By way of consolation, I saw my first purple hairstreaks and even managed a photo (below). Granted, it won't win me any prizes in the competition, but hey, it's my own, it's authentic and it's an elusive butterfly.
There's an area of the reserve called Scrubbs Meadow which is like a site within a site - grassland flowers that attract non-woodland species. I saw a couple of marbled white and according to a sign, marsh fritillary can also be seen at the appropriate time. Can this be right? I thought they had more or less disappeared from eastern England.
Another, rather gruesome highlight was seeing a baby rabbit killed by a weasel. My wife wandered off and saw a slow worm - her second in the space of a fortnight. I've only ever seen one, when I was 5 years old. It had been mistaken for a snake and stamped on by some idiot who thought he was doing the rest of us a favour.
I enjoyed my visit to Chambers Farm - highly recommended if you are a species-starved northerner like me! Will be returning next year, perhaps a couple of weeks earlier in the hope of catching the white admirals at their peak.
