Garden News

The wildlife in our garden has been struggling, for several reasons. The insects are contending with an unusually cool and grey July which has meant that we've been reporting no butterflies in our daily report on the Big Butterfly Count - until yesterday, when two small tortoiseshells and....

....a very smart red admiral made appearances during a brief spell of sunshine, the latter on our black knight buddleia which is in exuberant flower. However, although today has seen wall-to-wall sunshine, we were only able to report a single tortoiseshell.

Happily, the low number of insects doesn't seem to have deterred the house martins and their nesting efforts under the north gable of the house. They didn't nest last year, and the previous year their efforts ended when the nest and its contents fell to the ground, but this year....

....they seem to have done well, with at least two young at present being coaxed out of the nest.

That we currently have a building site next door and constant disruption from heavy machinery, may explain why our bird numbers are seriously down. In particular, we haven't seen a single robin these last couple of weeks and regulars like the tits - this is a coal tit - are only appearing in small numbers. There is, of course, one exception: it would take more than a few diggers, dumper trucks and noisy men walking around in plastic hats to deter the house sparrows from visiting our feeders.