On Saturday I joined UKBers Gibster, Sami and Philzoid for a jolly jape down to Portland in seach of Lulworth Skippers. As it turned out there were no Lulworth Skippers but there was a Captain (Bagsy - blog here
http://bagsy-thecaptainslog.blogspot.com/ ) and lots of Red Admirals. We were joined by ChrisC for a while. We had a thoroughly splendid time and it was nice to meet such lovely people.
We stopped off at the bird observatory first (amazing book shop!) and had a look at the contents of their moth trap from the previous night. It certainly made me want to give mothing another go. Although we were only there briefly the people seemed very interesting characters and the bird observatory seemed a fascinating place. I would like to go back there again and spend some more time, maybe even do some mothing and stay over.
We then turned our minds to scouring the meadows behind the pub for Lulworths and although we found some small skippers, lots of gatekeepers, some meadow browns, common blue, brown argus, small blue (a really tiny small blue - in fact many of the butterflies here seemed markedly smaller than I would expect), marbled white, a chalkhill blue and there were an awful lot of red admirals coming in from over the sea, the actual Lulworths eluded us. It didn't bother me though, I was having far too good a time with the swallows and martins swooping overhead and investigating the small quarry hoping to see little owls; no luck their either though.
We went on for a pub lunch and despite my ordering lots food but not actually eating a huge amount of it (am on the Dukan diet and it's a right b*gger at times! but incredibly effective - I guess starvation has that effect
) I had a lovely time and am envious of Gibsters' bins as well as learning a few birding terms. We found ChrisC's fleece on the way back which should be winging it's way back to him via Royal Mail.
We decided to skip the skippers and go to a quarry to hunt down wall lizards. These proved much easier to find and Gibster led us straight to them. I was a bit scared of going across some of the rocks (I know, coward!
) and so viewed from a short distance.
The call of a passing peregrine was something I won't forget in a hurry. Then we witnessed the juvenile peregrines swooping and grabbing the pigeon over the sea which was incredibly exciting and some choice expletives were voiced in our enthusiasm!
To cap the day off we went to a second quarry and Gibster yet again entertained us by turning over rocks and finding slow worms. Great stuff.
Unfortunately time was cracking on and I had to get back so we headed for home. All in all a most enjoyable day.
i'll refund postage costs at the pub next time i see you 
