Tag Archives: butterflies

Birds, Blood and Butterflies

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Green Woodpecker feeding on ants

Julia walked out of the back door this afternoon with a jug of water to refill the bird bath. As she did, she disturbed a Green Woodpecker, which was foraging on the arid, tussocky wasteland we call a lawn.

When my parents lived here they saw one in the garden too, but they aren’t a species known for liking gardens and I had resigned myself to never being able to record one for the BTO Survey. We do have them nearby, in the belt of trees about 20 yards from the house, and we have seen them a couple of times (and heard them frequently), but, as I say, they don’t often visit gardens. Having said that, they are on the BTO list of commonly seen garden birds.

We could, if Julia hadn’t gone out with the water, have missed it completely. It is the 22nd species of bird we have seen in the garden since we moved in. I’m sure there are people with more impressive totals, but I’m quite impressed. It was a slow start and it needs some work to improve it a s a wildlife garden, so I am happy so far.

Kites fly over (we aren’t allowed to count them unless they land), there are sparrowhawks about in the area and there must be chaffinches and sparrows (someone has sparrows on their feeders about quarter of a mile away).  We’ve also had parakeets flying over. I’m hoping that with time we may eventually persuade them to land and allow us to record a few more types.

Green Woodpecker feeding on the floor

We had a cat yesterday, which is a new one for the Mammals list. This is not such an impressive list – Grey Squirrel, Brown Rat, Rabbit, Domestic Cat. It looks well fed so we are hoping it won’t do too much damage.

We also have ten species of butterfly recorded. I can definitely get a few more in with some extra planting.

We’ve also eaten our own beans, courgettes, tomatoes and rhubarb, which isn’t bad for a few pots. I had intended doing more, but I’ve had a very lazy year. We’ve also had some figs from a tree at Nene Valley Railway and one damson from our own tree. It seems not to have appreciated the move. Julia has also made Lavender bags from our Lavender, and is currently selling them to help with funding the cafe.

I had a blood test this morning and am still waiting for the result (it’s the one for the Warfarin, where they usually ring back in the afternoon. It’s getting a bit late, but I am trying not to worry.  The new surgery seems nice – it’s clean and the staff are friendly. The nurse was a bit stand-offish, but they often are. I imagine she will soon start telling me off for not looking after myself. Unfortunately, the impending phone call means I have to carry my phone about, and that, in turn, means that I will carelessly leave it somewhere random as I move around the house.  I will be back again on Friday – different blood test for different specialist. I am, so far, giving it an 8 out of 10.

Later, checking my emails, I am told the blood test result is not in.  Ah well . . .

Green Woodpecker shots are some I took on the farm.

Greenfinch

Catching Up

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Sorry everyone, I’ve been neglecting you. When you combine the nappish nature of old age, the fatigue of recovery and the lack of sleep due to the hot nights, I seem to spend my life waking up in a chair and wondering where the last hour went. I looked for a library picture of an old man napping. Frankly, they were depressing.

We have had a real storm of butterflies in the garden, with a growing list of species, including white ones and little brown ones (precision has never been one of my strong points) and the birds continue to delight. We have had a family of blue tits visiting regularly, and using the bird bath, and the goldfinch contingent is growing in numbers. Not only do we have a few more on the feeders, but there are more in the air and they frequently sing from a perch on the TV aerial.

I have kept up my writing for the Numismatic Society Facebook page and done several pieces for the Peterborough Military History Group. What I’m not doing is writing poetry, or anything I might get paid for. I really need to earn some money to pay for the research sites and WordPress. What I do notice, with much of my writing now being 500-2,000 words long, I am now blasting through 500 words, where 250 used to seem like plenty.

I have recently been wondering if anyone has done an analysis of the people who use the different types of Social Media. WP users are obviously top of the pile, Facebook users are more varied, and at the bottom of the pile comes Quora. Yes, I’ve been on it again despite all I said. Amongst the gems and genii (there are a few) are people like a professor from an American University who tells me that all War Poets were British Army Officers of the First World War.

This is wrong. We also have non-British War poets, some women wrote war poetry, they weren’t all in the forces, Rupert Brooke was in the Royal Navy, they weren’t all from WW1 and they weren’t all officers.

