all year. Stop now if your only interest is polarised in Argynnis paphia. You will read no account here of this parfumier valentino of the woodland glade. However if I may entice you further, could a white admiral and maybe a large skipper pique your interest to continue?

I drove down the M5 in Somerset, en-route to Hodder's Combe in the Quantocks. The rain was so heavy that even on the fastest setting the deluge came down quicker than the windscreen wipers could wipe the rain away. Driving half blind we crawled along a flooded motorway where, as I passed by Sedgemoor Services at steady 30mph, I thought to myself "why on earth am I doing this?" The simple answer was the weather forecast suggested rain until noon followed by glorious sunshine for the rest of the day. Given butterflies have to feed and tend to fly only when it is sunny, my thought was they'll rest up in this rain but as soon as the sun emerges they'll be on the wing. I was right, and the butterflies came in good numbers.

Comma : Can you see me?

After a three quarters of an hour walk up the Combe, during which the rain finally stopped though it remained cloudy, I was now in position. I waited no longer than five minutes, not another living soul about, it was so peaceful. The sun emerged from behind the clouds and the butterflies began flying all around me. First the meadow browns who appeared as if by magic, ten maybe twenty of them flying haphazardly with their weak flappy flight. Followed then by a number of large white strongly flying in a purposeful way and then half a dozen comma, again out on the wing enjoying the sun. As the sun intensified out came half a dozen red admiral and gatekeeper, a trio of large skipper and a single common blue flitted and flapped between all this activity heading towards a large mound of bramble. I followed and noted this large bramble patch was a meeting place for the species. As happens when watching butterflies if the sun disappeared even for a short while all the activity would end and those butterflies I'd been watching seconds earlier would simply disappear as if by silent command. When the sun returned, this activity would resume. I became absorbed by this, a special moment to be in and amongst all this activity and behaviour by insects just getting on with their life while simply ignoring my presence. A wistful thought that if I were not there they'd be doing this activity anyway. The World revolves.

I did make an interesting observation though, the role bracken (Pteridium) played in all of this emergence and disappearance. Bracken is much maligned for its invasive and tick laden properties. My observations however showed how beneficial brackens' open domed growth habit is to butterflies, to species who would not normally be associated with this fern. Many individuals landed on the highest sunniest bracken fronds and rested, wings open, stationary, simultaneously warming up and drying out before heading off and out of sight. Every species I saw there on that visit used bracken as a resting site to a greater or lesser extent, often resting there with motionless wings for minutes at a time. There is a risk to all this of course as while they are so conspicuous butterflies are more visible to predation but the benefit of being out in the open while adjacent to dense vegetation they could quickly disappear into must outweigh the risk.  In all I spent two hours here exploring what this place had to offer. Sadly the silver washed fritillary did not show though they are here and I'd recently read that brown hairstreak have been discovered here. I'll leave these species for the next time, it was after 4pm now, activity was tailing off, time I headed home.

Comma

Gatekeeper

Normal meadow brown above and a dark form male with sex bands visible below

Female large white. A little like woodpigeons which because they are common and deemed a pest are very much overlooked, though both bird and butterfly I think are stunning.

Large skipper

Red admiral above and below.

Female small white on a nettle above and on herb robert below.

That was during the week and so following my failure to see silver washed fritillary on the following Saturday I headed into the woodland area of Shapwick Heath NNR after recent reports of silver washed fritillary flying. 

This time I was taking a real punt given the weather had turned decidedly autumnal in feel, cool, torrential rain showers but now accompanied by 40-50 mph gusting winds. This weather was so out of season the Saturday Market in the nearby city of Wells, where I'd gone to first thing, had  been cancelled. Undeterred my revised plan was to venture into the most sheltered rides of the oak woodland at Shapwick and just observe what if anything appeared as and when the frequent rain showers were replaced with sunshine. 

Shapwick Heath NNR - white admiral country.

I could not have had a better afternoon. In a similar way to Hodder's Combe if the sun disappeared then the butterflies disappeared. But, when the sun did emerge the rides erupted with life. Not just butterflies but tens or even hundreds of dragonflies and damselflies, hover flies and a myriad of insects I couldn't identify. I could identify unfortunately the hundreds of mosquitoes that also flew in the sunshine, I was covered in them and their bites. A real downside here, not pleasant at all and I still bear the scars.

While frequently distracted by other insects I kept focussed on butterflies whose abundance was enhanced by energetic activity by the many species now on the wing in the strong sunlight, before it all fell quiet again as the rain returned as it often did. I was getting used to this weather related cycle. 

A very obliging brimstone which despite its bright colour blended beautifully into these oak leaves.

A beautiful but pestilent deer-fly Chrysops spp. but not sure of the exact species.

Beautifully marked gatekeeper underside (above) and a different but equally lovely gatekeeper upper wings (below). The gatekeepers were everywhere, more plentiful than meadow brown.

Peacocks were everywhere too, such oddly out of place markings in the English countryside, almost tropical in looks.

Ruddy Darter (first thought common darter but I dismissed this or maybe it is)

This southern hawker clung motionless to this honeysuckle branch for fifteen minutes or more. At first I thought it might have been dead but then on my last visit it wasn't there. There were a lot of hawker species about, a few did that spectacular thing of flying right up very close to my face and then after hovering for a while looking at me, decided I wasn't any threat - nor prey - and buzzed off.  Fascinating behaviour and I'd love to know what they see and are observing.

I'm not seeing many speckled woods at the moment. This one was one of the few found resting on a fern.

Now we're getting to the white admirals. In this cooler weather they were flying really well but unsurprisingly a slower flight and much less fidgety than when I'd last seen them a couple of weeks earlier. I'm not sure whether it was just the weather but they were also much lower down perching around head height or gliding for short distances low along the track which is a behaviour many lepidopterists look for. The image below was more typical on this visit, horizontally straight wings on a bramble looking inconspicuous. Despite the quite wild wind in the high canopy down at ground level it was almost motionless. I'd made the correct choice to come here today, the butterflies were within easy sight and once again I had the site all to myself due presumably to the weather. During one of the more prolonged wet spells I stood quietly listening to the pitter-patter of raindrops. It's a sound I've loved since childhood.

All in all what these two visits to observe butterflies in poor weather has taught me is don't remain indoors bemoaning the inclement summer, head out and see what happens. I'd do that when winter birdwatching, so why not in the summer?  Would I have noticed the butterfly species using bracken as a sunning and drying perch if the weather had not been so changeable? Would the eruption of species simultaneously timing their flights with the sun's emergence have been witnessed if I'd stayed at home? I suspect not and it made for a fantastic immersive experience on both occasions. But I'll leave you with this female blackbird.

I was walking along a boardwalk back to my car when this female appeared. I stopped and she stopped then, after checking me over, she ignored me and hopped a few feet at a time towards me. I stood motionless watching her for what seemed an age. Then when she was around 12 feet from me she dived into the trackside and speared the fattest slug I've seen for a while, a slug much too heavy for her to fly away with.  Transfixed I watched her kill and repeatedly peck the slug for some time until having eaten a large part of it she finally managed to lift the slug remains and fly off, albeit under some difficulty. Whereto she went I have no idea as the torrential rain returned as she flew off, so I the happy wildlife watcher of these two days simply shrugged, pulled my coat a little tighter around me and walked off accompanied by the roar of thousands of raindrops crashing against leaves in the tree canopy. I was alone with my thoughts surrounded by nature at its finest.