Friday 22nd May

After moaning about the birds' failure to eat up my leftover cumin seed in a previous post, it was a bit surprising to notice that it had totally disappeared when I put more food out the other day. How mysterious!  The only thing I can think of is that the tree sparrows were visiting recently.  Can there be an affinity between

Wood Forget Me Not

tree sparrows and cumin seed? Obviously I'll have to put out some more to see if I can find out.

Meanwhile the butterfly emphasis in the garden has shifted slightly.  A few small whites have been showing up and the orange tips tended to be female while green-veined whites continue unabated. There's also been some good sightings of red kites hovering low over the B6305.

In the colder weather I have again fallen back on photographing flowers and then find I can't identify them.  This one however is clearly Wood Forget Me Not - I hope.

The major trip out this week was to Dipton Woods in search of the green hairstreak.  I saw precisely three and one suspect, a complete contrast the the 35 I saw last year  It was probably a week or ten days too late, but my calculation was that dreary weather might have held things up.

It was actually strange to see that the development of the bilberry was quite different along the route.  In most shaded areas it hadn't even started flowering yet but when I reached the 'hot spot', it was clearly past its best

Green Hairstreak

and hanging around for 15 minutes produced only one suspect on the wing.

Then a stroke of luck - as I moved on one flew in front of me and landed on the top of a young conifer.

I eventually continued the walk through the wood, continually scanning the abundant bilberry in flower but there just didn't seem to be any hairstreaks around anywhere that was even partially shaded.

Eventually I came to an area that was on the edge of more open land, but that would have been sheltered from the sun by nearby trees for a good part of the day.  It was here that I found the other two, one of which was a bit tatty and another that quickly made itself invisible in all the greenery.

On the way back down something strange happened.  What appeared to be a minute speckled wood settled briefly in front of me - but it was so small I thought it might have been a moth.  Unfortunately, like the third green hairstreak, it eluded the camera.  I didn't find a moth that looked like it.