Mixed Weather

While the recent weather hasn't been ideal for our butterflies - picture shows a meadow brown hiding in the grass on a dull day - they were....

.....quick to take advantage of Thursday's welcome sunshine. The whites predominated, but we also saw small heaths, a red admiral and this beautiful small tortoiseshell, sunning itself on a fence.

Inevitably, the number of visitors we see here during the summer months is strongly influenced by the weather - less the weather itself than the forecast. Thursday's sunshine was predicted, and the local camp site's numbers surged, but today's forecast - even as late as yesterday evening - was dire, so many campers left. Yet we've had little rain.

The visitors shown in the above picture are a large group of what look like racing pigeons, feeding along with gulls and starlings in one of the croft fields from which the haylage was gathered on Thursday.