Ground wetting rain overnight with droplets on the vegetation rainbow-filled and sparkling in the morning sunshine.
The ground was strewn with birch catkins like brown and yellow caterpillars knocked of by the rain. I must look out for the birch catkin bug, Kleidocerys resedae.
Bugle is at its best, with stiff, blue spikes of flower. The largest group is over by the edge of Medlar Wood. It seems particularly attractive to microfungi with some 57 species recorded from it but apparently only two insects attack it, the scorched blunt marble or bugle marble tortrix moth Endothenia ustulana and the aphid Myzus ajugae. The moth larvae live in the roots and later the midribs of the leaves and, in Sussex, it is a very rare Red Data Book species.
