Another day of highly variable weather – sun, wind, cloud, rain, sleet, hail, plagues of locusts*, etc. – settled just enough at lunch time to allow at least the possibility that a few insects might emerge from their roosts, so I quickly grabbed the cameras and went off to Cleeve Prior. The Community Orchard offered one surprise, in the form of a Small Heath playing hide-and-seek among the grass and wild flowers with the resident group of Brown Argus, but it was a bit windy for photographing small butterflies in long grass (not quite the way I expressed myself while I was trying to actually do it), so I pressed on through the village and down to the river.
The first thing that struck me when I arrived at the bottom of the cliff road was that a very large vehicle must have been there since my last visit: the compacted gravel parking area was badly churned up, and the vegetation around the edge of the space had been crushed and broken by something that needed a lot of space to turn. There was also a large oil slick and a heap of ash on the gravel, and when I got out of the car the whole area stank of ash and chemicals. I walked down the short vehicular access lane to the main clearing – the vegetation on either side once again torn and flattened – and followed some big tyre tracks down to the river, where I was delighted to find (as I’d hoped but hardly dared to expect) that the burnt-out car has now been removed.
It would have been very interesting to see the removal, because the car had been run off the edge of the wharf and was sitting, nose down, just above the river edge, and I don’t think it can have been easy to either lift it or drag it back into the clearing from there, but even if I’d known it was happening, I’d guess that the Safety Elves probably limited public access during the extraction. The lucky folks in the holiday park directly across the river probably must have had a great view though. It’s just ten days since I bumped into a County Council employee at the Mill, who’d noticed the wreck while surveying the local footpaths, and who said that she was going to put in a call to the Environment Agency and ask them to deal with the situation – and it seems that she did make that call, and the EA then stepped up very quickly. They didn’t just move the wreck, but cleared up quite a lot of other dumped rubbish from the area as well, and though the damage that the car fire and their own vehicle have caused to the bank and the nearby vegetation will take a while to heal, I’m sure nature will repair itself in time.
Good news following on from good news, I was then very happy to find my first couple of White-legged Damselflies of the season – this one an immature female. As she matures this plaster pink colour will pale to a greenish cream, but even now her double shoulder stripes and unusually wide head – I always think of Hammerhead Sharks – are unmistakeable. Males are an attractive aqua blue colour, and both sexes have pale legs with longitudinal black stripes running along them, and slightly flattened and expanded tibiae.
R: L2, C9, D17.
* This, of course, is untrue: it was much too cold today for locusts.
