Up onto the Downs before Vigils and rewarded by a feast of birds and birdsong: larks and lapwings, a corn bunting, yellowhammers, buzzards and red kites, but no short-eared owls today, and the cookoo has long fled the woods. Lots of painted ladies (butterfly variety) on the edge of the rape field and several hares by the gallops, which resulted in much sniffing and quartering by the monastery hound. I was looking at some of the grasses and ferns and wishing I knew more botany when I spotted a red-tailed bumblebee, B. lapidarius, common enough in the south but the first I have seen hereabouts. One couldn't help asking, however, what the chances are of encountering the same species in such abundance twenty years hence. The decline of previously common birds and wildflowers in a single generation is a sobering thought. New species will arise, of course, but nostalgia is a very adult emotion best enjoyed in advance. A touch of self-indulgent melancholy on a late spring morning adds a certain piquancy to the day, does it not?