High Summer Walk Part 1

Tags

agrimony, bindweed, common knapweed, common ragwort, Gatekeeper butterfly, hoary plantain, hogweed, hop trefoil, oil-seed rape, peas, pineapple weed, ploughing, poppy, Ringlet butterfly, seagulls, silverweed, thatched barn, thrips, thunder-flies, walking

I had been shopping in Norwich with E two weeks ago and the weather had just changed for the better.  We had had a lot of very humid weather, with heavy rain and thunder and lightening.  We had had the usual accompaniment to humid weather of flying and swarming ants and thunder-flies.  These are tiny little thrips with feathery wings; a millimetre long and thread-thin.  They get everywhere – in your ears and eyes, up your nose, in your hair, crawling on your skin until you feel like screaming. They come in the house and die in heaps on every surface; they even get behind the glass in your picture frames.  And then, after a storm at the weekend, we woke on the Monday to fresh air, warm sunshine and a gentle breeze. As we were driving home I had such a longing to be out of doors, walking in the fields that instead of having lunch I found the camera and my hat and went off down the lane.  The verge at the side of our lane had just been cut but there were still a few flowers hanging on there.

Beautiful pink and white bindweed.  The flowers are almond scented.

The harvesting had begun.

Oil-seed rape stubble.

The stubble is almost a foot high and so hard and sharp like knives; it is almost impossible to walk through.

You can see for miles from here

There is a UFO in this shot. Is it a bird?  Is it a plane? No!  It’s…. you tell me!

Ploughing had started in one of the fields.  Seagulls love to follow the plough as it turns up lots of worms and grubs.  Black-headed, herring and lesser black-backed gulls.

A rather tired and tatty ringlet butterfly

This is agrimony and there has been a lot of this about this year.  Apparently it has a scent reminiscent of apricots; I haven’t noticed this but then I don’t have a very good sense of smell – at least not for nice smells!  The ancients found this a very versatile plant as it was held to be a remedy against snake-bite, poor sight, loss of memory and liver complaints.

Silverweed leaves. Potentilla anserina

Common Knapweed buds. These plants have been flowering for many weeks now; and for many to come if these buds are anything to go by.  Also known as Hardheads.

We have had lots of hogweed too

Hoary plantain. This is an unusual plantain in that it produces a delicate scent which attracts bees and other insects.  All other British plantains are wind pollinated.

A field of peas.

For many years, peas were grown everywhere in this part of Suffolk as there was a frozen food factory in Lowestoft on the coast.  We were all used to the enormous pea harvesters and the smell of burnt peas wafting on the air.  Then the factory was closed.  Many people were made redundant and the farmers here had to find a different crop to grow and had to sell their harvesters.  In recent years peas have started to be grown again.  Some farmers are working together as a collective, sharing harvesters and have found other customers for their peas.  This field is being left until the peas have dried.  I don’t know if the plants will just be dug into the soil as a source of nitrogen or if the plants are used for animal feed or the dried peas sold to a processing factory.  Perhaps someone can tell me. Red is so difficult to photograph.  This photo looks as though I’ve done some careless ‘photoshopping’. You will recognise this photo from my previous post.  This works better as the poppies take up more of the photo but they still don’t look ‘real’.

A snail hiding in a hogweed seedhead

A female Gatekeeper butterfly

An enormous thatched barn

This is hop trefoil.  The stems are downy and the seed-heads are covered with dead petals making them look like hops.

There was a lot pink and yellow.

Pineapple Mayweed

This smells of pineapple when crushed.

This is Common Ragwort, a poisonous plant and the food plant of the Cinnabar Moth caterpillar.

I will continue this walk in Part 2.

Unphotographable

Tags

chiff-chaff, clouds, hare, house sparrow, nesting, phalaenopsis orchid, ploughing, skylark, spring, sunset, terrier, woodpecker, yellowhammer

Spring is definitely progressing quite nicely.  We have had some really glorious weather recently – blue, shining days and mild, moonlit nights.  Today we had some very heavy showers – the first real rain for some time.  In fact, the mud on the roads has been drying out and cars have been causing dust clouds as they travel along our lanes.  Most of the recent signs of Spring and many of the things I have seen in the past few days I have not been able to photograph.  Either they are unphotographable like birdsong, or my camera is unable to take a decent picture of them – birds in the garden (can’t zoom in far enough) and the moon –  or I am driving somewhere and can’t stop.

More and more different types of birds are singing each day and I have noticed more pairs of birds in the garden instead of either solitary birds or flocks of birds.  The house sparrows have started building their nests under the eaves of our house.  They sound as if they are wearing hob-nailed boots as they busily sort out the old nesting sites under the roof tiles and they clatter about in the gutter chattering and arguing.  R and I look forward (I don’t think!) to the mornings when we are awoken by the sound of a happy sparrow singing at dawn -( ‘cheep!’ (two, three) ‘cheep!’ (two, three) ‘cheep!’ (two, three) ‘cheep!…..).  When R and I went out for our walk last Thursday evening we listened to many birds singing including a yellowhammer.  These birds are getting quite scarce now and this makes me sad.  The woodpeckers are starting to drum.  I heard a chiff-chaff warbler yesterday – our first summer visitor – and above my head a skylark was singing.

On Sunday evening at dusk I looked out of the kitchen window to see a large hare run along the road to the end of our drive and stop there for a minute.  It then raced across our grass at the front of the house then out of sight in the direction of the big pond.  On the way to Mum’s house on Sunday morning I had to slow down as a very small terrier dog was running up the lane keeping pace with a tractor ploughing the field next to the road.  The little dog belonged to the ploughman who waved an apology to me as I drove very carefully and slowly past.  This evening, on my way to Mum’s house again, the sky looked quite dramatic -a thick black cloud-covering which had rents in it with the pale blue evening sky showing through like silk beneath the slashes in Elizabethan clothes.

I will end this post with, first of all, some photos of my Phalaenopsis orchid which I won in a church coffee morning raffle on 5th October last year and which has been in continuous flower since then.  (Apologies to friends on Facebook who have seen this already today).  I will then add some photos of today’s sunset.