No visit on Sunday as we had been away for the weekend and not Monday either so a bit of a gap in the feeding but on Tuesday I did get up to the wood.

Monday had been Storm Floris and whilst it was no where near the conditions in Scotland it was quite windy and wet, Tuesday was the aftermath and still a bit windy in the morning, however by the afternoon it was reasonably calm. I visited the wood and spent a little while in the hide, a Buzzard came down and was very nervous to start with, it must have spent at least five minutes looking around after it had landed before it finally started to feed, however once settled in it was there for about 20 minutes.

This Buzzard I think was a young one, the clue is in the eyes, mature specimens have almost uniformly dark brown eyes. This one had a lighter brown iris, however it was not that noticeable so I am wondering if it is one of last years offspring?

By about 3pm it was quite nice and sunny and calm so I decided to check out the Butterflies along the main path where there are a few Buddleia bushes and lots of Hemp Agrimony.  Well it was not that productive I found 5 different species but for some of them like the Red Admiral, the Holly Blue and the Speckled Wood there was only one specimen. The Gatekeeper was the commonest, probably 4 or 5 , and there were some Meadow Browns.

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The Buddleia was particularly dissapointing there are several bushes along the path and all I saw on the flowers was just one Red Admiral, the same one as was previously on the Hemp Agrimony.

There were several other insect visitors about, very few Bumble Bees some Honey Bees and various Hover fly types, I am not an expert on these, I just call them Dipterans, it sounds good but means you don’t have a clue.

I also visited on Thursday but that was largely a work day, I spent several hours cutting down and loading up Silver Birch, we use them for fire wood. They were mostly ones that had had the bark removed by the dam Squirrels also ones which were near the hide so I could get better sight lines.  Then I did one tank full of brush cutting, one  tank equates to just over 1 hour of cutting and here again it was largely in the vicinity of the hide to cut back any Bracken regrowth and push back the area that has been cleared. I want to gradually increase this open region to encourage more birds in particularly the Red Kites. I did notice lots of deer poo about as I was cutting back and some of it very close to the hide.

So ‘that was the wood this week’ TW3.