Tuesday is one of our volunteer days at Blashford, but it was not a day for heavy work in the sun. Luckily we needed to do a second sweep along the Dockens Water to remove Himalayan balsam plants that had either not germinated last time, or that we had missed. We found only about a couple of hundred plants, testament to the work we have done reducing it over the years. Along the way we saw a few common frog and good numbers of beautiful demoiselle.
beautiful demoiselle (male)
I retreated into the office in the afternoon, where at least it was a little cooler, until it was time to lock up.
There was a little excitement at locking up time as I found a person paddling an inflatable boat on Ivy Lake. We know the damage this can do, some years ago two canoeists were found on the lake and this resulted in many of the tern chick jumping off the rafts in panic and several were lost. Luckily the chicks are about a week too small to jump off so they remained, although the adults were less than happy. It turned out the boatman was an angler, although not fishing. He had a large bucket of bait and was looking for fish. It is a curious thing that anglers are very difficult to persuade that there is anything wrong with trespassing like this, they know that the water is not fished and private. When asked it turned out the boat had not been cleaned before use and he did not know where it had been last time out. The danger to inland waters and especially fisheries, of disease and alien species being moved about on wet gear seemed to have passed him by entirely. Anglers even had a euphemism for illegal entry and fish theft, they know it as “guesting” and it seems to be an accepted part of the “sport”. Small wonder that invasive aliens species and fish diseases get so easily moved around.
Once it cooled down a bit in the evening we went out for a walk on the edge of the New Forest. In some of the dried out puddles I came across a lot of coral necklace, a small plant typical of these locations and a bit of a New Forest speciality.
coral necklace
The main reason for the visit was to see silver-studded blue butterflies and I was not disappointed.
silver-studded blue, settling down to roost for the night.
Along the way we also found a small heath and a freshly emerged common emerald damselfly, I am not sure I have seen one at this stage before and it was a very different colour from the mature adult.
common emerald
The usually wet areas are very dry, so some species usually growing in wet bog are now high and dry, one example of this was a group of oblong-leaved sundew plants growing by the dry path.
oblong-leaved sundew
Sundews are carnivorous plants catching insects on the sticky globules on the leaves.
Blashford Lakes Nature Reserve 