A Hazeley Summer Day

Hazeley Heath is a perhaps little known RSPB reserve in deepest Hampshire, not a million miles from the slightly sleepy Hartley Wintney. Hazeley is a nice mix of heathland, looking gorgeous just now with the bell heather in full flower, oak wood, some pines and a few grassy areas. My guides for the day were Dave and Mary, long time friends, both of whom know the site well. Now Dave has a few idiosyncrasies (more than few actually) and one was on display today in that any circular route has to be done clockwise (counter clockwise obviously being the wrong way round).

Today was mostly about butterflies and dragons but let’s start with a bird, spotted flycatcher in this case, an attractive, sort of understated passerine which of course isn’t spotted so much as streaked. To be honest, this illustrates the difficulty of getting high quality photographs of small birds. This isn’t high quality truthfully but having crashed through the undergrowth (the flycatcher could have thought it was back in Africa with an elephant coming through the trees so much noise was I making!) this was as close as I could get. Perseverance required I guess and perhaps what I really need is more patience and a better stalking skills (so to speak). A nice bird just the same.

Spotted Flycatcher

When it comes to the butterflies, I managed to take some photos today of species that I have not previously managed to get on camera. The first was grayling, a common enough creature at the right time and one that is, as they say, cryptically marked and sometimes difficult to see depending on the background.

Grayling

Essex skipper is another butterfly that until today, I had not looked at down a camera lens. To tell these apart from small skipper, you need a close look at the underside of the antenna tips, brown in small skipper, black in Essex skipper as here. These two have other things on their minds I guess but at least it means we will get some more skippers.

Essex Skipper

Peacocks are of course beautiful, beautiful butterflies. I suspect I will take better images in the future than this one but actually, I quite like the slightly different angle here.

Peacock

Other butterflies seen during the morning included silver washed fritillary, dark green fritillary, red admiral, meadow brown, ringlet, large skipper, marbled white, small white, a lovely male brimstone and a number of silver studded blues; I make that thirteen or so species, not bad at all!

So what about dragons? Starting with one we saw but with no photograph, brown hawker. Now I am very much in the learner class when it comes to dragonflies but there seems to be a certain rock solid quality to hawkers; strong flyers and quite large, certainly larger than the darters we saw today. The brown hawker does certainly look brown in flight although it is also shot through with bits of yellow and blue. Talking of darters, I took lots of photos of common darters today. I have picked on this one for no better reason than because of the shiny highlights picked out in the wing.

Common Darter

Ruddy darter were also present and whilst the background isn’t the best, it is quite a colour (sort of not British somehow!)

Ruddy Darter

Few dragonflies are more stunning than golden ringed. This particular example flew into view and landed right in front of us just after Dave stated 'this can be a good area for interesting

dragonflies',

Golden Ringed 

By way of a change of pace , this is the caterpillar of the cinnabar moth; the moth itself is rather beautiful, the caterpillar no less so.

Cinnabar Moth caterpillar

Finishing where I started with the birds, which were on the quiet side today, I have to mention the swallows, one of my favourite twittery noises and lovely to see them whizzing around both at low level and high in the blue, blue sky. All very poetic.