Christine's walking & birds blog

The speckled wood butterfly was a welcome addition to the garden list.

Two Pellucid hoverflies (Volucella pellucens) were on the Hebe yesterday. They're very striking, but also wary and difficult to approach.



The Hebe flowers seem to be fading fast this year, and there seems to be an air of panic among all the insects feeding on them - as if they know it's a race against time. They drive each other away from the best flowers and are more aggressive towards me than they have been other years.

There were half a dozen honey bees among all the bumblebees and hoverflies, so our little garden is doing its bit to help an apparently endangered species.

There was also a wren in the garden yesterday, singing absent-mindedly to himself. And this morning, the peanuts attracted three blue and two great tits.

Yesterday I returned to West Berkshire/Oxfordshire to look for the harrier, walking first to the stubble field where we saw it on Saturday. There were loads of linnets, and a yellow wagtail flew over calling. I drove on through West Ilsley, to try West Ginge Down - one of the hunting grounds of last winter's hen harrier. There was a short, sharp shower of rain here, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Finally I drove to Bury Down and walked along the Ridgeway, turning onto Cow Down as great dark clouds massed in the west. In the place where I saw two redstarts last year, I heard a couple of hoo-eets but they were distant and I couldn't see anything.

Then the wind got up even more and the rain began.


I crept under this hawthorn tree as an elderly man in thin summer clothing sought shelter on the other side of the track. The wind grew stronger, raking across the downs carrying rain sideways, soaking and chilling you in seconds. This was no shower, and I began to wonder if it would ever end.

When I finally emerged, I was relieved to see the elderly man walking back to Scutchamer Knob. He must have been frozen.

I took the photo just after the rain stopped, and looking at it, you wouldn't think that possibly the most violent storm I've ever encountered on a Ridgeway walk had just passed over.

Bits of England are falling off...


Yesterday morning, a dark cloud was hanging low on Beachy Head. I've seen less dense mist on Scottish hills! And yet it was also incredibly windy. It required an effort of will to get out of the car and walk to the bus stop. Vehicles crept past through the gloom, carrying bewildered-looking holiday-makers in shorts and T-shirts.

Greger kept saying "This is it!" until finally one set of headlights really did materialise into the bus. It was surprisingly full. We rolled eastwards along the coast, dropping down out of the cloud to the Cuckmere Valley. We began our walk in bright conditions with twelve little egrets doing a flypast.

Up on the clifftop, on the first of the Seven Sisters, there were peregrines. It was probably too early for small migrants - that, or too blooming windy. I gave up looking for birds and just enjoyed the walk. Then - as we approached Beachy Head, we saw a brownish bird of prey twisting about in the air just beyond the cliff edge.

It perched momentarily on a chalk spur just below; I saw dull brown, Greger said there were rufous tints. We had already seen kestrels over the grassland and bushes, but this bird in comparison was tiny. Consulting all my books, I'd say it was almost certainly a juvenile merlin. Then the clouds rolled in again and we returned to the car and began the long drive home.