We take a walk around the Woolley Colliery site on our Wakefield Naturalists’ Society midsummer field excursion. I remember this being a grey spoil heap in the 1980s but it’s now fully restored. Hundreds of orchids are in flower on the grassy slope including plenty of bee orchids, a species which I don’t remember having seen before.
Amongst the grasses a spider has spun a large funnel-web. It was lying in wait in the centre but I didn’t manage to show it in my photograph.
We decided that most of the orchids here were common spotted, with a few paler, taller flower spikes that might be hybrids.
Willow warblers and chiff chaffs were singing at the scrubby edges of the meadow area while down at a rush-fringed lagoon a reed warbler was enthusiastically going through its varied guttural performance.
There were plenty of toad tadpoles, many of them sprouting their first pair of legs, congregating near a drainage pipe at the sunny edge of the lagoon.