I have just spotted this year’s first Hummingbird Hawkmoth in my garden and, amazingly, on exactly the same day of the year as in 2014!
You can find some more information about this impressive day-flying moth on the http://butterfly-conservation.org/ website, as well as a map with the ‘Migrant Watch’ records of the yearly sightings. The photo is from this website as I have not managed to capture the moth on my own pocket camera.
Saskia T
PARWICH.ORG 
That’s amazing
Fascinating Saskia, thank you. You get rather more variety “down” there in Parwich. In the gentlest spirit of competition, I’d be keen to post (relatively farther upland) species of flora and fauna which appear more frequently up in Alsop, but I don’t think we can claim one – at least to my knowledge. How annoying 😉
I do see hares regularly on the hillsides enclosing Dam Lane, buzzards in quantities unheard of when I was a kid (outside Scotland and Wales), little, tawny and barn owls occasionally too. Same goes for sparrowhawks, which were victims of insecticides in the 1960’s. Pipistrelle bats seem common here too.
Hedgehogs were a familiar sight when I was a boy living in a different part of Derbyshire. Not a single one have I seen here. Do you see them in Parwich?
Swallows are back in abundance, which is an absolute delight. Last year and this however, we’ve seen a dramatic fall in the numbers of House Martins. Why, I wonder? Swifts seem OK, many more obvious in Parwich than Alsop, but that’s to be expected.