Keep your eyes peeled if you're walking along that lovely footpath just ​inside the hedge between Upper and Lower Chicksgrove (TIS 62/SM34) as these Brown hares and the splendid Great Green Bush Cricket, whose usual habitat is the Dorset coast, have been spotted nearby. 

​You're reminded also to report any dead hares you may see, as a virus is reported to be spreading in this direction.  If you find a freshly dead hare that hasn’t been a road kill, please take a photo with a phone if you are carrying one and email D.Bell@uea.ac.uk with the location. If you are able to double bin-bag it for them to collect to mortem that would be be even better.  But don't let this spoil your walk!!

​Our colleagues in swift-conservation.org have alerted us to a small piece in The Guardian  
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/12/country-diary-swifts-band-together-for-screaming-parties.  Nothing new, but always good to see swifts getting a profile - increasingly so.

One of our members has drawn our attention to a lovely article, 'Consider the Swift' by Katherine Rundell, in the London Review of Books.  You can access this at 
​https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n16/katherine-rundell/consider-the-swift if you sign up to read up to four articles a month in the LRB - sounds like a good offer.

​A member writes:  I had a wonderful walk from Berwick St John across to Norrington, then up the easterly of the two tracks from there onto the Shaftesbury Way.  The flowers at the top of the track were really beautiful - knapweed, toadflax, scabious, yarrow - attracting some butterflies but maybe disappointingly few.  There's an amazing clump of golden rod on the Shaftesbury Way - legitimately a wild flower (solidago) but this looks so luxuriant it's surely a garden escapee.