Morning glory bee visits

The morning glory plants that I grew from seed are now in full flower.

The large flowers are attracting a large number of bees, such as white tailed bumble bee and honey bees as well as hoverflies.

A small number of common carder bees have also been visiting the flowers.

More fox observations

One of the foxes was up on next doors shed roof early this morning in amongst the windfall apples. Last night, as I walked down the road to the shop, I saw 2 of the foxes. The first was quite close, investigating
around a car across the road from our house. When it saw me coming it turned and disappeared up a track between the houses.

The second fox was further up the road and sitting upright like a dog. It too eventually disappeared up another track between the houses, which eventually joins with the previously mentioned track. Normally the foxes stick to the gardens and the back alleyways until after dark. We have still been noticing the regular travels of the dog fox through our garden at 9.00pm

Two nights ago, we were spoken up by foxes at 2.00am. The vixen and the cub were running around our car and making noises at something under the car. At first we thought they may have cornered a cat, even though my observations of these foxes throughout the year suggested they were wary of the cats and avoided them if possible. Infact on several occasions the cats seemed to gang up on the foxes several cats surrounding a fox and staring. But it turned out be be the dog fox. They then ran around chasing each other playfully.

I was really pleased to see that the cub is now looking like a small fox, where as before it looked stunted and more like a puppy. It was also interesting to see them together still as cubs are normally ejected from the den in September to fend for themselves (which is why there is often a high number of young foxes killed on the road in September and October.

We could hear the foxes even thought we could not always see them. However we did observe the dog fox drinking from the pond in our back garden.

Brown carder bee

There are still a lot of bees active in and around our garden. These are mainly honey bees and two banded bumble bees.However some bees fly through and don't settle making a positive ID difficult

There are still a few brown carder bees, relatively rare in Sussex, visiting.

I have seen them in our garden however these 2 pictures were taken just outside in the track. While they visited the occasional mallow flower, they favoured the last of the blackberry flowers.

Red Admiral

There are still a few butterflies visiting the garden. Gate keepers and this striking red admiral butterfly.

It was once thought that all red admirals died out ion the winter months, replaced by butterflies the following the year flying across the channel. Due to the milder winters, a few red admiral butterflies do overwinter as adults as they are seen in January and February - too early to be migrants from the continent.

Dragonflies

I noticed this dragonfly resting on our garden path yesterday.

I think its a common darter, possibly a female.

Today, I noticed this stunning dragonfly. My first glimpse was a dragonfly passing the window. When I went out to investigate, I accidentally disturbed it from our sunflowers where it had been resting. It flew out of our garden and I carefully followed.

It had landed on a rock rose bush overhanging our garden wall. I think its a male southern hawker. This looked like the dragonfly I had seen patrolling our road on 24th August.

I was able to slowly move really close and got this close up picture with the road and car opposite in the same picture, taken on wide angle.

More pipisterlle bat observations

I have continued to watch the pipistrelle bats. They circle right over our garden wall and it I stand still they fly past sometimes only a foot away.

The best chance of photographing the bats is when they circles the tree across the track, as it provides a chance to predict where they are likely to fly next. They are very fast and the pictures have to be taken wide angle. At times the bats are only a foot off the ground as they hunts. There are always moths around the Red Valerian, particularly silver y-wing moths. The pictures are not excellent but you can see many of the features such as the finger bones that support the wings.

The bats now appear at about 8.45pm as it gets darker earlier. They forage for about 30 minutes, flying back and forth, often turning above my head as our garden is at the end of the track.

Its such a treat seeing these fascinating little mammals up close.

Christian Moullec at the Shoreham airshow

This is Christian Moullec at the Shoreham airshow with his imprinted barnacle geese.

This is what baby geese usually do with their mother. Christian hopes to use what he learns to help rare geese (such as the white fronted geese) to migrate to new area starting new colonies in other areas.

They did look spectacular