Peter Jones Wildlife blog

  I find my search for specific flowers never goes smoothly, and I average about 8 miles in search of any chosen species! This is in contrast to my grasshopper quest in the summer where the bat detector was picking up the target species with minutes of leaving the van, in most cases! So today I went to Lepe, and Calshot in search of Little-Robin, a smaller flowered, rarer version of Herb Robert. It's another species that has a very limited distribution in the UK, with New Forest / South coast holding the prime locations. Lepe came up blank, but I did see Wheatears, and Sea Spurge. Calshot wasn't looking too promising either until I found a good sized plant with a few flowers against one of the Calshot buildings. Sea Club Rush, and a few common plants also seen in the area. I didn't venture into the best bit of the spot today.. the campsite looked packed. Photos

  A couple more days out, with plenty to see as we head into Autumn. I ventured over to Stoborough Heath, stopping in the New Forest on the way. Was unsuccessful, again, looking for Field Gentian, but did manage to see Coral Necklace and Pennyroyal. Stoborough and Hartland was pretty good, following in the footsteps of the author of the Purbeck Flowers book. The trick with this book is to work out what you can see at each site, and create waypoints before your trip. This way, you can pretty much move from site to site picking off the flowers. Some were seen, others were over for the year, others are probably no longer present at some sites, but it worked mostly.  Finally caught up with Field Gentian at Wilverley, I think the problem was being a bit too enthusiastic. Sure people were seeing plants, but very early. It's often better to wait a couple of weeks for more flowers and bigger flowers to appear. They certainly arent that difficult once they have started to hit their peak num