Here's Horrid's June story of all that's beautiful in nature in Henbury.
But he's horrified by the behavior of some inconsiderate dog walkers.
Occasional Notes from a Dog Walker
June 2025
As so often June started with unsettled weather. There were hot and sunny spells, days of torrential rain, and gusty breezy days (no need for the tumble dryer!).
A small group of toadstools, an inch or less across appeared beside the footpath towards the cottages. I managed to recognise them as members of the inkcap family because I had seen them last year but couldn't get a closer identification because within seventy-two hours they had gone (as toadstools do).
One of the great advantages of dog-walking is that there are frequent snuffling (and other) stops, so that there is time to look about rather than rush on.
One early June morning I woke about four o'clock to hear a thrush singing nearby (you can tell it's a thrush because once it finds a nice phrase it repeats it with variations – a blackbird just goes on improvising). After a few minutes I realised there was an answering call or perhaps a rival call from further away. I listened for a while and dozed off again.
A morning or two later Dot the Dog and I thought there must be cattle in the fields because the grass under the big oak tree by the kissing gate over towards Whirley Road was flattened. That is a favourite sleeping place when the beasts are about. The same applied to the land by the back gate of Mossway. We didn't see them, perhaps because of the folds in the land. Next day we went on a cattle hunt and found them – fifteen or twenty head of black steers, probably Aberdeen Angus, gorging on the long grass and evidently well content.
In the hedgerows the blackberries and elder came into full bloom. Where the grasses hadn't been cut (or grazed) they came into full flower at knee height or higher; a riot of pink, purple, yellow and greyish-green. I don't think I had realised how colourful mature grass can be. The cattle were obviously happy.
Pennywort came into flower on the high banks on Anderton's Lane, and a red-hot poker appeared at the junction of the lane and the track towards the cottages. I assumed it was a garden escape but one of my wildflower books (probably the most authoritative) lists it as "a clump forming perennial".
House martins were seen over the fields in the evenings but swallows and swifts there were none. The house opposite ours on Hightree Drive once had a whole line of martins' nests under the eaves for many years, but a new extension with new occupiers put paid to them.
We met a strange insect feeding with the bumblebees in the garden while we were having coffee on the garden bench (before the really hot days arrived). It looked rather like a bee, but hovered with a very rapid wingbeat rather than landing. Its proboscis was permanently extended (like mine!) instead of being retracted between flower visits. We had never seen one before but the inevitable internet search for "hover fly with long proboscis" revealed it to be a bee-fly (Bombylius major). It is apparently very common even though S and I had not seen it before. If anyone else has a 1986 copy of Collins Little Gem Insects (now long out of print) it can be found in the index as Bombylius major but doesn't appear as "Bee-fly" for some reason.
As the month wore (hotly) on more butterflies appeared and lady-birds too. We met a black one of the latter with yellow spots in the beech hedge, and another on the track to the cottages – but mostly the traditional red and black type of book fame. The butterflies were a mixture – brimstones, orange tips, small tortoiseshells and speckled woods.
Some new cattle joined the black Aberdeen Angus types. All seemed to be heifers and were really rather beautiful, predominantly white but spotted grey.
Over the fields the boggy area behind Williams Way became covered with cotton grass, bright white in the sunshine and the bulrushes began to grow tall.
A new wildflower (for which read "weed") appeared in the back garden. Once again my trusty collection of Collins Little Gem books came up with an identification – hoary willowherb. I thought it looked a bit like the rosebay type but its habit was shorter and the flowers smaller and white with a pink border. With some regret I rogued it out.
We met a very dark, small butterfly. Dot the Dog wanted to chase it so I didn't get much time to identify it but I thought I saw a brief flash of green underwing, so perhaps a green hairstreak.
And now a rant! On Dot the Dog's walk one very late June afternoon we saw three bags of dog excrement – one dangling on a (dilapidated) barbed wire fence by the cottages, another hanging from a hawthorn in the hedge at waist height and the third under the hedge itself. The following morning another appeared dumped in the middle of the footpath that children use to walk to school. I suppose some people think that there is a miraculous regular collection of these things even though there are bins marked for the purpose at each end of the Henbury-Whirley footpath. I doubt the culprits are local residents.
As ever (and grumpily)
Horrid of Henbury