July: from green to brown

Wowee, it has been such a hot and very dry summer here. There has been no proper rain for months now and we’ve just had a drought declared, despite having had a very wet winter. The countryside is currently looking completely parched and out in the woods the trees are showing signs of stress with a lot of leaf drop and branches dying back, it’s a desperately sad sight and I keep hoping for cloudy days with rain, but they just don’t arrive here in the south east corner of England. The woods are so very quiet too, completely devoid of the birdsong that chimed through the trees during springtime, perhaps it just takes too much energy to sing in this heat when you are a very small bird fighting to survive. The birds are still there though and July is a great time to find feathers out in the woods as many birds moult after breeding. I regularly find 2 or 3 owl feathers on each of our woodland walks because by day the meandering pathways through the trees may be human-trodden byways, but…