Redstart and linnet, with milkwort

Male redstart in full song

 

​A day or two ago, we found a redstart nest with the female flying in furtively, delivering insects to her brood. Today, a male sings loudly from display perches below Scout Scar escarpment.   Perhaps he's hoping for a second brood.  The canopy is now in full leaf so he was hard to see, despite his loud song.  In this image his beak is wide, his bright gape visible. 

---

He sang from hawthorn up on the cliff- top, then returned repeatedly to this ash tree perch where I also found him last spring.   With his bold colouring you might think you can't miss him, but if he turns his back his blue-grey mantle blends with the tree bark.  I sat for a long leisurely while, listening to his song. Until I heard a pair of linnet singing in a hawthorn behind me, and rolled over in the grass to photograph them.

Getting up from the grass, I noticed the tiny flowers of milkwort, translucent in sunlight.  Along the escarpment edge I found more milkwort flowers in a range of colours: magenta, cobalt, pink and white.  

Mountain everlasting, Cat's-foot,  Antennaria dioica  is widespread in upland Britain,  on limestone grassland. Othewise it's rare. Flower-bracts are white in male flowerheads, pink in the female.  The cluster I show  has long flower-stems so it's rather more showy than usual.
Scout Scar escarpment is the view-point, the popular walk. It's about leisure. By contrast, below the cliff redstart and woodland birds are busy raising their young.  The cliff-top is yellow with rock rose, vetch and buttercups. And down below in the Lyth Valley a patchwork of fields shows farmers have been busily at work, cutting grass for haylage and silage. The yellow of buttercup pastures  shows from afar.  At Morecambe Bay the tide is out and there's a pattern of sand-bars across the bay.