Kendal Fell, who goes there? This summer we are asked how we use Kendal Fell and  how we'd like to see it managed.  Last week's meeting  clashed with another  held by the LIb Dems on the Climate Emergency, so I went for the latter. Biodiversity was a theme linking both.
What did we seek on Kendal Fell on this July day, and whom did we meet?  A farmer made hay ( these days it may be haylage or silage) while the sun shone 

Six-spot burnet moth is a striking creature.  In flight, the insect is a blur of fast-beating wings and a flash of scarlet and black. Mating is  leisurely  and can last for hours. This morning, broods of soldier beetles were out and about,  tumbling and climbing all over each other, mating and feeding. 
This summer on Scout Scar the unsettled weather is in contrast to last summer's heat-wave, affecting flora and butterflies and their behaviour.  My blog archive for July 2018 shows a very different picture. 

Swindale Beck meanders through deep pools, fast-moving shallows and deep gravels where salmon and brown trout lay their eggs.  In July, its flood plain  of flower-rich meadows has  drifts of melancholy thistle, with eyebright, yellow rattle,  sneezewort, saw- wort, wood cranesbill and ragged robin.  ‘ A suite of meadows’  along the course of the beck. 
We hear of the farming community some two hundred years ago when Swindale Beck was made straight.  It’s ‘an anthropogenic landscape’ says Lee Schofield, RPSB site-manager.

Wind-shear and streaming cloud over ScouT Scar.  Yellow hawkbit and catsear on rising ground where sunlight falls.  The first thistles open to the sun  and a fresh brood of  small skipper comes seeking pollen and  nectar.  
Alarm calls from the tree- tops and a great clamour. The jays have a young family.  The adults will take eggs and young birds and warning signals sound as the young jays beg for food and take flying lessons.   Sunlight pours through the canopy,  dazzling. 

​A creature appears in the gateway to the stubble field,  masked by  long grass, long ears erect, it  lopes off along the track to Bradleyfield Farm. A hare is a rare sighting here and in that startling first moment we took it for a dog, a small deer. So unexpected it was. 
Tuesday was cool, with a breeze. Too cold for larger butterflies. Micro moths flying. I find two common blue, like displaced petals on scabious. So tiny. They have not yet warmed up enough to fly. 

​'You were a nature writer long before you declared yourself to be one,' said Frances.
Long before I decided to publish my work, to share the fun of finding things. 
Her words reminded me of an excursion to the Black Mountains, 27th  July 1992. I reflect on how being a nature writer has changed over that time. 

To interpret butterflies on Scout Scar in late June  I am alert to season, to when new broods emerge and to the way the morning's weather develops. A blaze of blue sky with a mid-morning breeze that is pleasant.  Micro-moths about drifts of yellow hawkbit. Painted ladies scarcely settle. A glimpse of common blue and fritillary but larger butterflies are restless. Someone sees an adder or was it a slow worm?  By late morning there comes  a surge of hot and humid air, a reminder that France suffers with a record temperature of 46.9 degrees.   

Eyebright and yellow rattle are key plants of the flower-rich hay meadows of Dentdale. Hemi-parasitic, they work their magic secretly,  tapping  into grass roots  to take up nutrients and water,  weakening their host  grasses to give traditional flowers of the hay meadow an opportunity to thrive.  Eyebright and yellow rattle are annuals so their seed must set before the meadow is mown, in mid-July.  
This morning, Farming Today casts further  light on the importance of hay meadows and their traditional management. On either side of the River Dee there are meadows and we pass farmhouses and barns, a pastoral landscape.  Rising in the distance, the moors and uplands where a hundred years ago curlew bred, a ground-nesting bird in dramatic decline. The curlew habit has changed and now the bird breeds increasingly in hay meadows, requiring some two months to incubate and rear its young.  No topping or mowing during that time. 

​ At Waitby Greenriggs, fragrance of flowers after rain, elusive fragrances. Marsh helleborine are a speciality but we were too early and found only  flower-stems with pale buds.  The surprise  was globe flowers,  a bank thick with them.  And the white flowers of lesser butterfly orchid.  There were Northern marsh orchid, tway blade, common spotted orchid, fragrant orchid,  a fly orchid and hybrids various.   A few tiny flowers of bird’s-eye primrose grew on the limestone bank above the disused railway line, and in the ditch.  Yellow rattle in abundance.   Frog hoppers lurked in cuckoo spit, like bubble wrap about flower stems.

​The air is loud with bees flying to the next white flowers of lace-cap hydrangea. Spurts of bee-sonification transmit requests for nectar, signalling  flowers to prepare a welcome. The lace-cap hydrangea trembles and hums with bees. Sheen on bee wings caught in sunlight, membranous wings of the Hymenoptera. Hairs on head, thorax and abdomen, dusted with mites and  pollen brushed over bees as they  delve into flowers.  Legs jointed and hairy, tarsus claws lock onto flower stems. Amongst the hairs, small movable plates of chitin covered in a layer of wax, like polished armour: the bees’ exoskeleton.   

