As always the first thing the boys do in the woods, is to climb the first suitable tree. Whilst they were climbing I was admiring the bramble flowers. Of course, I was also thinking about blackberry and apple jam and how busy the boys will be in a month or two. Not sure if they believed me when I told them.
One of the purposes of the walk in the woods was to see how many butterflies we could see. This is for the RSPB Wildlife Explorers summer survey. The brambles were the ideal place to spot this one. Unfortunately, it didn't stay still long enough to get a decent photo.
This is a Speckled Wood and they feed high in the trees or occasionally on brambles. We saw them in both environments.The boys reckoned this tree had a bad case of pimples! It did look very amusing.
This spider was very busy spinning it's web. We couldn't get a decent picture of the web as it was directly in the sun. It was horizontal to the ground but about six feet above the ground. It was beautiful, even if spiders aren't my favourite creature.
As we were sat on a stile just admiring the butterflies in the field and the bees on the clover, we had a visit from this pigeon. He was ringed so we assumed he should be flying home somewhere. We couldn't get close enough to see the rings, but he was soon back in the air,
This is the boys favourite woodland activity and this tree seems especially designed for climbing. All the boughs are conveniently spaced for getting from one to another.
While we were walking through the woods, we kept seeing a white butterfly with black spots on its wings. It didn't land anywhere close enough to photo and it wasn't until we got home that we could identify it. We knew it wasn't a cabbage white-we've had them in the garden over the weekend.It turned out to be a Brimstone.
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Just as we were leaving the woods, D spotted this one. It's a Comma and apparently these have been found further north than previously due to global warming.
It turned out to be a very successful butterfly spotting day and a lovely couple of hours enjoyed by us all.
2 comments:
Looks like a lovely, nature-filled walk.I was actually using my blog today to check when the blackberries here are likely to be ready, it was end of August last year. I used to love walking in the Peak district as well as many lovely spots round Sheffield when I was living in Sheffield. Nowadays country walks are very infrequent, due to limits of buggy friendly paths/ generally less energy available on my part!
We've only been here since the beginning of the year, and we love it
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