Wareham Forest Silver-Studded Blues

I called a halt to my career in Banking IT fairly early and have been idle retired for about ten years. I started off with lots of plans to in-effect resurrect my career in independent part-time format, but those thoughts just kind of floated away and now I spend my time walking the dog with Mrs D in the hope of seeing something interesting, or when I'm not outside I'm going down Rabbit holes on You Tube on extra-terrestrials and early human civilisation. 

One of those dog-walks took us to Wareham Forest and specifically Woolsbarrow Fort. It's typical Forestry commission stuff with acres of mature pines interspersed with open heathland, and soon we were amongst families of Stonechats, a few Dartford Warblers, and serenaded by Tree Pipits. But there were regular blue butterflies, and immediately I thought these weren't the normal Common Blue - smaller, browner on top, I wondered briefly if they may be Small Blues but the spectacular underwing made me rethink to Silver-Studded Blue, so out came the iPhone with the results below. The silver studs weren't obvious at the time, but comparison online gives an exact match, so yippee that's one for the notebook. Very nice to see.

There is something about different species that is just, well, different. Like Whimbrels and Curlews. I still have to take care with those two but quite often its just an instinctive well its obviously a Whimbrel, or else no that's clearly just a Curlew. Same here. Just obviously not a Common Blue.

And then a patch of reddish plant life which looked sundew-like and my phone tells me is Round-Leaved Sundew. The book says widespread, common, so its basically a weed, but its still great to see an insectivorous plant in full red glory.

And now its back to hours of You Tube videos on ancient civilisations and spacemen. If you like a bit of ancient history laced with wild speculation then Graham Hancock will provide you with hours of that and soon you will be explaining to your wife the importance of the Younger Dryas event in human development and how Gobekli-Tepe completely changes our understanding of blah blah and she nods in an understanding way whilst carrying on weeding the flower bed. But the last ice-age is in evolutionary terms astonishingly recent and is a major factor in the birds we see throughout or birding year, and I should return to that at some point. Just as soon as I've finished those videos about Gobekli Tepe. Which may take some time.