Although I have been familiar with bluebells in woods since my childhood, it is still a sight I try to see every year. Bluebells are only wild in western Europe and I think restricted to UK, France and Spain (though the Spanish variety is different).

I find that the beauty of a woodland carpeted with bluebells is very hard to convey in photos. In the foreground you see individual flowers and in the background the flowers combine to form a "haze".

This Saturday we got up early to see them at about 07:00. They have flowered a few weeks earlier this year. I often think of them being at their best around May Day but they were probably at their peak a week ago.

In many bluebell woods there are also patches of wild garlic. They usually flower at the same time too. This Saturday was no exception and there were whole banks covered with white blooms.

We had visitors for Easter from the Netherlands. We decided to take them to the Dorset coast as the cliffs there would be very different to the sandy beaches and dunes back home. We went rather predictably to West Lulworth and not surprisingly it was packed with day tourists.

Although the door is famous, the views further to the west are also quite spectacular. Swyre Head (middle) is a very steep walk up from the amusingly named Scratchy Bottom; according to OS it is 98 m high. Further away Bat's Head has a tiny arch (Bat's Hole) and a small chalk pillar.

Although I have seen it many times I still like seeing Durdle Door. It is quite different in colour from the nearby clifss - grey limestone as opposed to white chalk.

Between the chalk and the limestone (which is also visible at West Lulworth at the entrance to the cove and at Stair Hole) there is a softer sandstone which has eroded more rapidly leaving the limestone to stand out.

We revisited Fosbury Down on the Hampshire/Wiltshire border at the weekend. It is an easy downland walk ending at an iron age hillfort. There were clear blue skies and a heathaze that limited visibility; unusual so early in the year. At the beginning of the walk there was a sparrowhawk circling; there are plenty of them these days while I never saw them in my childhood.

The fields looked white (from chalk and flint) with just a green hint of the crops growing through. The woodland had plenty of dog's mercury, wild arum, bluebells and wild garlic. The bluebells were just beginning to flower so too early to see a 'blue haze'. With no leaves on the trees the woods had a light quality and it was easier than usual to see the roe deer. Above the wood you could hear buzzards calling.

At the top of the down there was the song of skylarks. There are one or two very splendid beech trees on the edge of the hillfort that are a lot wider than they are tall with roots exposed by the ditches. We saw a soaring bird or prey rising out of the valley and visible above the ramparts. It was a single red kite. We have occasionally seen red kites in the area; including one occasion further north when we saw eight at a time! There were plenty of buzzards - most in pairs, but there was one group of four soaring.

A surprisingly good early April day.

In late winter 1994-95 I noticed a raptor in the same tree almost every morning beside the autobahn when driving to work. It was in a field close to the old Munich airport just one junction before the exit for my office. Again and again I puzzled over what it was as I shot past at speed.

I got fed up with this and ended up taking my camera and 500 mm lens with me to work some days and illegally parking on the hard shoulder. My first photo did not help much as the plumage did not match anything in my bird book. From some angles it looked very white - too much so in my view then to be a buzzard - but lacked the markings associated with other species.

However, photos did clear up some of the mystery along with a newly purchased copy of Birds of Prey of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East by Benny Gensbol. This is an excellent guide and there are systematic black and white drawings of many different raptors where the variation in plumage is very clearly set out. This book revealed to me how buzzards vary tremendously in colouring from dark brown to almost pure white. At the whiter end of the scale the markings on the upper wing like in the above photo are possible; the white patch on the shoulders with the rest being darker. The wing-tips are buzzard-like and there was a hint of bands in the tail feathers.

After getting a shot of the bird approaching its tree, it was clear that it was a buzzard. The shape was quite distinct from the silhouette and the narrow bands underneath the tail.

The whole experience opened my eyes to how much buzzards vary in colour. Since then I have seen even whiter buzzards in several different countries.