... and covered in prickles and white hairs. This magnificent Cotton Thistle is dwarfing all around it in a Banstead farm field. A Triffid if ever there was one.
Steve, I repeat what I have said elsewhere :-), a fabulous plant. It even got me out of blog hibernation a few weeks back and that was before it flowered!! I do wonder what is going to happen with those fields though. They sprayed the cereal crop with (ripening) herbicide a couple of weeks ago but diodn't stray!
I tweeted that at 09.00hrs, a few hours after coming to terms with the fact that this country had decided to vote to leave the EU. I can honestly say that I have never been so angry, confused and felt so impotent over a political decision. It was a referendum that did not need to happen, but did so because of petty party political infighting. I took myself off to Denbigh's Hillside, close to Dorking, to clear my head. I sat down and started to put all of what had happened into some sort of order. The bare facts are that 51.9% of those who voted opted to Leave, and 48.1% opted to Remain. For such a far reaching decision, it seems almost too narrow a margin to allow any progress to continue. This isn't just a case of the UK coming out of the EU. It has opened up massive chasms between the generations; a deeper fracturing of a fragile United Kingdom; a widening class divide; Northern Ireland and Gibraltar now facing up to being on closed borders; enormous worry for UK passp...
Chequered Skipper - the only one that I have seen. NOT collected A museum glass cabinet that displays stuffed birds is an object that at once shows its age. When the naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries went out to catalogue the natural world, they went armed with guns, cat gut and sawdust. The provenance of a bird was down to the production of its skin - the old saying of 'what's hit is history, what's missed is mystery' was very true indeed - if you didn't have the body then the record was unproven. There cannot be many people who would not baulk at the idea of netting birds, wringing their necks and then displaying them at home, stuffed and wired to a perch within a case. But what about butterflies? Moths? Beetles? I have recently had an email correspondence on the rights and wrongs of collecting with two fellow naturalists. I think it fair to say that one is pro and one against. I find myself sitting somewhere in the middle. It got me thinking abo...
A bit of a 'secret squirrel' post as I won't reveal the exact location of two of the species that Seth and I recorded today. Both were in the Mickleham/Box Hill area is all that I will say. Firstly was a singing Firecrest that performed admirably from a mature yew tree. Secondly was at least 1,000 plants of Wild Candytuft (above) from its only known Surrey station. This isn't a common plant anywhere. We also found it at another site, maybe half a mile away. There was a fair amount in flower. Both sites are on southward facing disturbed chalky soil. Another plant that I was pleased to see (after failing to find it on my last two visits) was this Rustyback, a fern that is on an old flint wall close to Juniper Hall Field Centre.
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