Friday, June 7, 2024

A Chill June

On Monday the weather was briefly warm enough for a small white to be on the wing, though it was very much alone as....

....even though there were occasional sunny intervals, the speckled woods and orange tips were conspicuously absent from the relatively young plantation of deciduous trees which we have, for fairly obvious reasons, called Speckled Wood.

It's been miserably cold these last few days. The air temperature has struggled to reach 12C on any day, the west to northwesterly wind has been gusting above twenty miles per hour and bringing in sharp showers, some of them as sleet. Worse, there's no sign of this weather letting up for almost another week.

The cold doesn't seem to have discouraged a few fungi from making an appearance. We found this patch of chanterelles in the coniferous plantation this morning on our way to collect a paper from the village. I wish we had the courage to identify whether they are false or true chanterelles so we could enjoy what is supposed to be a very good meal.

We use the Merlin app fairly frequently as we walk through the woodlands and this morning it picked up six different bird species singing all a one time. The interesting one was the blackcap but, try as we might, we couldn't see him. Instead we had the pleasure of being roundly cursed by....

....a very irate wren parent which was doing its best to tell its young that sitting and....

 ....watching humans approach probably wasn't a wise thing to do.

2 comments:

  1. He/she looks like a disgruntled teenager!

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    Replies
    1. Reminded me of the agonies of both being a teenager, and of being a teenagers parent!

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