Cheers Dave
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
- you know how it is sometimes when you see a species for the first time after 8 or so months and you're a bit rusty with it
![Confused :?](./images/smilies/icon_confused.gif)
It is great having Martin Down just down the road but then you have Wood Whites, and you're closer to Heath Frits than I am
Cheers for your kind comments Jack
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
It seemed that Martin Down was back to it's usual best, last year it was a bit lack lustre
Part 2
Eventually I managed to rouse my daughter from her book and we set off down the hill to the “hotspot”. On my last visit I noticed that it had been burnt out but the area just as the ditch starts uphill on the other side of the path is equally as good. And so it turned out today in fact we saw almost everything we’d seen around the rest of the reserve, all jam packed into this tiny little area!
After finding Dingy and Grizzled Skippers and Small Heath almost under pretty much every step I found another Green Hairstreak. This is the same area in which I saw my first ever Green Hairstreaks three seasons past. The next year I struggled to relocate them and in the end managed a singleton and likewise last year. So to find them at four or five sites across the reserve this year suggests to me that 2013 has been a goodun for Greenstreaks!
There were also Blues around with a difficult to chase Brown Argus, Small Blues and Common Blues. One Small was taking minerals from a large piece of dung whilst the Common Blues were engaging in that all important business of ensuring that there might be some Common Blues here next year, the sole purpose for their existence.
Whilst I was letting my daughter loose with my camera she said “Dad I got a Blue” and she had, a much better view of the Adonis and one looking much more like the second brood – more electric blue and less pastel. It seems that all of a sudden the temperature had reached the optimum as all along the ditch Blues were flying, fighting, generally larking about and mating.
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One female was tiredly crawling through the grass stems as if she were hacking her way through a jungle, dragging her mate along behind her when another male literally dropped out of the sky next to her, totally oblivious to me. He must have thought that he was a better prospect than the incumbent male and made a lot of flapping fuss but the other male stayed locked to the female. In the end she decided by turning round and crawling off further into the grass, dragging her male behind her. I followed them for a bit and they maintained copulation for another 5 or 6 minutes by which time my daughter had borrowed the camera and was busy taking landscape shots.
The way back held more Dingies and Grizzlies as well as very flighty Brimstones and all too soon we’d reached the car and so the glorious afternoon was at an end. As I drove over the bumps and potholes of Sillens Lane I thought “Better try for Small Pearls tomorrow while the weather lasts”...
Have a goodun
Wurzel