A Parting Gift

We've spent the summer working hard in the garden to provide food for the worryingly few butterflies which have come our way, including this tortoiseshell, and have been so pleased to have some still in the garden as we've moved into October. They've been encouraged by some gloriously sunny days when the temperature at midday almost reached 20C.

Joining the two painted ladies have been a few red admirals and peacocks - and then, on Thursday, a lone white which was far too skittish for me to get a picture.

However, it seems that, during an earlier visit, this white....

....managed to lay about a dozen eggs which have now hatched as caterpillars.

I wouldn't have minded if the eggs had been laid on one of the plants we've grown for the butterflies' use, but that wretched large white chose my precious broccoli plants, of which I have far too few to get us through the winter.

And, no, I'm not going to record what happened to those caterpillars.

Three Robins

While there are reports of a shortage of robins this autumn following the very dry summer, this is not true locally: we have plenty of them, all busting their guts to establish territories which will get them through the winter fit enough for the rigours of next spring's mating season.

Our first robin is the garden robin. He's under the greatest pressure of all as our garden offers a feast of different foods but attracts all sorts of rivals - see earlier post here.

Not far away, just in the pinewood plantation, there's our second robin, the woodland robin. A chunk of monotonous pine wood isn't a great territory but he has the advantage of being fairly close to some houses which I know feed the birds.

This is our third robin, the field robin. He lives in a lone willow tree along the farm track above our house, a place of limited resources - where he has recently been traumatised by a huge machine which....

....came along the road with a great arm extended upon which there was a grinding, cutting machine which mashed up half his tree and a considerable length of vegetation along the track. His was a poor territory to start with, so it wasn't surprising that we found him unwilling to leave the remains of his precious tree, preferring to bury himself in it while....

....emitting a plaintive 'weep.... weep.... weep'.

Poor soul - but at least he's very unlikely to have any serious contenders for his territory.

The Sound of a Distant Surf

I woke to the low, constant murmur of the surf, of waves breaking upon a none-too-distant shore; and as the light came, I could see the welter of white water off the golf course, a sure sign that a low tide was breaking along a sand bar running parallel to the shore. And on checking the tide table I found I was right: a 0.73m low tide was forecast for 08:31 this morning, the picture being taken at 07:11.

The ceaseless roar of the surf is a background to so many of my memories of Mombasa, be it at the....

....Hoey house at Nyali where we could sit on the veranda and look out across the lawn and through the high palms to a lagoon protected by a coral reef a mile out, a reef pounded by the long swells of the Indian Ocean or....

....be it at the big house at the end of Cliff Avenue which had a view out across the Kilindini channel to no less than three reefs, all white-teethed by the ocean's great breakers.

The memories of those four summer holidays in Mombasa between 1957 and 1961 are some of the most treasured of my life. One cannot go back to those moments but one can recall them, enjoy them, celebrate and be deeply thankful for them.

The Painted Lady

This beautiful butterfly was spotted on goat willow which is showing signs of the coming of autumn. It was the only butterfly on the wing, which is an achievement as the temperature at the time was 11C on a day when it struggled to reach 14C.

The butterfly is one of two painted ladies which have appeared in the back garden each time the sun has come out. One, this one, is rather bigger than the other, which is also rather moth-eaten.

Painter ladies are rather special as they are immigrants which, over several generations, have worked their way northwards from Africa and the Mediterranean. But, like ocean waves, they can only reach a little further north before they break against the hard shore of northern Scotland's short cool summers and long winters.

I have a special affection for these butterflies because they are, for me, fellow travellers,  emigrants from Africa that will never return.

Portraits

I have thousands of photos stored in 'the cloud', accumulated since 2008 when I purchased my first digital camera, yet few are of me. I'm very happy with this situation as I don't consider myself to be in any way photogenic, not can I imagine that there is anyone out there, not even my nearest and dearest, who would want a mass of pictures of me.

So such pictures of me as I have kept are very largely for my use in recalling particular moments in my life, in helping me to remember how I felt at the moment each was captured - and this picture, taken on the long desert coast of Namibia, is one such.

All night the onshore breeze has carried a dense, chilling mist in from the sea, a mist formed as the warm, damp South Atlantic airmass crossed the cold Benguela current - but the sun is almost hot enough to burn away the last of the mist leaving us to broil in its direct heat.

I remember that short walk on my own. I remember the immense heat, the burn of the sun on my skin, the rhythmic bump of the waves, the otherwise immense silence, for this beach backs on to the emptiness of hundreds of miles of desert. I would have been quite happy to spend the rest of the day in that lonely place, where air meets sand and sea, but we were on a tourist trip and had to return to the Land Rover so we could hurry on to see the flamingoes.

A Raptor and Eight Butterflies

Within moments of our leaving the house this morning for our usual gentle Sunday morning stroll, this bird passed over us. While it is evidently a raptor, its species is less clear. It might be a late-staying osprey or a hawk, but I think it's most likely be a harrier. From its silhouette, it could be a marsh harrier, but according to the RSPB's distribution map this species does not come this far north - so it's most likely to be a hen harrier.

It's very frustrating that the only pictures I could get were silhouettes from below as hen harriers aren't common here - in fact, I don't think we've seen one since leaving Suffolk..

I keep thinking that I'm seeing the last butterfly of the year in our garden, and then the weather, and the butterflies, prove me wrong. Yesterday we had some warm weather and bright sunny intervals, and the butterflies came out in even larger numbers than before - four peacocks, two red admirals, a painted lady and, for the first time in some weeks, a tortoiseshell.

Conditions towards the end of the afternoon must have been pretty marginal for any butterfly to be on the wing as I saw more and more finding the sunniest places to settle and extending their wings to catch the sun - except for....

....this red admiral which obviously thought that the dark undersides of its wings might absorb more heat. Wherever they chose to settle, I could then approach to within inches before they, very reluctantly, flew off, leaving me feeling bad for disturbing them.

Robbut, or Robbutina?

We were relaxing after a healthy breakfast this morning when we spotted something lurking behind the buddleia at the bottom of the garden. At first, we couldn't believe it, but we realised it was a rabbit about the same size as the missing Robbut, the same colouring, and - conclusive evidence - he was eating the growing tips off one of our precious heathers.

If....if it is Robbut, he's been away for a week - see previous post here. We always assumed it was because our eldest daughter, who came to stay with us, brought her two dogs, one a lurcher, which would have frightened any rabbit out of the garden.

Then we had a terrible thought. The length of time Robbut has been away is about the legal requirement of maternity leave in the rabbit world, so has Robbut.... or, as we might have to call her, Robbutina - been away on maternity leave? And, if so, the implications for our precious back garden are pretty grim