If a tree falls in the forest …
This week has seen a lot of office work again as I try to get everything sorted for summer, and my big event at the event of July. I was lamenting time spent indoors at the beginning of the week when walking back to my car, when a beautiful Small Tortoiseshell butterfly landed on the steps in front of me. What a stunning specimen!
Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly
I was let out of the office on Wednesday for some summer tree identification. After some theory and samples in the morning at DWT’s HQ, we headed out to Thorncombe Woods near Dorchester. It’s a nice mix of conifers, hazel coppice and sycamores. It was a lot of un, and I think I’m more confident with tree ID from their leaves, though I do need to practice – quite difficult at Chesil Beach!!
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- Chloe and some leaves
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- Tree stump appreciation
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- Damselfly
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- Conifers and an open glade
We saw some fab wildlife at Brooklands before we left, and some dragonflies / damselflies at a pond in Thorncombe.
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- Flower identification
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- Damselfly
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- Slightly tatty Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly
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- A Skipper Butterfly
On Thursday, I took the new Chesil / Lorton trainee (Yup, there’s a new one! She’s called Nadine and she’s cool), to Lorton Meadows so she could see the other spot where she would be working. It was a glorious day, though a tad breezy – there weren’t as many butterflies as I hoped. However, our butterfly / Odonata species list was still impressive: Red Admiral, Marbled White, Small Skipper, Peacock, Meadow Brown, Ringlet, Common Darter Dragonfly, Emperor Dragonfly, Broad-bodied Chaser Dragonfly and Blue-tailed Damselfly. Not bad for a quick walk! There may have been a couple of other species, but they didn’t stay still long enough to be photographed (I’m not good enough to ID most species in flight although I can do a couple now!).
My favourite photo from Lorton – an immature male Common Darter dragonfly, resting on the branch of an apple tree!
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- A Blue-tailed Damselfly takes a break from flying around
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- A Meadow Brown Butterfly hiding behind flowers
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- Lorton is beautiful!
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- A female Emperor Dragonfly takes a rest from ovipositing (laying eggs)
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- Pretty sure this isn’t Deadly Nightshade, but not sure what it is
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- A male Broad-bodied Chaser Dragonfly
A short (in comparison to other blog posts) but sweet blog post there about this week’s wildlife. In other news, my extra writing last week about the Ladybird app has since resulted in me being asked to become a tester for the new version of the app AND an Android tester for the Wildlife Trusts app (currently just available in Apple)!
Congrats on being asked to be an app tester! Lovely photos and so many species! Particularly like the tortoiseshell one 🙂
P.S, I don’t know if you know but after my old blog failed I started up a new one… http://hithernyonder.com 😉 )
Ooh, I shall check out the new blog, what was wrong with the last one?
Just a problem with the database – it got corrupted and I lost so much stuff I couldn’t be bothered trying to fix it lol.
Oh no! Such a shame, I do mean to do some backups of my blog posts as I don’t want to lose them!!
It’s worth it!