Chalkhill Blue

This morning we actually woke up to rain - not heavy but enough to create puddles! I'm having trouble focussing on work at the moment, so distracted myself by sorting out a box of cake-decorating materials that had been sitting in our smaller kitchen since Christmas! This lead to some cupboard tidying (to make space to put everything away) and then baking a batch of raspberry amaretti biscuits to use up two tubes of freeze-dried raspberries that were past their 'best before' date but still tasted perfectly good.

In the afternoon the sun emerged, and it felt rather hot and sticky. I had to go and fetch a parcel from M & S, and then went on to Bainton, to scout out a route for a walk I'm leading on Wednesday. Again there wasn't a lot around so I suspect it'll be rather a short walk! I came home via Barnack Hills and Holes NNR, which was looking just as brown as I expected, but with a good smattering of flowers and reasonable numbers of male Chalkhill Blues, Photography was rather hindered by the warm and gusty wind that had developed by that time. Apart from the usual Meadow Browns and Gatekeepers, there were few other butterflies about - the Marbled Whites seem to be definitively over and I only spotted singletons of Common Blue and Brown Argus. The season is coming to a rather premature end...