House martins

I already miss the swifts screaming a couple feet above our garden every day as they fly past the nest site next door. They have now left for the return flight for Africa where they will spend the winter.

Swifts

I have been noticing the odd small group of house martins over the months but they appear much more frequently now.

House Martin

Not as high flying as the swift, house martins resemble swallows without the tail fork. Like swallows they make a mud nest and I think the ones we see locally nest on the farm buildings to the North of us. Swifts, house martins and swallows are quite similar, but as you can see from the drawing below there are distiguishing features.

Picture from a book I have written called Animal Neighbours: Swallows

The house martin and swallow are most alike. The main difference is the swallows forked tail. The swift is quite different with its wide sickle-shaped wings.

Blackberries

It has been a good year for blackberries, my favourite fruit. We have a small bramble in our garden and bramble bushes that grow along the side of the track that passes our house and provides back entrances to houses further down the road.

Every few days I have been picking the fruit just as it becomes ripe. A few other local people also pick these blackberries, but even so their are always plenty that cannot be reached that the birds and otehr wildlife eat.

I have made several balckberry and apple crumbles so far. When there is a lot of fruit I pick a few extra and freeze them for later in the year. The blackberry season is often over very quickly and its nice to have hot blackberry and apple crumble in the winter with hot custard, yummy.

Unidentified caterpillar

I wash and freeze the blackberries indivdually on a tray (carefully removing first any invertebrates that I have missed, releasing them back onto the blackberry bushes)

This year we have had a mixture of very hot days with heavy rain in between. This appears to have kept the blackberries going much longer this year.

Wood pigeon, hummingbird hawk moth and slow worm

Have suspected for sometime that wood pigeon are nesting in the tree that overhangs our garden. The last couple of days I have heard the almost pathetic cries of two young wood pigeons being feed by an adult. I say young, they are almost as pig as the parent and slight differences in the beak and plumage distinguish them.

Common urban birds, because they are more settled in towns etc, often give us a peak at a larger part of their lives than the less common species.

A hummingbird hawk moth again visited the red valerian growing from our flint wall. It was quite windy and the moth did not stay around for long. A red admiral butterfly also passed through the garden, but did not settle.

For the last few weeks we have had a couple of bags of wood chips laying on our front lawn, waiting to be put on the garden boarders. I was concerned that they may be damaging the grass beneath so decided to move them. As I lifted up the first bag I noticed a smallish slow worm (legless lizard) curled up underneath.

I checked the second bag, but found nothing except squashed grass.

Emperor Dragonfly and egg laying speckled wood

Another hot sunny day. I noticed a large Emperor dragonfly darting to and fro in our neighbours garden, occasionally crossing into our garden. It was probably hunting for flying insects which this species catches in flight, often patrolling an area. The dragonfly was around in the same area for much of the afternoon. There are many flying insects around the large tree that overhangs our garden and the dragonflies patrol was centered around this area.

I noticed a second speckled wood butterfly laying eggs on the long grass next to our lawn. For first observation of this see 8th August 2009.

Small white butterflies egg laying

It was a hot sunny day yesterday. Several small white butterflies Pieris rapae in the garden feeding on the Buddleia bush and laying eggs on the nasturtium plants.


The butterfly is in the process of laying an egg. You can also see a few eggs that have already been laid on the leaf.

Hummingbird hawk moth

Early evening I noticed a hummingbird hawk moth feeding from the Red Valerian. Hummingbird hawk moth are a summer visitor to the UK which flies during the day - its wings make a humming sound up close. It darts from flower to flower and hovers uses its long tongue to probe for nectar.

Egg-laying speckled wood and blue butterflies

As we only have a very small garden we have not been able to create a meadow garden as we would have liked. We do let the clover and other small flowering plants remain in our lawn. We also allow some of the lawn edges, where they are bordered by shrubs, to grow uncut. I was really pleased today to see a speckled wood butterfly laying eggs on the long grass at one corner of the garden.


Egg on grass

The garden was also visited by two of the blue butterflies. A female common blue (below) the females have brown upper wings tinged with blue with a fringe of orange spots.


This Holly Blue (blue) was actually photographed just outside our garden on the track where it settled.