However, leaving all that to one side, isn’t life unfair? I sit here, crushed by the weight of my own ignorance whilst a man in the USA, confident in the quality of his intellect, makes big money teaching despite his dangerous stupidity.

This is a German WW1 poster exhorting school children to collect nettles. They could be processed for their fibre in the same way as flax. The yield was less, but they grew wild.

Here’s a poem from Moina Michael, a very untypical war poet, according to the definition above. She wasn’t an officer, she wasn’t British. she never served in the Army and she wasn’t a man.

And with that, it’s time to go.

(I had planned to use Alan Seeger as my atypical war poet and quote Rendezvous with Death, but I was close to getting political as I mused on a scenario where he returned from the war, entered  politics and filled the White House with the Seeger family. Particularly Pete and Peggy.

That thought, I admit, cheered me immensely.

 

Day 205

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I’m a day behind again, but at 3am this morning, when I woke up in my chair I decided to go to bed. Normally I would write the blog,  make sandwiches and generally wake myself up. This time I just went to bed. Four hours later I was wrenched from my bed by a strange dream about a lack of toilet facilities. Do you ever get that one. I frequently do. I then wake up and realise the way out of my dream is to visit the toilet. One day, I suppose, I will wake up after dreaming that I found a toilet. At that point it will be time to move into a home.

The day was OK, and featured quite a decent rainstorm around mid-day, which cleaned the roads and made things a lot cooler.

Comma

Oh, and the computer broke. It went off and when I restarted it kept flashing “Fan Error”. We rang the man who does our computer stuff and he advised us to take the cover off and clean the dust off the fans. We could only find one fan, but we dusted it off and the computer worked again.

On the way home I tried the new roadworks. They were supposed to start on 1st August for a month (oh joy!) but seem to have started already. I tried an alternative route last week, just to see how it went, and that has a set of roadworks on it too. It wasn’t a total success as an alternative route. The normal route with additional roadworks wasn’t too bad, but traffic was light and I imagine it could get hot and unpleasant as the year goes on.

Small Copper

I’m not sure much happened apart from that. It has a tendency to be like that – a chat about Julia’s day, a little TV, a snooze, cook tea (we had pork steaks with roasted veg) and a bit more TV. I had more things planned but my head switched off, which takes us back to the first line.

Common Blue at Screveton

I thought I’d use some butterfly photos- I like butterflies but there have not been many about recently. It was hard finding them. I searched “butterfly” and only two photos came up, and one of them was a coin. Fortunately I realised that I must have titled them with the species, so was able to call more up.

 

 

 

Road to Recovery

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As part of the process of hardening myself off to get back to work I set myself a 30 minute target on the computer this morning. I have already had breakfast, been to have my dressing changed and had a drive in the country.

After waiting for the computer to start, checking emails, reading a the headlines and checking comments, I now have 17 minutes left to either read blogs or write one. As I haven’t been writing many posts recently I thought it was time to write again.

Medical news is that I am much better, the leg is definitely healing, the swab showed only normal bacteria, my weight is decreasing and everything is returning to normal. Coming downstairs this morning after another good night’s sleep I really felt wonderful. By the time I got halfway down the stairs my legs were feeling a bit heavier, and things weren’t quite so rosy, but it was still good.

There were butterflies on the shrubbery at the surgery – a Speckled Wood and a Meadow brown, which was good as I have struggled to see anything other than whites this year. The front garden is still full of bees and hoverflies, though deficient in butterflies.

I’m currently concentrating on nature haiku and am having to write about what I see from the house windows, so it was good to get out for a drive after seeing the nurse.

Talking of which – I let several deadlines slip by in the last couple of weeks, but if you aren’t feeling 100% is it worth putting out substandard work? I decided not. I did have some bits I could have sent, but the filing system is a little chaotic and there was a risk of sending things out that I’ve already sent elsewhere.

As I have recovered I have been writing more, but haven’t typed a lot, which is also something I need to take in hand. In the next few days I’m hoping to send some submissions out, which will be a sign that I’m back to normal.

Sorry it’s a bit rambling, but as it’s not unusual, the only excuse is poor focus. This is one thing  can’t blame the illness for.

Picture is a Speckled Wood from about this time last year.

