Roses, curlews and a fritillary!
Wednesday 3 July, 2013 (Part 1)
No hills this week. The weekly email said "Trevor has suggested a walk from the car park in Bride, this week, and he thinks Wednesday" - so we were expecting a flat walk out to the Point of Ayre.
It was drizzly in the glen when we were getting ready but the dry weather, which we had been promised, had arrived by the time we reached Bride and started off down the road past the church. We turned down the Ballaghennie Road instead of taking the footpath which we used in January. We still had bad memories of the mud. The path is probably much drier now but there was a fair amount of rain last night so we weren't about to chance it.
I got left behind as usual because I was taking photographs of the wild flowers at the side of the road. I saw the others stop and look over the hedge.
When I caught up I could just see over the hedge into this field and see what had caught their attention. Tim is taller than me and got a good photo of the very "free-range" geese.
We walked on down the tarred road towards the visitor centre and heard the song of the skylarks for the first time this summer.
The first thing on the agenda was to photograph the burnet roses (Rosa pimpinellifolia) - which are the stars of the show on the Ayres in summer. Here is another of Tim's photos - of me trying to focus on a pink rose. Most of the roses are white, but for some reason we always make a bee-line for the rarer pink ones.
I think I was taking this photo. The sun had come out and the light was too bright but I adjusted the brightness on the computer and managed to reduce the glare.
After that I realised that it was a good idea to photograph the flowers in the shade - and, as I was casting the only shade available, I tried a different technique in the next photo and then cropped the photo when I got home. (I am going to save the rest of the flower photos for Part 2)
We turned off the road and walked along a path towards the little plantation. This area looked totally different in January when we last hiked on the Ayres. Then there were lakes of water stretching almost as far as the eye could see, covering the paths.
10 January 2013
3 July 2013
It is a boggy area, where we look for marsh orchids in late spring. There used to be a large pool of water here for most of the year but this was all that remained on Wednesday.
I was tormented by butterflies all morning. First there was a meadow brown that posed nicely on a dandelion at the side of the road. I got one shot from a distance . . .
. . . and then got a close-up which should have been better - but the butterfly had moved and was facing the camera with its wings still folded up - so it didn't show up too well. I moved around to get a side view - but the camera managed to focus on a grass flower instead of the butterfly, which then lost patience with my incompetence and flew away.
After that I wasted a lot of time chasing after common blue butterflies which all seemed to be incredibly energetic and were not interested in resting on the vegetation. There were also numerous small heaths flying around.
But what I really wanted was a close view of an orange butterfly. I saw one flying around last week when we visited the Ayres with Danny, and then I saw two today. I suspected that they were fritillaries - judging by the colour and shape of wing and strong flight - but I am a novice at identifying butterflies and it was just a guess. So I was delighted when one of the suspected fritillaries settled on the path ahead of us and I got this photo. When I told Trevor that it must be a dark green fritillary because that was the only type of fritillary found on the Island he said "It doesn't look dark green to me! Whoever thought of that name must have been colour-blind." We had to agree.
After walking through the little plantation, where a group of children on an outing were picnicking in the shade, we walked towards the shore. There was a curlew flying overhead but I didn't try to get a photo and then I saw one perched on the top of the dunes . . .
. . . and it took off and I managed to get my first action photo of a bird. Not a great picture but good for me - you can see that it is a bird, in fact you can even see that it is a curlew.
After the excitement of the curlew we saw a small bird which was behaving like a skylark (and probably was one). It hovered over Dorothy, who took a photo of it with her new camera. She said that it had something in it beak. So it may have had a nest nearby and babies to feed.
Later we saw another skylark, flying so high that he looked to be in danger of disappearing into the clouds. The lady skylarks must have been very impressed by his display.
We stopped for a while to watch the terns diving but they were too far from the shore for any hope of a successful photo so we headed on to the lighthouse.
And then it was a long, hot trudge along the road back to Bride. We had spent so much time messing around with cameras that I was glad to take the most direct and quickest route back . . . and we were happy to approach the end of our journey and the pretty outskirts of the village.
I have saved the best for last . . . Tim's beautiful photo of the red valerian (Centranthus ruber) growing on the wall alongside the road.
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