The Purbeck Way
Jul. 27th, 2024 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
puddleshark
Set off early from Corfe Castle, before the tourist hordes began to arrive, following the footpath that runs along the foot of West Hill, through the hazel coppice. A narrow clay path, still muddy at the end of this very wet July, made narrower by the nettles and the brambles and the bracken, passing through sunlight and shade.
Since the National Trust started restoring the hazel coppice, clearing areas to let the light in, I keep thinking this must be ideal habitat for Silver-washed Fritillary butterflies. At every flash of bright orange, my heart leaps... but every flash of bright orange seen today turned out to be a Comma.
Comma (Polygonia c-album).
Never mind. Commas are beautiful too.
Summer is truly here. Suddenly the brambles and the burdock are full of Gatekeeper butterflies.
Speckled Wood (Pararge aegeria).
Where the Purbeck Way footpath leaves behind the coppice to head off through the fields at Norden, there is a fallen ash tree convenient for sitting on, if you wish to take out your flask, drink coffee among the nettles and the ragwort, and watch the butterflies pass.
Down, but not dead. Still putting up branches, still in leaf. Even though many of the ash trees on the hillside are being lost to Ash Dieback, this one is hanging on.
Ragwort, ragwort everywhere this year. But the butterflies like it.
A short climb up through the hillside woods and you are up on the Purbeck Hills, wandering narrow paths through the yellow grasses and the ragwort, with Meadow Brown and Gatekeeper butterflies flying up at every step.
Six-spot Burnet (Zygaena filipendulae) on Field Scabious.
The red spots are a sign of a deadly talent. The moths are able to produce hydrogen cyanide - a chemical compound that gives them a bad taste and, in large quantities, can kill a predator.
The caterpillar food is birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), a grassland plant... When caterpillars feed on its leaves, they are able to metabolise toxins found inside the plant for their own use, without being harmed.
If the caterpillars do not get enough hydrogen cyanide from their food, they can produce it themselves.
The cyanide is also used as a mating tactic. Females can release plumes of the chemical, which is likely to combine with normal sexual pheromones and help attract males. Males can also transfer the cyanide to a female during mating.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/toxic-talents-cyanide-moths.html
Stopped again at the top of a path that winds down a gully to the foot of the hill, disinclined to walk further, and sat upon a bleached old elder trunk, in the sunshine, in the company of the half moon and a charm of goldfinches. A little wind stirring the grasses, not quite strong enough to persuade the thistledown into flight.
A meadow pipit, I think, from the long claws.
But you cannot sit on a hillside forever, listening to the drone of flies. Time to walk the curving path down the gully, with Stonechats scolding you for your existence from their perches on the gorse bushes.
***
Please forgive any strange spelling or grammatical errors. I'm feeling a bit head-achey and feverish. Probably psychosomatic. Someone at work tested positive for Covid this week...
no subject
Date: 2024-07-27 11:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-28 07:40 am (UTC)I love the Purbeck Hills. The way that, even on a short walk, the landscape around you is constantly changing - one minute you are following hidden ways through the woods, the next minute you are out in the sun and the wind, on the wide open downs.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-27 03:30 pm (UTC)Feel better!
no subject
Date: 2024-07-28 07:48 am (UTC)The sitting on a log, drinking coffee and watching the world, is probably my favourite bit of all my walks... 😊
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Date: 2024-07-29 10:03 pm (UTC)Feel better soon!
no subject
Date: 2024-07-30 07:53 am (UTC)A very handy perch, that stock-fencing. Later in the year, the swallows will all be lined up along it.