My timer just went, by the time I have added tags etc I will have done about 35 minutes on the computer. It’s a start.

 

 

Where Roses Fade – a Haibun

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This was first published in Drifting Sands Issue Six, December 2020. I was looking through the book where I print out my published pieces ( a trick my father in law taught me – when you need a boost, you can always flick through it). I discovered I’m actually several months behind with it and started poking around the internet. I quite liked this one when I first wrote it, and I still do. This isn’t always the case.

I probably linked to it from the blog when it was published, so apologies if you have seen it before.

Here is the link to the full issue.

 

Where Roses Fade

Thirty years ago, I rambled through the Leicestershire countryside and saw villages which had collections of crumbling farm buildings and odd nooks of unruly weeds. Stands of tall nettles often concealed rusty machines, and rosebay willowherb blazed in the sun. Now they are tidy, and iron butterflies decorate the fronts of houses built where real butterflies used to feed. They have become development opportunities, and gaps have been filled. Small neat houses and barn conversions proliferate, with block-paved drives and shiny cars. Drinks are taken, and conversations held, where pigs once grunted and chickens scratched. Snouts, though, are still rammed firmly into troughs.

tidy
but the roots of weeds go deep
unnoticed

 

Comma Butterfly

Butterflies and Nettle Soup

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I’ve just been having a look through some old photos. It’s amazing how many I have kept over the years, though they are a  random, unsorted and generally useless bunch of images.

The one I used as a “featured image” is one of my favourites. When you consider how early a crocus blooms, it’s unusual to photograph a butterfly on one.  Strangely, it was very active, despite the time of year, and flew off after I’d managed to get just two shots. That is typical butterfly behaviour.

MY relationship with butterflies started when I was very young – it was the summer before my sister was born, which would make me just over two years old. In those days they were as big as my hand. Like so many other things, they became less impressive as I grew older. About eight years later, I became interested in them again, learnt more about them and pursued them with a net. It was not my finest hour but times were different then. After that, I didn’t pay them more than a passing interest until we started the Quercus project on the farm. Butterflies are easier to observe and photograph when you have a group of people behind you.

Nettle soup, as you may guess from the title, is also one of my favourites. I haven’t made it for a few years but, having cleared the back fence, I now have  a thriving nettle bed. This promises a good harvest, and a good food source for butterflies. I will have to manage it properly, as we don’t want masses of nettles when we com to sell the house, but I’m looking forward to several years of butterflies and nettle soup. Red admiral, peacock, small tortoiseshell and comma caterpillars all eat nettles. I’ve never seen a comma in the garden, but I have seen the other three so we could be on for a good year.

Nettle Soup

Nettle Soup is also, sometimes misleadingly, the name given to the solution that develops if you steep nettles in water .It’s also known as nettle tea. You can also put nettles in a cup, pour boiling water on them and drink them like a tea.

There are many recipes on the internet for nettle soup (some more complicated than others) and nearly as many for the fertiliser.  have a poke round and see what you can find. Fertiliser is easy – let nettles rot in water. Compost the nettles and dilute the resulting liquid a the rate of about 10:1 to water on a s a plant food. Warning: it may be a bit smelly. I’ve never been bothered by it but some people do bang on about it in their recipes.

My personal favourite recipe for the green (edible) soup is very simple – just onions, nettles, stock and a blender, as I recall – no potatoes, no rice. And definitely no carrot, celery or cream. One recipe even tells you that you can often find bunches of nettles on Farmers’ Markets in spring.

Buy nettles? Words fail me…

 

Bloodbath!

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Last week I realised I was following over 1,800 people. I had culled a lot of the people I followed a couple of years ago when I realised that I didn’t actively follow most of them, and that many of them hadn’t posted for months. I started following a lot of them because we had shared interests, or because they followed me, and it soon got out of control.

After the cull I still fell into the trap of following people who followed me and it started building up again.

A couple of days ago I started thinking about WP and my numbers. I don’t need to follow 1,800 people when I actually struggle to keep up with reading more that a couple of dozen blogs, and even then my reading is somewhat erratic.

