Friday 5th July

I forgot to mention last time that things have deteriorated in the garden as the larger birds are now hogging the feeders and I've had to put them on half rations to at least discourage them a bit.  The only bright spot has been the appearance of a squirrel who had a good nose around the garden and the feeders before deciding to retire to a safe distance. And there was a brief red admiral on Wednesday.

Wednesday turned out nice and I was glad to make a repeat trip to Havannah Nature Reserve while my car was getting fixed, this time together with Malcolm and Arthur the Retriever.

This time the ringlets were present in force and outnumbered the speckled woods. There were a good number of meadow browns and we managed to see a dozen or so common blues and a handful of six spot burnet moths.  A noticeboard indicates that there also narrow-winged five spot burnet moths on the site but this time I checked carefully the ones we managed to catch up with and they were definitely six spot.  There was also a couple of small tortoiseshells, a few painted ladies, two small skippers and one red admiral but only a few small heath and again no small copper.  They aren't mentioned on the noticeboard so maybe aren't present, though I would find that rather surprising.  Given the presence of Malcolm's dog, few birds came near aside from a pair of bullfinches. And again the red squirrel area looked uninhabited.

Meadow Brown	Small Tortoiseshell
Common Blue	Siz Spot Burnet

We spent some time at the West end of the reserve where we found quite a number of oak trees, but reckoned that the smaller trees I had seen near the middle car park weren't oaks at all.  So I think I have a better idea where to try for the purple hairstreak. Malcolm reckoned that one of the oaks could have been a red oak, which isn't infeasible if there has been replanting as in other former mining areas.  He also identified some clusters of loganberry in a nearby hedgerow that I wouldn't have spotted at all.

Loganberries