Last week I made an evening return to a landscape that is well-represented on this blog – the North Downs.
I had a lens with me that focuses very closely, though it wasn’t a proper macro lens.
When we topped the mighty Hill I noticed a couple of patches of sainfoin out on the slopes. It’s such a beautiful plant, a member of the pea family, at home on chalk downland. It was popular with bumblebees as you can see above.
The evening light was reaching into the woodland along the North Downs Way, catching the leaves of black bryony. This plant will always trigger in me memories of a child eating its poisonous berries in the woodland where I worked. He was fine, so not sure what happened there.
These huge Roman snails were out in good numbers along the footpaths.
We saw a few deer. This one was up on one of the slopes.
The light was beautiful.
The walk passes a beautiful church in the village of Mickleham.
In May 2024 my wife and I went on our interrail honeymoon to the Jungfrau region of the Swiss Alps. I am finally ready to post my photos from the trip, starting with some macro photos. I’ve popped in some short videos here to give a bit more texture and sound to bring things to life.
My cat whispering wife
It was an incredible trip, all done by rail there and back. The nostalgia is already with me.
In addition, I’m aiming to post about the spring alpine flowers and the amazing sycamore wood pasture. Hopefully one each week. I posted about the smattering of fungi back in May on Fungi Friday.
On the trip I took only one lens with me, one capable of pretty much any photography between 12-45mm (equivalent to 24-90mm in full frame cameras). That includes excellent close up capabilities. I also had a pocket compact camera and my phone.
The meadows were in full bloom, days from being cut for hay to feed the alpine cattle through the winter months.
Breathtaking alpine meadows
Oxeye daisies with the Wetterhorn (I think) in the background. This pic is taken with my Olympus TG-6 compact.
It was nice to see the variations in the grassland species in the different locations. At about 1200m up these meadows were packed with umbellifers. They make up the wash of white here. This meadow must have been impacted by the snowmelt as it nourishes the foothills in spring.
The typical mix around Grindelwald was one of red clover, scabious, oxeye daisy and hawkbits.
The Eiger looms over chalet homes and rich hay meadows. You can see the allure of Switzerland. High living standards and abundant nature.
It is a breathtaking place, as this beautiful phone pic suggests (as in the phone’s capabilities!). This meadow was one that lacked the diversity of others, with the dandelions being evidence of nutrient enrichment, which encourages more vigorous plants at the expense of others. The most diverse meadows will have lower levels of nutrients in the soil.
The Grindelwald meadows were at a height of around 1000m. They were peaking and very loud at times. Just listen to this:
It was a chorus of crickets, not something that we get in England much anymore. The management of these meadows follows a largely medieval practice of haymaking, though it is now mechanised:
This is probably a family cutting and collecting the hay. This photo was taken from a cable car heading up to Männlichen.
Now onto the invertebrates that lived in the meadows.
Bush crickets
The sound in the meadows was made by the European field cricket, a species that has received support via conservation projects close to me in West Sussex. According to the iNaturalist page it’s flightless, so when it becomes locally extinct it struggles to repopulate lost ground. In the UK it has suffered from the decline in heathland, its favoured habitat. The cricket above was travelling across a lane to reach another meadow. There were a number of them squashed by vehicles. It’s unavoidable.
Moths and butterflies
During a walk in the valley woods at the foot of the mountain this green-veined white butterfly (I think) was on the wing. The main butterfly we saw was the swallowtail, but they were too fast, restless and far away for my lens to reach.
In stark contrast, this latticed heath moth alighted on my actual lens before being coaxed onto my trousers:
This is a species we also have in southern England.
Wasps and sawflies
One insect you don’t see in the UK, as far as I know, is the European paper wasp.
They have a lovely orange hue to their antennae, feet and wings. I’ve seen them before in Czechia making nests in residential post boxes. Here you can see one gathering wood shavings for nest building.
Meadow cranesbill was another common flower in the – you guessed it – meadows. I noticed that one area we passed when returning to our accommodation had a number of cranesbills that held sawflies in their flowerheads. The iNaturalist sawfly oracles have decided this is Tenthredo koehleri.
Beetles
Beetles are not my strong point, unless they are from Liverpool. This is a species of click beetle from what I know, visiting an oxeye daisy flower.
Spiders
Now, I did mention those beardy daisies the hawkbits, earlier. I’m not up on my ID with these plants, but I did spot a crab spider which had joined in their colouring and caught a honeybee (I think) in one of the flowerheads. This was a statk example of how they can change their complexion to camouflage themselves in certain plants.
That’s all I really managed in the macro photos stakes. There’s much more to come from the Swiss Alps though.
Thanks for reading.
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