When it comes to wildlife and wild flowers I have to say I am absolutely spoiled here around the Landscape Juice HQ.
Only yesterday evening I heard my very first Golden Oriole of the year, the sporadic call of the Cuckoo has echoed - although I think they are becoming much more scarce, even here - in the woodland for the last four weeks.
There must be at least eight Nightingales singing their heads off in the hedgerows around my home, the Hoopoe is a regular visitor: a very friendly bird often letting one walk right up to them.
Although a less frequent visitor in the last two years, the male and female Hen Harrier can be seen swooping and hovering as it hunts for food across the fields. Skylarks are aplenty.
Wild flora is a plenty also.
Orchids are now blooming as the Cowslip fades. Miniature wild daffodils were in abundance but have now all but left us for another year. Wild violet bloomed profusely. Even the dependable dandelion put on a magnificent show in great carpets between the plum trees and through the hay meadows.
Fritillaria in abundance
But this year I was in for a treat. Just a short walk from my home along a dusty farm track there lies a virtual ruin of a farm.
The French farmer had died shortly before we arrived here in 2004. I've watched the barns and a small cottage submit to the weather and slowly fall to pieces.
Despite the obvious reversion to wilderness there's still evidence that the garden (if one can call it that) held a few shrubs and plants.
Just past the house is a traditional unspoilt meadow which runs downhill into a valley.
At the top of the meadow is an old well which leaks badly after prolonged rainfall. Needless to say the meadow below is lush with deep green grass; it's a real picture.
It has become a ritual to visit the meadow every spring to see the daffodils. Although until this spring, when the encroaching blackthorn was scrubbed out, I really had know idea that there were so many. There were literally thousands.
I walked down the meadow again this spring with my eye firmly on the cowslips and daffodils. Three quarters down the meadow I spotted a lone Frillaria mileagris (Snakeshead Frittilary). I was overjoyed to spot about another five. It really made my day as I'm a big fan of Fritillaries.
The following day I took my camera. For some reason I decided to cut through a cleared hedgerow past the well and as I tramped through the waterlogged ground I came across another Fritillary...and then another and another. I stood still and scanned the field and my jaw just dropped. There were literally hundreds, maybe even a few thousand of the the blighters. The day before, in my keenness to get to the highly visible yellow flowers, I'd failed to spot this amazing spectacle.
It will be a walk I make every spring from now on, without fail.
Becoming rare in Britain
It wasn't the first time I'd seen Fritillaries in France so It wasn't a total surprise to me that they were growing just a short walk away.
However I was shocked to read an article by Michael McCarthy - Why half a million fritillaries didn’t make it this year - on the Independent this morning telling just how threatened Fritillaria meleagris is in the United Kingdom.
I was amazed that the Snakeshead Fritillary only grows (or grew) on thirty sites in the UK and has become very rare.
It appears that the weather and pesticides have taken their toll. Michael tells of one dependable site in Wiltshire where just one flower appeared this year where 500,000 once grew.
I'll treasure my little spot from now on.
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