Feed

Once you stay in one place for any length of time, you start to notice just how much is going on there. We spent the afternoon in the dingle, and in a tiny area there were a big number of different trees, flowers and insects. Once I noticed the 1st butterfly, we then realised there were lots. There were 4 different species fluttering around today; peacock, green-veined white, orange-tip and speckled wood. The last 2 species were the most abundant with the male orange-tip butterfly being really noticeable with 2 or 3 being seen together quite often. I hadn't realised until looking it up afterwards, that only the male has orange wing tips, the female just having a dark black tip. The speckled woods must have just been emerging from their chrysalis as some still had crumpled looking wings that hadn't fully pumped up to their full shape.

The weather was glorious for bank holiday Saturday, so we spent several hours in the Ffrydlas dingle, the kids in wetsuits, and a camera in hand. The last time we spent an afternoon down there in March the kids decided they could practice their Arctic survival skills by crossing the frozen stream on their tummies, today they were swimming in it! There was a bit of dam building, a lot of getting wet, and just a glorious spot to be with no one else there. It was lovely to see some of the trees now with bright green leaves, like the hawthorn and hazel, and others just about to burst into leaf like sycamore, oak and ash. We feel so lucky to have places like this right on our doorstep.

We were starting to wonder if they had got lost on their way back from Africa, but during the last week several swallows have returned. There's now 3 or 4 regularly sitting on the wires and they seem to be going in and out of the shed, so hopefully they will nest in there even though Mrs blackbird is still in there on her nest. Summer has finally arrived.......

Back to the Dean Country Park today for my nature ramble with a talk about the history of the park thrown is as well.

As the theme of our #johnmuiraward is the UN's Sustainable Development Goals I thought I'd share this thought from @GreenSolitaire seen on Twitter "Is a sustainable lifestyle just what we buy? Or how we eat/travel/play, what we teach our kids, how we vote, spend our time (work, leisure, community), how we engage online, who we support, how we worship, how we socialize, what we study and the stories we tell." Solitaire is co-founder of @futerra and has been playing around with the SDGs and put them into things we can all do everyday - #GoodLifeGoals. I'll drink a local beer to that!