Day 30 - Grasshoppers, Glow Worms and a Moorland Fire

I was in Bakewell this afternoon so for 30 Days Wild, I had a stroll by the river. It was far too hot for me, I stayed in the shade where I could and then sheltered beneath a lime tree and looked for grasshoppers close by!

I've never seen so many pollen beetles in one place before. So many flowers were covered in them. After I took this photo, the next flower along had so many beetles it was just all black in the centre!

I noticed this on one of the hawthorns. I've never see this before, I suspected some kind of gall at the time but having looked at my photos since, I think it could also be some kind of rust fungus. I haven't tried to find out yet.

There were lots of tiny fish in the river. I'm not very good at tiny fish identification but this looks trouty to me!

There were some very tiny fish too. This picture is full of them but they are well camouflaged.

The grasshoppers all seem to be camouflaged here too. I didn't see any green ones - they're all the shades of dry, scorched grass!

There were larger trout further along the river, in the town centre.

At about the same time I got home, a little after 5pm, the moorland caught fire. I could see the smoke from the windows upstairs but couldn't see exactly where it was coming from. I knew it was close to Home and wanted to have a look, so I had a wander on Gun Hill (across the valley) to see what I could see.

I spotted some bilberries, rather small at the moment but soon they'll be ready to eat !

There's the fire. My childhood home was getting smoked, but isn't close to the actual fire. I think there was around 200 square metres of moorland burning at this point but it was windy and so won't stay at that.

The smoke smelled amazing, but I'd rather have not discovered that. When are we going to have some rain? There have been lots of smaller fires locally too and of course some larger fires in the country too (I could see smoke from one or two of those from the top of Gun Hill).

At home. the sunset came with a line of smoke. There was a point when I couldn't see any smoke and I hoped the fire had been stopped, but it hadn't.

Later in the evening, I drove through the smoke to go on a little nigh time excursion I've been planning.

I was hunting for glow worms and found some. I've not seen glow worms for years - not since the days I used to spend my weekends in Wolverhampton and could go down to Highgate Common, where there is (or was) a good population.

As well as the glow worms, I also saw some bats, a pair of tawny owls and I heard a barn owl screeching too.

I drove home very late, past midnight, passing the orange glow of the moorland still burning.



On the final day of 30 Days Wild last year I identified a plant and spent some time in the garden. The year before was also some time in the garden whilst in 2015 I had a sunset pudding picnic on the moors.