Brigsteer Wood and Scout Scar in late April

Early purple orchids  and cowslips appear in the grass.  Wych elm is thick with flowers, showing against a bright blue sky on a morning calm and still.  We note the tree, thinking to return in  July and look high in its crown for the white-letter hairstreak.  The wych elm overhangs a sheltered woodland fringe where we found  silver washed fritillary last summer. 
Swallows perch on a wire by Park End Farm, the sun discovering a sheen of blue on the throat and a warm flush on the breast.   Light shines directly onto the swallows, bringing out colours of their fresh breeding plumage in all its loveliness.
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The trees of Brigsteer Wood are leafing and tree-flowers are full of pollen.  Oak is green-gold and has catkins.  Somewhere in the canopy  a wood warbler sings.  Butterflies dance along woodland rides,  flickering wings of white, cream and yellow through sunbeam and shade  A saffron yellow  brimstone alights, closes his wings and becomes invisible.  Another settles in a bracken hot-spot and sunlight bleaches-out his colour.  There are orange-tip butterflies and, most frequent, the green-veined white.  Settled on a bluebell,  the  hind underwing shows a warm cream. A sequence of images of the same  green-veined white on a bluebell shows  how angle and incidence of light affect colour.  

Following the flight of a butterfly, I glimpse Herb Paris- drifts of flowers amongst bluebells.   Bright sunlight casts a shadow of each starry  flower onto its leaves, insect-like.  Paris Quadrifolia, most plants have four leaves but  we find five-leaved plants. Most are in full flower, some with  ovaries pollinated and later to form a black seed-bearing capsule.  

 A redstart sings somewhere below Scout Scar escarpment.  He is on cue, I find them here the last week in April, first in May as whitebeam leaf-buds unfurl. I sit where I can listen to his song whilst looking into the trees anchored in the cliff face, searching for him.  He sings loudly but his silver-grey mantle is toward me and tones with tree bark. His bold white brow, black face and red breast are turned from me and twigs mask him.   He flits up in display and chooses another perch close by, marking-out his territory. I know he'll return to his early perches if I sit quietly.  He faces this way and that, broadcasting  his song  to attract a mate.  Sometimes he chooses another perch out of view but he returns again and again, at last choosing a twig which gives me a clear view. You can see from his posture the energy that goes into his song. beak at full stretch. 
 I head north for a sheltered spot on the escarpment, a grassy bank on a fringe of woodland. Here I found green hairstreak on 21st April 202O, that glorious spring weather of the first Covid lockdown. The afternoon is warm, sunlit and still- ideal conditions.  I glimpse small brown butterflies flitting over the bank, then one alights in the grass and closes  its wings to show the green underwing of the green hairstreak. 
All I'd like now is to hear and see a cuckoo.  And, of course, to photograph one. 

5th May Scout Scar, Helsington Barrow to Brigsteer Wood
A cloudy day when the sun scarcely broke through.  Close to Scout Scar escarpment there were patches of mountain everlasting coming into flower. And early purple orchids bloom.
Down in Brigsteer Wood a couple of orange-tipped butterflies showed briefly but the skies were overcast and the wood was rather gloomy.  Approaching Park End Hide I heard a grasshopper warbler calling, from the mosses beyond the wood.