Friday June 23 - a quiet week draws to a close

 I've made two very different sallies out into the countryside this week. 

The first, on Wednesday, was a return visit to the Botley Mill area (a rather uninspiring tetrad just north-west of Henley-in-Arden). My reason for going was that it incorporated a walk along the trickling river Alne, although most of the walk was through fields of improved pasture or intensively farmed crops.

The former gave me a count of 111 Meadow Browns, which isn't too bad, but only three other butterflies species, the best was being a single Small Heath. As far as birds were concerned, a single distantly singing Yellowhammer was about as good as it got. However, as this was an under-recorded tetrad many of the common species encountered were useful to plug a gap in the Warwickshire tetrad atlas part of Jon Bowley's eventually to be published Warwickshire Bird book.

Compare that visit to Thursday's butterfly transect at HOEF College Wood. Leigh K had invited me to join her and I was keen to do so as I have been wondering whether I too should volunteer. Leigh was following the rules, and had split the route into five sections, which we assiduously counted. For my part I agglomerated all the counts into one total. I was just along for the ride.

My totals were 166 Meadow Browns, 11 Ringlets, 40 Marbled Whites, 17 Small Heaths, 24 Small Skippers, 14 Large Skippers, three Common Blues, three Speckled Woods, a Brimstone, two Commas, and a Red Admiral. So that's nearly three times as many species, and larger numbers of everything than at Botley Mill. HOEF is doing something right.

We also saw at least 12 Burnet moths, most of which wouldn't settle, but of those that did I identified both Six-spot Burnet and Narrow-bordered Five-spot Burnet. I suspect the majority were Six-spots.

Both species in this shot (Six-spot top leftish, N-B Five-spot bottom rightish)

I'd never seen so many Burnets in one locality. I also added a Brown Hawker to the dragonfly list, and we heard a female Cuckoo and at least five singing Willow Warblers.