After three days of boring effort I am now following 285 people and that’s only because I haven’t finished yet. I’m hoping to get down to around 100. Some of them make it easy for me by having words like “marketing” in their titles, Others haven’t posted for months, or even a year. A few haven’t posted for two years. It’s very sad to see them pass, and I haven’t the heart to delete the ones I used to enjoy.

As an aside here, if someone dies, what do you do with their emails and email address. I keep them, because it’s not like you’ve lost them if you keep the emails alive, and it seems discourteous just to press a button and consign them to cyberspace. Is that morbid, ghoulish or unbalanced? Or just plain stupid? I’m not sure. What do you do?

In a similar vein who do you follow? And how many people follow you? I have 2,080 followers, but on a good day I have fifty to sixty people visiting the site. If a post gets 20 likes it’s a red letter day. I’m pretty sure that 2,000 of those followers aren’t pulling their weight. Let’s face it, most of them have probably left WP or grown bored of my ranting over the years, or never really liked me in the first place – they just wanted me to follow them. I shouldn’t be surprised about this, after all, it’s what I do to other people.

The Red Admiral in the featured image was basking in sun on some ivy as Julia walked to the laundrette today. I saw a Small Copper in our front garden yesterday but it flew off before I could get my camera out. Wife 1 Me 0.

Small Copper on castor oil plant

This is one from a couple of years ago, when I was younger and quicker. It appeared in the recent post Sunlit Uplands and I took it a year or two before that.

Taking a Breath

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A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare

W. H. Davies

We took time out on Wednesday to buy sandwiches from the supermarket and take a drive into the countryside. It wasn’t as comfortable as it could have been because I had a feeling that I should have planned better and made our own sandwiches. In my defence we didn’t know what time Julia’s meeting would end and everything was a bit chaotic.

Shopping at the supermarket still doesn’t feel comfortable, paying the cost of ready made sandwiches seems extravagant after months of economy, and aimlessly driving in the countryside also seems wrong.

On the other hand, sitting at home is beginning to wear a bit thin too.

Gatekeeper
Gatekeeper
Gatekeeper

We eventually found a verge to park on and ate sandwiches whilst watching the local wildlife – which was butterflies. The flies were too small to see from the car, the grasshoppers were hidden and though we heard the call of pheasants and saw a few wood pigeons there didn’t seem to be much bird life about either.

By the time I got out of the car, brushing crumbs from my newly decorated shirt, the Peacock and the White butterflies had all gone and the promising reddish brown ones all turned out top be Gatekeepers, which are common, and not much more interesting than the Peacocks and Whites.

I clearly need to brush up on my butterfly stalking technique,and my grasshopper hunting methods as I managed to see them only as they leapt to escape my feet. I didn’t get a single grasshopper shot, just  a few flies as a relief from Gatekeepers.

Even my attempts at photographing sloes were thwarted by a sparse selection and poor lighting. It’s bad when you can’t even get a shot of something that just hangs there without moving…

My efforts are a far cry from the fine efforts made by Beating the Bounds, a blog I haven’t read for a while. On seeing this post, I was glad I had chosen to return.

Insects on Thistles
Fly on a leaf
Two Cyclists

As you can tell from the captions, I have returned to my original style of uninformative caption. I must do better, but, to be honest, I’ve made it through the first 62 years without trying too hard, so why change now?

They say that hard work never killed anybody, but that’s what I thought about Covid 19 to start with. It seems silly to take a chance.

The final shot is the Grasshopper that emerged from the garden when we returned home on Friday– displaying itself on the tarmac. This is not the setting you most associate with an insect that has the word “grass” in its name.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Grasshopper on tarmac – probably a Common Field Grasshopper

Sunlit Uplands

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As my post count moves closer and closer to 2,000 I find my main feeling is not one of achievement, but one of wanting a rest. This is accompanied by a realisation that reaching 2,000 posts is just reaching a number, rather than finding enlightenment or suddenly breaching a barrier and breaking through into the sunlit uplands of quality blogging. Standards have in fact fallen so far that I am typing this without my glasses. It’s not as lax as blogging in my pyjamas, but I’d be doomed if I didn’t have a spell-checker.

Even with glasses my typing wouldn’t win any prizes, as I often see when reading the gobbledygook that passes as previous posts. I’m often amazed that despite my best efforts at composition and proof-reading there are still pockets of gibberish lurking to embarrass me on re-reading. I hate that.

