Just for a change I thought I’d take a field trip in the UK last weekend. And just for a change it wasn’t birds I was looking for, but orchids. Yes, occasionally a young man’s fancy turns to flowers and what better flowers to look for than orchids - those beautiful and exotic plants that almost only now exist on Nature Reserves or protected areas and whose decline is so symptomatic of the changes that intensive agriculture have wreaked upon our countryside? And what better time to look for them than in “flaming June” the warmest month of the year, the month that contains the longest day of the year, the month with more daylight hours than any other…unless of course you live in England where June is turning into a damp squib, a month shrouded in dark cloud, and a month when rain showers are now so cold that ice forms on your nose and ears as you run for shelter (okay, that last bit was an exaggeration, but - blooming heck - when are we going to have a summer here, eh?).

Anyway, to cut the complaining short I went to Pewsey Downs Nature Reserve near Marlborough,Wiltshire, a really beautiful site consisting of three hills overlooking Pewsey Vale and run by Natural England. Managed grazing and careful rotation ensures that the rough grassland here is packed with orchids - mainly Burnt-tip, Common Spotted, and Fragrant, but also smaller numbers of Frog and Lesser Butterfly (less careful editing has resulted in an official and well-funded website that gives the wrong directions, by the way - sloppy stuff Natural England!)

Perhaps I was too late in the season for Burnt-tip (or they’d been beaten to death by the pounding rain) as I couldn’t find a single spike, but there were literally hundreds of both Common Spotted and Fragrant Orchids, as well as a few hardy butterflies and a few more disgruntled hikers wiping rainwater off their glasses or shivering in t-shirts and shorts (hey, am I convincing all you North Americans reading this that England is THE place to spend your rapidly declining dollars - oh I shouldn’t be so harsh, when the sun does come out this is a gorgeous country)…Okay, here are a few images just to prove the point (a little)…

And here are a few orchids…

Common Spotted Orchids (left) and Fragrant Orchid (right)

Pretty unimpressive I admit. Fortunately for anyone who may be interested in seeing more of the UK’s orchids, I have recently moved six long-forgotten photo-galleries over from my old CharliesBirdBlog (can you believe I’ve been writing on 10,000 Birds for a year already? Amazing…) and though I say it myself there are some good orchid photos amongst them.

If you’d like a look they’re at

• Pyramidal Orchids (UK)
• Green-winged Orchids (UK)
• Fly Orchids and Fly/Bee hybrids (UK)
• Burnt-tip Orchids (UK)
• Monkey and Lady Orchids (UK)
• Bird’s Nest Orchids (UK)