 A female goosander appears toward the far bank of the River Kent, her eleven ducklings feeding about her. My second goosander family this week.  They swim closer  and next moment the foremost ducklings are riding on her back and the rest of her brood swims head-to-tail behind her. She  heads up-stream and I must follow. 

The goosander has a five ducklings. Their  chestnut heads are the colour of her  crest  and their flanks have similar  white patches.  She dives down into the water to feed, visible below its surface,  teaching her ducklings how to fish the river.  She heads upstream, where the river banks are lined with trees. High in one of them is the  nest-hole from which her downy ducklings parachuted  as she called them down to earth, to life on the  river.

Interlude with great crested grebe on a beautiful May morning. Calm and tranquil, no ruffled feathers until his mate emerged from the islet of  reeds and they danced on the water. A choreographed bonding sequence designed to show off the long, sinuous neck of          gleaming white,  black cap and erectile crest of dark feathers, white face in a shock of tawny-black ruff  and tippet.  Breast to breast, riding high on the water in courtship, they shook out their head-plumes.  'He has a beard,' exclaimed  Rosie.  Like a judge in full court regalia. 

 A cloudy day with an invigorating wind that almost drowned out the cuckoo calling  toward Sunbiggin Tarn. High in a leafy summer canopy  he was canny, knew we could not see him as he called loudly above us. 
We set out to the call of curlew and skylark sang as we walked the moors.  Wheatear amongst outcropping limestone, with flowers of mountain everlasting.

The stonechat parents are busy feeding their young on a glorious day in May. A cuckoo calls from across the Lyth Valley, but not on Scout Scar. Not today.  He is guile and subterfuge. 
Flowers come into bloom rapidly, yellow flowers. There's hoary rockrose, common rockrose, horse-shoe vetch and bird's-foot trefoil and a range of compositae with green beetles in the flower-head, as usual.  The patterns of their petals, of stigma and stamens is fascinating, especially when sunlight pours through the flowers.

 A bright morning, with alto-cumulus cloud.  The cuckoo was slow to give voice but then he called, showing in unmistakeable posture in a bare tree on Scout Scout.  And flew.  Calling moments later to the south, more distantly.  For two or three hours he called from different locations.  He would fall silent, relocate and call again.  As I returned across Kendal Race Course he was still audible.
A diffuse sunlight over hoary rockrose, but the flowers only open when the sun gains strength and I was too early for them.  Soft grey flowers of mountain everlasting, in grass near the cliff edge.  And hawkweed freshly opening.  May blossom is the dominant motif on Scout Scar at the moment, and early purple orchids.

The cuckoo. Bird or wandering voice, asked the poet Wordsworth?  Cuckoo, cuckoo, now here, now faint and further off,  now close in my ear.  Without the luxury of good binoculars I wonder if Wordsworth is telling us he rarely or never saw the cuckoo.  Or was he consoling friends who often heard but never saw  the bird.
Another overcast morning, with light rain, but still. So once I heard that wandering voice I was intent on a close-encounter. I heard him again, found him in a tree, saw him fly low and rapid in stealth flight.  I can do stealth too. I know not to let my profile be seen against the horizon, I keep low, using stone walls and hawthorn and juniper to conceal me, where I may.

 Cuckoo, at last! Heard none in the Yorkshire Dales this last fortnight, none  by Shap Abbey and Knipe Scar, none on Scout Scar- although my scouts reported hearing the bird. So this morning I lingered and lingered,  heard the cuckoo faintly in the distance, and at last quite close.  The call of the cuckoo defines the coming of spring. Without it,  nothing is the same. Without it, we're in trouble with species loss and habitat loss.  I was out at 6.00am this week,  when once the volume of bird song would have been loud.  The diminution is apparent.

Pastoral in limestone country. From  Langcliffe,  vistas unfold before us. Aspects of Pen Y Ghent, changing perspectives  along our way. 
Beside a hollowed-out ash set in mossy limestone pavement, an interlude  where skylark sing and lapwing call. Before us, the Celtic wall and Ingleborough beyond. 
Hoping for field pansies on Smearsett Scar we find them sooner.   

Weird weather. The hottest Easter on record, the coldest May Bank holiday.  A chill wind and poor light  with skylark  singing in display flight.  A day in the vicinity of Plover Hill and Pen Y Ghent.   In this  moorland solitude aerial display is enchanting. A curlew sings and displays  above us as we shelter beside a wall overlooking Wind Tunnel Cave where water trickles from beneath limestone at Cosh Head Beck. Perhaps in wild weather the wind sounds through the tunnel.