Wildlife Wandering

I feel extremely lucky to live where we do. We are surrounded by lots of beautiful places to visit and even more fields, woods and public footpaths to wander at our leisure that we make regular use of.  One sunny afternoon my mum and I, decided to take Luca on a little walk to make the most of the beautiful weather and stretch our legs.  We took him to a local business park called Thorpe Park in Colton, bear with me on this one.  Once you driven through all the buildings to the far end there is nothing but open land and fields.  I love it here as there is no landscaping, no planted flowers just nature doing its thing.  After reading Centre Parcs resident photographer, Rich Heath's, top tip of "seeing what nature is on your doorstep" this place couldn't have been better as there is often lots wildlife to spot around here. As soon as we were out of the car and walking down the footpath Luca shouted out 'Horse'. When my mum and I looked up there was absolutely nothing to be seen but Luca was adamant he'd seen one.  We think it was probably one of the many deer that frequent that area. Every time I've been we always have the pleasure of watching the Red Kite flying around and hunting.  This picture does it absolutely no justice but he's there if you look closely. 

There are some well trodden footpaths working there way around which means its nice and easy for Luca to walk on too. As we slowly made our way through the fields and down to the level crossing, we stopped to admire and smell all the wildflowers and blow numerous dandelions clocks.  We also spotted lots of bugs but nothing I managed to capture on camera. Luca adores bug hunting and is often spotting things before me, hence why I never manage to catch a photo of them as he has usually scared them off.  There were lots of butterflies this day, a dragonfly or two and a huge bee.

Once we got to the bottom of the fields and to the level crossing for a bit of train spotting we sat with the sheep and had a quick drink before we decided we had walked our little feet off (or not in Luca's case as he was piggybacked most of the way), we headed back up the hill to a regular haunt of ours, Franco's Ristorante, for a well deserved ice cream, or beer in my case!