West wind

[puddleshark]

A pleasant cool start to the day. Took a walk up onto the Purbeck Hills to photograph the west wind.




Westwards, following the path at the foot of the hills, through hazel coppice and through narrow tunnels in the hillside scrub, roofed over with brambles and bracken and old man's beard.




Midges dancing in the sunlight, and (not photographed) a hawker dragonfly hunting them on glittering diamond wings.


A fine crop of hazelnuts this year.




Gatekeeper butterfly on Burdock.

I couldn't sit on the fallen ash tree where I normally sit to drink my coffee. Someone had been having a session there, and the spot was strewn with crushed beer cans. But, in an area where ash dieback is killing off most of the trees, there are no shortage of fallen ash trees to sit upon. Found another spot for my coffee break, further up the hill. Not that I even need to sit on a fallen tree at the moment. The ground is bone dry.

Not exactly a peaceful morning. Jets rumbling overhead on their way from Bournemouth airport to Alicante, or wherever. A family soccer match taking place in the campsite beside the hill, with both adults and children shouting. But that's a sound that makes you smile.


Not bad weather for a camping holiday...

Fuelled by coffee, began the climb up the side of the hill. The hilltop is open access land, owned by the National Trust, with little permissive paths in all directions. You can wander as you please. Or sit a while and watch the west wind blowing through the grass.


A very parched looking August landscape, in case anyone doubted that we are in drought.


Field Scabious.

No grasshoppers singing today. The sun was hiding, and the wind was a little too fresh. A few Meadow Brown butterflies on the wing.






Found a peaceful spot on the hilltop to sit a while and watch the world go by. A buzzard circling and mewing. Pipits perching on spikes of gorse. Would probably have still been there, only the sun came out, and the day started to get warm. So I hauled myself up, and took the chalk track down to Corfe village. As I walked, a wild & splendid pack of mountain bikers went hurtling by in a rising cloud of chalk dust, calling out cheerful greetings as they passed.

Comments

[kotturinn]

It is so dry... 😿
Particularly like the field scabious amongst all the grasses.

[puddleshark]

It is scarily dry. And no rain in sight. :(

Field Scabious is such a lovely photographic subject, half-hidden in the tall grass, never quite sure what colour it wants to be.

[kotturinn]

Here too. Dry even by our semi-arid standards. We had the edges of rain when others got downpours, but not enough to really count.

[heleninwales]

Gosh! It is still very dry where you are. Everything is green and the streams are flowing again as normal here. Having said that, we did notice at one point in the forest that some of the leaves on the trees growing on a particular slope were brown and crisp looking. I think those trees must have been very stressed earlier in the year during our dry period. They were growing on a steep hillside with very thin soil.

[puddleshark]

We missed all the thunderstorm showers a few weeks ago, and missed all the rain from Storm Floris, so it is very dry indeed here at the moment. Everything is looking wilted. Even the leaves on the hazel trees at the foot of the hill, where there are springs, and the path would normally be muddy even in summer.

[kaishin108]

Oh oh that butterfly! Very sweet.

[puddleshark]

It's been a very good year for Gatekeeper butterflies. There have been clouds of them on the brambles wherever I've walked this summer.

[kaishin108]

Well that is great news! We need butterflies as much as bees I am sure. :)

Speaking of thunderstorms

[jesse_the_k]

...do these lovely meadows ever go up in prairie fires?

Re: Speaking of thunderstorms

[puddleshark]

It hasn't been a problem in the past. In a normal year, the fields here are too damp to burn. But with summer droughts becoming more extreme, it may be something we have to watch for in the future.

We do get a lot of heath fires here though, most of them deliberately set. Unfortunately the heather and gorse burn easily.