Month: May 2018

My ongoing search for the Duke continued last night. After work,I fought my way through heavy rush – hour traffic to Stroud, a one-hour journey that took me closer to two. I parked up and set off down the slope of the Hill to the place where I’d seen the Duke the previous evening.  And as I had the previous evening, I saw it settle three times, but each time (as it had the previous evening)it flew off just as I was bringing my camera to bear. for the rest of the three hours I was there, I had to just stand and watch as it flitted relentlessly around, without ever once stopping. I’ve started to really, really hate that insect, which is an odd position for a naturalist.

But just as with my last visit,the evening brought an unexpected compensation.  As I was driving home, disconsolate, and full of evil thoughts about spraying the bushes of Stroud with superglue, I glanced to my right and saw a Hare sitting in a field, very close to the road.  Unfortunately there were no turning spaces on the road for a couple of miles, so it was a good 10 minutes before I could throw a U – turn and come back.  There was a small layby very near to where I’d seen the Hare, so I stopped and got out.  Traffic on this road travels very quickly and makes a lot of noise, so I was able to open the boot of the car and get my camera out without any sound being audible.  It seemed that the photographs smiling me, because there was also a small gap in the roadside hedgerow that led into the very field where I’d seen the Hare.  I picked my camera up and started to push my way through the hedge, only to stop short.  For while I’d been driving back, the Hare had been hopping slowly forwards, and I realised, to my horror and delight,that he was barely 6 feet in front of me. If I moved, I would startle the Hare, and there was every chance that he would Sprint off far faster than I could get my camera set up to take a picture.  Worse still, he might never return to that field if he’d had a bad experience there.  So I had to grit my teeth and wait as he slowly moved away before I could set my camera up and take his picture.

Wiltshire was, sadly, home to the completely illegal hare – coursing world Championships this year.  Many fields of hares that I’d watched over the years had been wiped out, so it was a joy to find not one Hare, but two, grazing in the field.  And at least now I know that if I have a bad day with the butterflies, I may yet have a happy day with the hares.

This weekend I went looking for my old nemesis: the Duke of Burgundy butterfly.  It was a stinking hot day and as is usual with the Duke, who adores steeply – sloping sites, I ended up climbing up and down hills in the blazing sun.  Although I saw the butterfly twice, I couldn’t get a picture of it.  To rub salt into my wounds, I bumped into a young couple with a dog who proudly showed me a stunning picture that they had captured on their iPhone earlier that day.

But, as quite often happens with wildlife watching, the day wasn’t without its rewards.  In the skies above me, I could hear the beautiful, lilting song of the Skylark, as evocative of warm summer days as the smell of newly-mowed grass.  That by itself would probably have been enough to make the day a winner, but then I noticed a Skylark fly horizontally quite close to the ground, and land in a bush near to me.  I took some photos, and thought little of it until I noticed a second Skylark nearby.  I sat down with my camera (and my lunch!)  and watched as the pair as they hunted for grabs in the grass, gradually getting closer to me. The Skylark is a bird that is normally elusive and extremely hard to see, but to my surprise, this pair were happy for me to get very close indeed –  they seemed quite relaxed around people, and I got spectacular views of the female Skylark in the grass.

The Skylark is a long, graceful bird, a little smaller than a Blackbird. the Skylark has a Brown – and – cream speckled further pattern, very much like a thrush, and as you can see this image, it also has a small tuft feathers on its head which you can raise and lower rather like the spoiler on a high – end car.  It’s used for signalling and displays.

Despite spending another two hours hunting for it after seeing the Skylarks, I never did manage a photograph of the Duke of Burgundy.  One of the joys following wildlife is that every year you get another chance a spring rolls in again.  So I know that in early May of 2019, be walking the slopes again in the hope the grand old Duke is flying.

The Green Hairstreak is a tiny butterfly- the closed wing is little bigger than the nail on my little finger. In a perfect demonstration of the value of doing your homework first, I thought I had seen one some years ago, because the Green Hairstreak is touted as the UK’s only green butterfly, and I’d seen a green butterfly before. This one had a wing the size of the lens on my glasses, so I thought that that was what they looked like. In fact, that butterfly was a Brimstone, a yellow butterfly that occasionally comes in a pale green variation. So I’d spent  a lot of time looking for a buttterfly which was the wrong size and didn’t exist. The penny dropped when I was looking for Large Blue butterflies early one morning and got a brief flash of dazzling green from a gorse bush. It came from a tiny green metallic butterfly, which stayed long enough for me to look at it for a second before flying away. Ever since, I’d wanted to see one again.

Today I got my chance. I’d been on a fruitless search for the Duke of Burgundy butterfly, which is a similar size to the Green. I was walking despondently back to the car when I caught a movement of a small butterfly. My heart did a quick double-flip: It was the Duke! No, it wasn’t. But it’s a Green Hairstreak! Yes, I’m sad enough to get that excited. This small  Butterfly is actually brown from above, but always settles with its wings closed, so we see the beautiful metallic green of its underwing. This one was a male: I watched it rise to attack a couple of common blues when they strayed over its territory. Unfortunately the territory it was defending was behind a barbed-wire fence, which I spent so long leaning on that I came home with a series of puncture marks on my arm. But that’s a small price to pay to finally get up close and personal with the Queen of Green (OK, this one was male, but don’t spoil the ending, okay?)

It’s official: it’s not just my imagination. I went hunting today for the duke of burgundy butterfly again. It’s the peak of the flight season and I’m in a place where I’ve seen them before in decent numbers ( and for a butterfly as scarce as the duke, that’s threes and fours, not tens or hundreds. I got a brief glimpse of one. Butterfly numbers are down. The unseasonably mild weather we had earlier in the spring followed by intense cold seems to have brought some species forward, only to hammer them. I bumped into bird ringers in a local woodland who gave more evidence: bird numbers and bird weights are down. It takes 1000 caterpillars to feed a bluetit chick, so even a slight fall in numbers has a big impact on brood sizes. It seems the countryside will be less full of colour and dong this year.

I was photographing Great Crested Grebes at a local lake today, when I saw a behaviour that is known, but which I’d never seen before : eating feathers. The parent Grebes were taking feathers from their breasts, dipping them into the lake water, then feeding them to their chicks. The current theory is that feathers (which adult Grebes eat as well) help protect the stomach from fish bones and assist in pellet formation, but the evidence is slim  and a more honest answer might be that nobody knows why the Grebe does it. It seems to be the only bird in the world which does.