I got two pointless answers on the final question of Pointless last night. For those of you who don’t watch the programme, this is pretty good, but does, in truth, not compare with a Nobel Prize or an Oscar.

Small Copper on castor oil plant

My answers were Duke of Burgundy and Adonis Blue. I would have scored the triple with Cryptic Wood White but I couldn’t remember the word “Cryptic” so settled for Black-Veined White, which wasn’t pointless. When I checked it for the link it would appear to be extinct in the UK, so that explains it. To be honest, I’m feeling more deflated at missing the triple than I am elated at nailing two of them, even though was two more than the real finalists. It’s a sign of ageing that I am finding it harder to access my full vocabulary. If I hate finding gibberish in past posts, I really hate not being able to find the right words.

My photos are of commoner butterflies, which are the best I can do.

Of course, another sign of ageing is attaching importance to answering questions on TV quiz shows. That’s one of the milder signs of encroaching old age.

Hummingbird Hawk Moth

The butterfly photos are from  A Painted Lady Comes to Call, which indicates that in August 2017 we had crumble for tea. We had crumble for tea tonight – apple and rhubarb with ice cream. Some things don’t change much. Or, to look at it another way, some things are so good they can’t be improved.

Talking of age, I just deleted the entire post. This is the second time I’ve done this recently. Fortunately I managed to get it back without too much trouble, but it’s a worry that I keep doing it. I really must get a grip.

 

Good Intentions

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Prologue

I wrote this post about twenty hours ago, apart from this paragraph. The penultimate sentence was true. I did serve tea. The final sentence did not come true. It should have read “Then I am going to watch comedy programmes and fall asleep in front of the fire, finally waking after midnight and going to bed without posting.” Now that you know that I can pass you over to last night’s second post, secure in the knowledge that it should now make sense.

The header picture is one of my favourite photos, despite its imperfections – you don’t often see a butterfly soon enough to picture it on a crocus. I took it four or five years ago but still like to see it. The other two were things I was working on today.

I walked through to the kitchen half an hour ago with the intention of cooking tea, writing a quick blog post and starting to firm up my presentation. It’s only three weeks away and it’s looking rather under-prepared. I say “under-prepared” but I might actually mean “not started”.

In the old days I used to give talks on the Sealed Knot and the English Civil War. I’d stick a uniform on, grab a box of equipment and set off, often with an assistant, stand in front of an audience and start. No preparation, no heart-searching and, most importantly, no Power Point. I’ve never even used an overhead projector for presentations.

I am absolutely dreading the forthcoming presentation – everybody uses Power Point these days and the audience will be expecting it. Even if I prepare the slides properly I still have the problem of standing, talking and pressing a button at the same time. That’s three things! I’m not sure I’m up to it.

I don’t have an assistant for this talk, so I can’t even tell the audience, “And now I’ll pass you over to Julia.” She used to hate that.

Meanwhile, back at the blog…

I sat down, started looking at comments and found myself whisked away to a world of poetry, parties, hummingbirds, health, ponies, gardens and various amusing characters. I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting my WP reading dreadfully. Sorry about that.

The result of that I left the potato wedges in too long before adding the veggie burgers and not only did I write no blog, but I am now going to have overly crispy potato wedges.

It will be a busy day tomorrow, in place of our usual day off. Julia has a hair appointment in the morning and a meeting in the late afternoon/early evening. We have several collections booked in tomorrow – everyone seems to be selling at the moment – and I’ve been asked to go in as we are going to need to be at full strength.

Banknotes of Sudan

Banknotes of Sudan

After a slow start to the year its good to see that things are finally moving, and I’m glad that the request for the extra day came. when it did – I was going to be lonely tomorrow without Julia. I now have a full day planned, extra pay and somewhere warm to sit without increasing my domestic fuel bill.

I’ve even, eventually, managed to complete the post.

Now I’m going to serve tea.

Then I will add tags and photos.

Medallion - Her Majesty at 90

Medallion – Her Majesty at 90. Complete with gold-plating, spot colour and a Swarovski Crystal, because nothing says “quality tribute” like a garish, blinged up medallion with a crystal in it.