At this time of year there are so many places I could visit locally and when I knew the forecast for today was good I tried to think of which orchid would probably be at its best this week.  To help me make my mind up I looked at last year's pictures and noticed that last year on the 13th June I was at Wye National Nature Reserve looking for Late Spider Orchids.  It has also been a couple of weeks since I was at Park Gate Down, so I planned a day visiting both sites.

I’m not sure I will ever get that ultimate butterfly shot because there is always something I think that can be better. One of the first butterflies I ever took pictures of a few years ago was the beautiful little Heath Fritillary and if they hadn’t been such an obliging butterfly I don’t think I would have been bitten by the bug and would have given up a long time ago.

At this time of year there are many butterflies about or perhaps there should be anyway. Sadly, I have to say, numbers of many species as far as I can tell are far less this year. I’m not sure if that’s to do with the appalling summer we had last year or the bad start to this. I know those doing butterfly transects this year are saying the same thing though. 

Today I visited Walmer Castle, a lovely place to visit on any day as a wander around the gardens is always a pleasant stroll, but today I was there to see if I could find some little visitors who had taken up home in the pond: Small Red-eyed Damselflies.  They are recent colonists of the UK, first being recorded in 1999.

This time of year is always an exciting time if you enjoy watching blue butterflies, as late July and August is the time when many species of blue butterflies emerge either for the first time or for some their second broods of the year. I’m very lucky that one of the best places for blue butterflies locally is at Lydden Temple Ewell: a nature reserve just outside of Dover. The reserve is on chalk downland: perfect for blue butterflies as it’s just the type of habitat where their larval food plants grow. It just so happens that we live just 20 minutes from there so it’s never too much of a problem to nip over there whenever the weather is suitable. 

I had a chance to stay in the Chilterns area for a few days and looked for local places to visit while I was there that would maybe give me some chances of seeing new butterflies for me. The internet is a great source of information and it doesn’t take long to find some likely looking places and I found there were lots looked after by the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust. One place really appealed to me when its description read “A wildlife showpiece, with excellent visitor facilities set in a secluded Chiltern valley, the Warburg reserve is a magical place throughout the seasons”.  Well how I could resist that description, but always when you visit a new place you never quite know what to expect. I wasn’t disappointed in the least in fact I’m really keen to return in a different season as I’m sure at anytime of the year there really will be plenty to see.

A few weeks ago I read a report on the BBC News website about how Silver-studded Blue butterflies are making a good but surprising comeback at Thursley Common, Surrey. In 2006 there was a devastating fire that burned for several days here and it’s such a horrible thought that a lot of the wildlife that made their homes in the area such as a colony of Sand Lizards and many ground nesting birds will have been wiped out at the time. The fire went through the area where the Silver-studded Blues lived too and as it happened in July 2006 it couldn’t have been at a worse time for much of the wildlife.  A lot of work has had to be done since to restore the area and from what I could see nature is doing what it does best and the heather and other plants are starting to re-grow. Large areas of the boardwalks that take you across the site have been replaced so it wasn’t difficult to follow a path.

A couple of years ago we spent a very enjoyable week in the Yorkshire Dales. After what has been a miserable wet summer this year it’s easy to forget that 2006 was actually a very hot, dry summer and the south-east of the country had a hosepipe ban at the time. Well as you can imagine it wasn’t exactly the best time to go visiting places like Aysgarth falls, which had been reduced to a trickle, and we promised ourselves we would return to see them another day.

We’ve stayed in Ambleside three times now and we’ve looked at Wansfell Pike each time thinking we really must go up there one day. We could actually see the fell out of the kitchen window of our cottage too so it seemed a perfect walk to get us going on the first day of our holiday. The day was as overcast as it could be so we knew we wouldn’t be seeing any distant views and it was also incredibly humid which makes it hard work for a couple of unfit souls who rarely get the chance to walk steep hills.

We don’t get to visit the Lake District very often so for us the task of completing all 214 Wainwrights seems unlikely for now. Whenever we do visit though we will often try to visit summits new for us, as it means we are exploring new areas of the Lakes. We get a lot of pleasure doing just that and one place I really hoped we’d be able to visit this time was Angle Tarn and its Pikes, as I heard from so many other people that it’s one of their favourite tarns and places to be.

Today turned out to be the best day’s weather of our recent stay in the Lakes, but not without a very wet start.  As we were staying in Ambleside, there is always a shop or two to spend time looking in and finding walking clothes you didn’t know you wanted until you saw them.  Plus a café or two to enjoy something naughty but nice. We both ended up with new clothes, and then had an early lunch at Lucy’s on a Plate: a favourite place of ours to eat in Ambleside.  But we could see what the weather was doing outside too and the sun was breaking through and there was plenty of blue sky too between the heavy showers.