A thick fog hangs over the park this morning, getting thicker as I head up the hill to work. Mysterious silhouettes loom through the fog and everything seems so hushed, I feel like I should tread softly!
On the downland, tangled patches of Yellow Vetchling and Tufted Vetch - their vivid colours leaping to the eye through the mist, which swirls around the tall stems and chunky flower-heads of Woolly Thistle and the swaying stems of Wild Carrot and Wild Parsnip.
Patches of white Yarrow, Bristly Ox-tongue, Common Ragwort, Hedge and Field Bindweed, while among the scrub, Bramble is in flower, along with the first of the hard, shiny green blackberries.
Grasshoppers and Bush Crickets abound for those willing and able to get down on their hands and knees! A magnificent Great Green Bush Cricket stalks her prey along a hedgerow in South Field, with a Speckled Bush Cricket perched on a stem of Old Man’s Beard on the Diagonal Path (with another discovered on one of the ceramics in the Gallery yesterday!).
Not many butterflies on the wing this morning, but while changing the roller towels in the Ladies loos at the Learning Centre, I disturbed a pretty Early Thorn moth, with a colourful Magpie Moth seen on the trees in front of the Learning Centre.
Down by the coast, things are a little clearer, with plenty of Gannets passing by in ones and twos, including many speckly juveniles. Cormorants, Shags, Herring Gulls and Great Black-backed Gulls also passing by, with the blood-curdling shrieks of a Kestrel splitting the silence.
Returning to the Centre, a neat squadron of triangular-winged Starlings zoom by overhead – a relatively unusually sight at Durlston.