Flyladyphotography By Wendy Cooper

  Well Hello !  it's been a while, but I have been out and about and have finally gotten round to starting to catch up here though!   This is all about the Butterflies I've been seeing on my Local Patch, from the end of May through to the end of July.  For those new to my ramblings, the patch of land I go walking on close to home is a fallow field (meadow) on farmland, which is bordered by a small brook and three small areas of woodland.  The meadow supports a wide variety of wildlife - Rabbits, Foxes, Muntjac, Brown Rats, Voles, Grass Snakes and Common Lizards as well as a wide variety of birdlife, including Chiff Chaffs, Whitethroats, Great, Blue, Long Tailed, Marsh and Coal Tits, Blackbirds, Goldfinch, Bullfinch, members of the Corvid family, Buzzards and Kestrels too.     Flora-wise, there are banks of brambles around the borders, nettles, thistles, hogweed and hemlock, buttercups, stitchwort, St Johns Wort, vetch, trefoils, spotted and me...

  Well over the past few weeks, the season has changed and spring really is in evidence all over my local patch.   Inside the woodland areas, the Bluebells have rapidly gone from being little green shoots, to buds and are just about bursting into bloom.  Just before the Bluebells began to open, the floor of the woodland was and still is covered in tiny white stars - the Wood Anemones are in flower.  If I walk early on in the day, they are all closed, but as the sun gradually filters into the woods, they open their little heads and shine. Here and there are little pools of bright shiny yellow as the Aconites open - this little clump, which grows in the bole of a tree is nearly always the first to open.  There are still more to bloom as across the woodland floor there is a carpet of their new leaves. Where it has been relatively dry, none of the Wood Violets have appeared, although there are plenty of young Garlic Mustard plants, Wild Garlic and in places, Stitc...

  Well, after a few days last week when the weather turned considerably milder, I simply had to get out on the Local Patch to have a catch up and see what was about!   I wandered up to the entrance to the woodland and could see a couple of Grey Squirrels scooting about in the trees around the pond – still in courtship mode!  I paused for a moment, as did one of the Squirrels, who gave me a bit of a lookover before continuing after the one he had been pursuing.  I continued over to the pond, where a couple of weeks previously, there had been a somewhat smaller, but earlier, Frog Ball going on.  The Frogs had arrived ten days earlier this year than last and the party had been in full swing, with plenty of Froggy couples and quite a bit of Frogspawn.  The pond is somewhat shallower than it has been in previous years, however this has not deterred the frogs. As I looked around the pond, a regular annual visitor caught my eye, a female Mallard.  For a s...