#DailyExercise in the Sunshine

It's lovely and sunny at the moment and we've been enjoying our latest #DailyExercise walks in the local community park and the two nearby cemeteries. Here are the highlights of our most recent walks.

There are some lovely leafy paths in both of the cemeteries - perfect for social distancing as well as nature spotting

It was just along this little path that we were able to watch this chiffchaff as it searched for food on the leaves (the first part of this bird's scientific name Phylloscopus means leaf examiner, which is a very apt name!)

Lovely to finally see an orange tip butterfly in one of the cemeteries, we had expected to see one earlier, given that this cemetery has a good amount of garlic mustard which is this butterfly's food plant. Here the orange tip is in amongst the green alkanet, which is beautiful at the moment

There's a beautiful cherry tree in one of the cemeteries which is in full bloom at the moment

and a lovely crab apple tree in the other cemetery which is just starting to bloom

One of the cemeteries has all both nettles and the two species of dead nettles, here the nettles and white dead nettles are together, you can see how similar the leaves are (the nettles are in the background and don't have any obvious flowers)

and here we've got red dead nettle and white dead nettle together

Daisies are very common and easy to overlook but many of them have lovely red edges to their petals

There's a lot of this horsetail around in one of the cemeteries and also in the park

and I've found one (but so far only one) yellow poppy

Given how many soitary bees there are in the community park, we really shouldn't have been surprised to find a dark edged bee fly there today, given that it lays its eggs in the nest holes of the solitary bees.

I've rarely seen bee flies before this year and given comments online it seems it's a good year for them generally.

What are you seeing in your garden or on your permitted #DailyExercise route?

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 The UK Government is, at the moment, allowing us out for one form of #DailyExercise once a day in addition to visiting the shops (as infrequently as possible), travelling to work (for those with essential jobs that can't be done from home) and medical emergencies including helping those who are self isolating. In England, the police advice is that you can drive to a location before walking or jogging as long as you spend more time exercising than driving, the advice from Police Scotland however, seems to be that you should not drive to a location to exercise and should only exercise very locally.