6/6/14

Sunshine was forecast and it has arrived. Jeffrey is going to the opticians so I am walking the dogs on my own. I grab a pair of binoculars and Charlie and I go to collect Jazzer. There is little breeze and  I stroll listening to the birds. It’s hardly the dawn chorus, I rarely see dawn, but the forest is still in the sunshine and bird songs float among the trees.

I see movement at the top of a pine tree where I  saw the . The bird  hops about in the branches, doing a good impersonation of a pine cone when I try to focus on it. When I eventually succeed it turns out to be a chaffinch;a disappointment. I sit for a hwile on a piece of tree trunk which the Forestry have left in the middle of a track for no apparent reason. I am hoping to spot woodlarks. I can hear them but no joy in spotting them.

Jazzer and Charlie carry on without me for a while then come back and hassle me when they realise they are unaccompanied, so we carry on through Meg’s track. The wild privet have started to flower and there is a slight fragrance but there aren’t enough blooms yet to produce the heady scent that I love and associate with summer.

I hear a goldcrest where I often hear it. A rook flies overhead. There are not many flowers on the sides of the drove at present. The cow parsley is past its best. There are one or two Bladder Campion reminding me that I have one in a vase waiting  to be  drawn. I have the same guilty feeling about the Ribbed Plantain. They are not the most showy plants with brown, bee like  flowers but the textures are  fascinating.

  I wonder whether we are going to have another mast autumn. Everything is early. The hawthorne are smothered with the pink bloom of berries forming. The beech look strange. They have their mast forming  like  small green teasels along all the outlying branches. There are bunches of sycamore seeds hanging like propellers. They are all far more advanced than you would expect them to be. I haven’t noticed any acorns. I need to look more closely to see what is happening with them.