Our Sunday morning stroll round Ninewells wood, took us up through our section of the wood, then we  joined the public footpath skirting the edge of the wood along to the watchtower. Here it was quite clear and we could just see the top of the Severn Bridge and the views across to South Gloucestershire.  From there we worked our way down to the main path that sort of bisects Ninewells wood. This was made up a few years ago so that lorries could get in and remove some of the wood that was being felled to thin out the main section of the wood, owned by Natural Resources Wales. This work created quite a lot of disruption and mess but forestry work always does and now it has settled down and you would be hard pressed to know what it was like just 3 years ago. The main path always had a lot of wild flowers along it particularly Hemp Agrimony, these have re-established themselves  and the Hemp Agrimony  was just coming into flower last week.

This stretch of path is often a haven for Butterflies and other insects but due to the cloudy weather all we saw was a few sleepy Bumble bees on some of the Marsh Thistles that grow there. I decided that a visit later in the week with my camera might be worthwhile if the sun was out.

So I thought that with the Butterfly populations seeming to do well this year I would visit the woods with a small zoom lens and see if i could get some interesting Butterfly photos this week. Well that was the plan but the weather was not obliging. However my two visits this week, Tueday and Thursday,   were very productive.Tuesday was a grey day so no chance of butterflies and the bird life was fairly quiet, there were lots of small birds visiting the feeders and I took some nice shots of the young birds, the young Robins looked particularly attractive. Then to make the day along came a Fallow deer, they often keep well hidden but this one did sort of half venture into the open and I got a few reasonable shots.

 

 

Thursday was the red letter day though. the weather forecast was for once right, some very heavy thunder storms interspersed with sunny periods, again not good for butterflies and certainly not good for photographers of butterflies so I put some food out and snuggled down in my hide. Then a first, a Red kite flew in and landed on the dead tree trunk which I had put up close to the feeding area. This was erected only about 6 weeks ago with the help of our Grandchildren it was an old dead tree, that we cut down from another area of our wood and then banged four 6inch nails into the bottom, dug a deep hole and pushed it in and then filled the hole with concrete.  So far a good range of birds have perched on it, all the visitors except the Buzzards but now there was a Red Kite. Wow!

The Kite sat there for several minutes eyeing up the goodies on the ground and I expected it to fly down and take something but then a Buzzard and a Crow both flew down, more of less together and started feeding. The kite immediately flew off, presumably not wishing to tangle with the guys on the ground.

Not long and then the Buzzard, (this was Mr Halfeye) and the Crow suddenly flew off and in came a fox. This was a rough looking fox, not one I had seen before, one eye was surrounded by scar tissue and the eye if self looked a bit out of place. Another Halfeye? The fox proceeded to remove the food I had set out bit by bit and I was hoping the Kite would make a return so eventually when it came back for the fourth or fifth time I made a noise and it ran off. The Kite did  not return but Halfeye came down and as usual spent a long time on the ground often sharing the food with Magpies and Crows.  

So all very event full and some very heavy rain, at one point the rough fox did come back in the heaviest of rain to grab another morsel.  No butterflies, but ‘That was, the wood, this week’  TW3  remember that ‘That was the week that was’, David Frost and Millicent Martin.