Skippers & Scabious
Lulworth Skipper (Thymelicus acteon).
A little cooler today, but close and airless. Not a breath of wind, even on the hilltop. A layer of high white cloud like a sandwich-box lid over the world.
Took a walk along the Purbeck Hills, in search of summer things: butterflies & Bee Orchids.
Out along the foot of the hill: a narrow, shaded path overgrown with nettles and brambles and briars, and creeping tendrils of Old Man's Beard and White Bryony.
White Bryony (Bryonia dioica) flowers & tendrils.
Little candelabras of Nipplewort flowers (Lapsana communis) lighting the way through the shade.
Field Rose (Rosa arvensis).
Thick-legged Flower Beetle (Oedemera nobilis).
Ringlet butterflies (Aphantopus hyperantus) fluttering darkly along the hedgerows in their mourning cloaks.
Further along, the path emerges from the scrub and the shade, into open chalk grassland, where the bees and the butterflies and the beetles are battling over Knapweed and Field Scabious and Musk Thistle flowers:
Butterfly versus Beetle on Field Scabious (Knautia arvensis). (The butterfly won).
Marbled White (Melanargia galathea) and tiny bee, on Musk Thistle (Carduus nutans).
Large Skipper (Ochlodes sylvanus), on Greater Knapweed (Centaurea scabiosa).
Hedge Bedstraw (Galium mollugo).
Skipper, Scabious, and Smooth Hawksbeard (Crepis capillaris), maybe?
Common Blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus).
Alongside the chalk track that climbs the hill, Wild Thyme & Common Rock Rose in flower.
Small Skipper (Thymelicus sylvestris) on Wild Thyme (Thymus polytrichus).
Common Rock-rose (Helianthemum nummularium). Lots of Red-tailed Bumblebees busy about the Rock-roses, which was good to see. It has not been a good year for bees so far.
The hilltop is looking marvellous this year - they obviously got the grazing regime just right. So many Pyramidal Orchids.
And even a few Bee Orchids on the short-grazed areas.