The Week So Far...Good and Bad.

I haven't really done any birding this week yet, I haven't even taken a scope out as far as I can remember (which isn't far). Talking of scopes, I've just heard from Nikon that they've fixed mine at long last, so I should hopefully have it back quite soon.

On Monday my son George was keen to see an Adder so we went to Beer Head where a couple of obliging individuals showed well. A male in The Dell was well out in the open so much so that I almost trod on him! We also saw this lovely orangy coloured 'tiddler' secreted within the base of a hedge.


I've also been walking Rex on Axe Cliff every day, where there has been a noticeable amount of Wall Brown butterflies on the wing, with a total count of five on Tuesday. Here's one of them:

I've seen a few interesting plants too, and as a consequence discovered a fantastic website, where you are able to fill in a questionnaire to identify any plants whose ID eludes you. Find it HERE it's superb. The plant whose ID eluded me was a Sedge, now, trying to identify a sedge is no mean feat because there are around 100 species in the UK and they can look very, very alike. The questionnaire worked well though and the Sedge was revealed to be Spring Sedge. It caught my eye because the flowers were very striking ( well, for a sedge) and looked like little yellow bottle brushes. Here they are....

... Yes, I know, yawn, you really had to be there!

This curious little pink flower belongs to the Bilberry plant, I stumbled upon a whole swathe of these in a local wood. I suppose the Pheasants or some other bird will eat any berries before they're ripe enough to pick this autumn. I'll keep an eye on them and see what happens.

There was also a lovely display of these little beauties, another small flower which is exquisite close up, Wood-sorrel.

There are swathes and swathes of these up on Axe Cliff, the dinky flower of Wild Strawberry, compete with morning dew.

I see this fellow on every visit to Axe Cliff, he arrived over a week ago. No sign of a female yet but he's already got stuck in with the nest-building.

Wheatear on a very big post ( a telegraph pole)

This bird was seen today and is the only migrant I've seen up here all week except the odd Willow Warbler in the scrub and a few Swallows coming in off. Having said this I didn't linger too long today as Rex was clearly feeling unwell. Unfortunately he's remained unwell all day and so I'm taking him to the vets first thing in the morning, he's hardly been awake at all this evening. I'm very concerned that it looks like renal failure, hope the vets can help him. No, I'm sure they can. I'm going to stay up with him tonight in case he gets any worse. Poor old man, age has caught up with him I'm afraid.... :(