Butterbur in the Dales

Ok, so I was another year older today and to comiserate celebrate I headed off to the Dales with the family for lunch at The Angel pub, Hetton. Before we hit the food, we had a short walk around Janet’s Foss near Malham and it was nice to see so many wild flowers blooming in the (very) warm spring sunshine: ramsons, dog violets and bluebells were all beginning to show, but well ahead in terms of flowering was the butterbur. Chiefly a plant of damp verges, the butterbur is an impressive plant with the flower spike showing before the leaves. I only had a snapshot camera with me but here’s an image of a common butterbur spike (Petasites hybridus) surrounded by the leaves of ramsons (or wild garlic).

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Redpolls in York

My friend Ian Newton invited me over to a small woodland near York where he was helping run a feeding station to attract redpolls as part of a study being conducted by a local birder. The niger seed feeders were attracting stacks of coal tits, blue tits and marsh tits, a species we don’t get in my neck of the woods, but they were indeed attracting the target species of redpoll. Today, not only were lesser redpolls arriving at the feeders, but the much bigger mealy redpoll was coming to feed too. Here are a few redpoll shots and I’m sure I’ll be posting the marsh tit shots soon :¬)

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