Field of Blue '08

We arrived in the wood around 2pm, with the sun high in the sky, on a beautifully clear day. What better place could there be than an English woodland on a May afternoon?   The bank holiday is over, while others go back to work, we decide that we will visit the bluebells in Norsey woods.

 Take a look at the pictures on Google photos here: https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipPP52FPoiaUfflLiDRO9nKhBMuMAhfK6CuzRooJ. 

We decided to follow the trail. Although the bluebells are coming to the end of their flowering season, they still make an impressively blue carpet across many of the more open spaces. We wander along the trail, eagerly taking pictures, or stopping to watch a Jay hopping around in the dead leaves. Moving further into the wood, and down one of the relatively gentle declines, there's a buzzing behind my right ear - very close behind indeed. The bee, because I assume that it was a bee, soon loses interest in my ear and flies away. That's about the most dangerous thing we met all afternoon. The wood ants I suppose come a close second. As I stayed still and moved my camera in position to take a picture of their busyness, I was already aware of a few inquisitive ones starting to crawl on my boots. I've had wood ants bite me before, and it's PAINFUL, so is to be avoided. Take the picture and move away. In another location, I tried to capture theme moving up and down a tree, but the ant was gone before the digital delay had expired. Pictures of tree trunks are just so uninteresting. Watching those ants did lead me to one of my weird questions: How many steps does an ant take during its life? Further on and there are more bluebells, and more intense birdsong. The coppiced trees provide an open woodland, the bracken and bramble have barely started to grow yet, so there are good views across the woodland. There are posts along the way marking things you're supposed to look at, but we don't know what they are, and we are happy to wander around the trail. We come to a stream, and judging by the bridge that crosses it, it is often much wider. Today it's just a trickle, and the picture doesn't really show what happening. We move on. As we move round we come to the wood bank, where there is coppicing in progress, and there is a notice just left on the ground next to the path explaining what is going on. Here we sit down, and I try to take a video of the view all the way round. I'm hoping that I caught some of the birdsong as well. The video's should go on YouTube, but right now they get marked 'failed'. They are on Facebook OK, but you have to be logged in, and they can't be embedded.