As I mentioned in Tuesday’s blog (Skylarks and Stonechats), the area around the Ferrybridge Wild Chesil Centre is rich in birdlife at this time of year, the lush wildflowers and thick scrub obviously providing a rich diet of lurking insects for breeding birds to nourish their young. As well as the Skylarks and Stonechats, a healthy population of Meadow pipits also breeds hereabouts, and I caught this adult with a beak full of foraged food, just waiting for me to pass by before heading in to the undergrowth to its nest.

Later that day, as I sat on a boulder eating my lunchtime snack at Portland Bill, I was entertained by another member of the pipit family busily gathering titbits to feed its family. This Rock pipit looked gorgeous as it sat on a rock, surrounded by the delicate pinks of the lush flowering Thrift, waiting for a family of humans, who were clambering around the remains of a former quarry, to move away before flying down to its well-concealed nest to satisfy, if only momentarily, the hungry tummies of its chicks.