Saturday, 4 August 2012

Great Dug Dale again. Bugs, bees, barley and buzzards.

3rd August 2012
A walk along the top of Great Dug Dale in pursuit of the pheasant cover which produced such a wonderful display of flowers last year.

As we set out there were two tortoiseshell butterflies on the buddleia...



It's only when you look closely that you notice the blue on tortoiseshells.
On the walk down to the top of the dale there was a bumble (several actually) with a white tail...

And then one with a red tail...


The flowerbeds were back but further on than before, on the far side of a large old ash tree.

I know that ragwort is considered a menace by horse people, but the insects love it, and it was in abundance...


And some large daisy things...



Hover flies, in particular seem to love Ragwort.


There were tiny little shiny things on the thistles...


You can see the pollen grains in this thistle (hay-fever sufferers look away now)...


In places there was so much ragwort that it gave every shot an impressionist backdrop...


An almost perfect daisy type thing ( I really should get a better book so that I can look up the names)...


The walk back by the "boring bit" alongside crops where the flowers were last year gave us a scarlet pimpernel (I presume) in the path...


And a different hover fly, darker than usual...


It seems to me that this blog should be looked at during a snowstorm in the depths of winter, to remind one of the seasons past and yet to come.


The day before, we had been to the bottom, the sheep-poo filled bottom, of Deep Dug Dale.  The last time we were there it was like a manicured lawn, better than ours, that extended forever along the floor of the Dale. 

Now the wet June had left it a shaggy,rough,wet, pasture, and suddenly our lawn seemed better....


A word about the Wolds.  (To those that know and love the Wolds skip on to the next picture.)

The Yorkshire Wolds are upside-down to any other area of natural beauty in the country.  In most areas there are safe tended valleys with crops and roads and the wild places are up, up in them there hills.

In the Wolds, as you drive through,  there are fields and planted shelter belts, that is a pleasent enough spectacle (cf  the wonderful works of Hockney), but the wild places are in the valleys

The valleys were formed from the melting of the glaciers and have left a series of dry, almost textbook, valleys but without the lakes  and other bits beloved of geography teachers.  The bottoms of these valleys are too small for the plough, and the sides are to steep, so they stay as a reminder of the what the Wolds were before the plough came

There are endless dry, sheep-filled valleys and some, like Deep Dug Dale are now Open Access Areas and can be wandered at will.

They all look quite similar and in some places it can be confusing and, of course, there is no mobile phone signal.  Ask any sheep for directions.  They will direct you to the bar (I think).   It can be as lonely as the high places.

The sheep have the whole area to walk in.  Why do they chose to follow the same path?  This is no hefting, this is blind obedience.  What is in those woods?  And why only that route to be there?


And why ( and this is THE BIG WHY why do sheep never walk on sheep tracks when you are watching?

Anyway Deep Dug Dale has almost bolted on raptors and a buzzard turned up...




After all the fiddling with apertures and stuff it was nice at least to be able to see some markings against a bright sky.

The buzzard bossed the sky until the kite turned up (didn't get a good shot) and the show was over.


The barley is missing because the video I took of barley waving in the breeze was rubbish.  I will try again soon and insert it later.

That said there is only so long for the barley/breeze thing to continue. 



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