Photographer Ray Roberts enjoys the sunshine, the spring blooms and the insect life he sees during an early morning walk in the woods...

The sun was shining as we were having breakfast one day last week so I decided on an early walk down beside the River Tiddy. Whilst making my way through a much grown-in and brambly piece of woodland beside the waterway I spotted what I thought were some light coloured tree trunks standing nearly upright some distance ahead of me. However, as I approached them, I could see that they were shafts of bright sunlight shining through the trees. They had me fooled for several minutes.

In the fields beside the river there were lots of cuckoo flowers – Cardamine pratensis – with their pink/lilac blooms. They are so named as they come into bloom during April and May at the same time the cuckoo bird can be heard calling. They have a variety of names, milkmaids and lady’s smock are a couple, but there are a couple of folklore stories that suggest that anyone who picked the flowers would be bitten by an adder and in Germany it was once believed that bringing the flowers indoors would cause the house to be struck by lightning.

Walking up the steep hill to Quethiock I could see lots of greater stitchwort – Stellaria holostea – still out in bloom. This plant relies on neighbouring vegetation to support its long stems but when it grows in a large group, they become almost self-supporting. Soon the flowers with die off and plump seed capsules will take their place which will burst open with an audible ‘pop’. The common name refers to the plants use as a cure for the ‘stitch’ in the sides of the abdomen, after being mixed with acorns and wine.

The lovely yellow blooms of herb bennet – Geum urbanum – or to give it its other common name, wood avens, can be seen now on the hedges and grassy banks. The roots of this plant were dug up and taken into the house during the fifteenth century to ward off the devil.

Looking closely into the hedgerow as I walked, I saw a couple of seven spot ladybirds. These are the most familiar of our ladybirds and the one that is generally seen as the most typical. Both were sitting on large leaves and were obviously waiting for aphids to fly along and pitch within reach so they could be made a meal of. When I got home and sat in an armchair my wife pointed out a ladybird, on the arm of the chair, that had obviously been carried home on my sleeve.

I walked past a lilac tree that had spread itself out along the hedge and I spotted three pairs of small green shield bugs mating. These bugs hibernate during the winter and early spring and usually appear during May. Their larvae can be seen during the summer and a new generation of adults appear during September. These are the first bugs I have seen this year.