Slow progress

 

The weather continues to be haphazard and Aprilish, lovely sunny spells followed by showers and downpours and resulting floods, plus some chilly nights. Not a lot of joy from the moth trap therefore, but one highlight was the male Brindled Beauty above with its magnificent antennae.  It was also good to have some rich variety in the abundant Hebrew Character moths which are the most populous of the trap's visitors at the moment. They vary from quite dull, like the one on the left below, to a beautiful mixture of russets as in the moth on the right which I suspect was fairly recently hatched.

Here it is again below with a contrasting Clouded Drab (I hope; as per recent posts, I am very dodgy in my ID efforts with moths such as this one).

Better than all the above, however, was this fine little Ashy Mining Bee, so called on account of its colour and habit of digging holes in patches of open soil.

One of my many great-nieces has also been an observant insect hunter on a visit to her Granny and Grandpa up in Bradford. They spotted a bumble bee leaving this trail - as my sister said, like drops squeezed from a tube of mustard - on the children's swing. Connie's Dad did some Googling and found that 'bees save up their poo all Winter and then go on a cleansing flight and blob it out.'  Well I never.

My butterfly list for 2024 reached three with this Speckled Wood three days ago, coming after an Orange Tip last weekend - too brief a visit to photograph - and the Brimstone two weeks earlier. Penny and I also saw theses different kinds of butterfly on the walls of one of those pricey art galleries in London's Fitzrovia round Charlotte Street. As often previously mentioned, the colours and patterns of moth and butterfly wings have been hugely influential in textile design.

And so to birds and the fun I've been having with our garden's many robins who all want a share of my moths. I ought to oblige them perhaps, since feeding birds is widely considered the main role of moths in the great cosmic round, but it is too callous in human terms not to try to smuggle them away into the depths of bushes. 

Undeterred, another robin mocked us on the day we finished a massive and impressively argument-free DIY of our new fruit cage by treating it as an aviary. He was terrified, however, and I don't think he'll go back in.

Less happily, we saw an horrendous fight to the death between two male Blue Tits, presumably over a mate or nesting site.  Never be under any illusion about the tooth and claw side of the animal world.