Marbled White

The sky was mostly grey this morning and I wondered, whilst trying to put my mind to some planning and admin, what on earth I'd blip. I needn't have worried.

Peter & I visited a patch of waste land on Waterford Heath, opposite the former quary. The corner at the bottom of the hill is farmland and the top is just a sandy scrub area, covered in rabbit holes and a badger set. As we arrived we scared away a rabbit and a pheasant, whilst a buzzard soared high overhead, and it was too dry for any sign of the roman snails I'd seen last time, but as we took a few steps further into the plot we discovered a huge swathe of wild flowers: mostly knapweed, birdsfoot trefoil, oxeye daisies, thistles, centaury, wild strawberries, teasels, mares tails and ragwort but also a few scabious, stonecrop, black mullein and willowherb. Next to it was an impenetrable mass of nettles and brambles, home to labyrinth spiders and I'm sure we'd have seen much more besides if we'd looked there, but I was busily captivated by the flowers and butterflies. A kestral hovered overhead at one point and the whole area was hedged with blackthorn and hawthorn. A wildlife haven.

And where there are wild flowers there are butterflies. In this case marbled whites but also lots of small heath butterflies and flighty small skippers. Some of the ragwort fed cinnabar moth caterpillars and we saw a few 6 spot burnets.

We thought that was enough and then out of the thick of the meadow flowers stepped a muntjac deer and its foal. and then a green woodpecker swooped and dived past us.

We were only there an hour!