Small heath butterflies flirt among the delicate pink flowers of sea-spurrey. A solitary meadow brown flashes past, wind-driven and quickly lost against the muddy crust of dried-out estuarine pools.
There’s bright blue sky overhead, but the spinnaker-ballooning yachts out in the Solent lean over on a choppy white-tipped sea. Oystercatchers hunker down in the gulleys above which three forest ponies graze. Their movement disturbs a group of shelduck sheltering in a dip that bob fleetingly into sight.
The white flowers of sea campion hug the ground. In contrast, the florets of sea lavender stand tall, inviting inspection, to be enjoyed as individuals. Nearby on the Lymington river, their density creates a purple wash over great areas of mud-flat passed by the Isle of Wight ferries.
We’ve come to this remote part of the forest with a group from the New Forest Association as part of its 150th anniversary celebrations. Set up originally to protect the forest, and still working for this today, the association is also concerned about the loss of tranquillity as the pressures of the surrounding conurbations mount.
It’s deeply worrying that we have to come into a large private estate to experience a remoteness that used to be commonplace in a forest characterised by John Wise in 1863 as free “from all noise and turmoil”. A point made by the helicopter whose groaning swish suppressed even the sound of the wind.
Heading to a stretch of heath behind the shoreline, we walk along a line of stunted oaks and meet a volunteer doing a butterfly transect. He confirms that on a better day we might have seen both green and purple hairstreak butterflies around the treetops, but not in these buffeting conditions. We examine English stonecrop on the ground, ponder a badger sett beneath it, and watch red kite and buzzards soaring above.
Moving to the hides, we study little egrets and a heron preening themselves on a dead tree, and spend time observing an Egyptian goose and her young. We saw the birds we expected to find, but not the avocets we hoped to see.
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