I would still like to get some good photos of Skylark on Baildon Moor so I had another trip up there on Friday. Skylark were around and I could also hear them up in the sky but I couldn’t find them to point my camera at.
I have arranged the gallery in a different way this time but you can still click/tap on an image to see it in the gallery carousel.
Though I didn’t get good sightings of Skylark I did very quickly see something I had been hoping for. Within a minute or so of setting off I saw something small and pale flutter to the side of the path. I thought it was some kind of pale fly but I still stopped to have a look – and there it was – a tiny Green Hairstreak butterfly. On my last visit to Baildon Moor I had spent some time looking at the Bilberry and in the bell pits but didn’t spot one, and on this visit it came to me.
When I got to the top corner I rested against the wall and looked over the field and the golf course wondering why I hadn’t brought a water bottle with me. I then started to hear a noise that I could have been a Grasshopper Warbler trying to get going so I was surprised to see it turn out to be two Common Whitethroat bringing food for their young down amongst the thorns.
If I had some water with me I might have spent longer out and about but I did spend a few minutes watching two Curlew in amongst the buttercups. They come up this way to breed so I kept looking. They took some spotting and the photos are not good, they are heavily cropped and focusing on them in the buttercups was impossible, but I could count three Curlew chicks.
This gallery is for the “incidentals” but without the Green Hairstreak, Whitethroat and Curlew chicks they would still have made the visit worthwhile. Willow Warbler which were being helpful in not only displaying their eye stripe and their leg colour but were singing away. Meadow Pipits were frequently coming up onto the stone wall. Several Small Heath butterflies were flitting around each other and occasionally landing to tempt me with my camera. Wall Brown butterflies were also around. The nearby fields have cattle in them and horse riders use the moor so I hope I am right in the ID of the Yellow Dung fly. The last few things are Stichwort, Yellow Rattle and a Dandelion with a variety of insects on it. Feel free to let me know what kind they are.
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