Butterfly Decline

We've worked very hard in our new garden to bring on the insects', and particularly the butterflies' favourite foods in time for summer, with some success: verbena, toadflax, lupins, buddleia, and many more are flourishing yet, in weeks of waiting, not a single butterfly has appeared and....

....only a few bees and hover flies. Recent weather can't be blamed, it's been perfect, warm, with sunny intervals and light breezes, although July as a whole has been unusually cold.

It's been a terribly depressing wait, the more worrying as our favourite paper, The I, had a letter in it recently from a correspondent who reported the same dearth of insects in his garden. The only local butterfly which is doing well is the speckled wood, of which Mrs MW reports good numbers in Speckled Wood.

Happily, our patience was finally rewarded this morning when we had an unexpected visitor, a small copper, followed shortly after by....

....a tortoiseshell.

I have been saying this for a long time: there is something terribly wrong in our precious insect world, and their loss, if we would only acknowledge this decline, would be a disaster.

Big Butterfly Count

I'm doing my best with my still very sick right leg to get back to some walking, so today, with the Big Butterfly Count in mind, I managed to follow the track up towards the forestry for about half a mile, the spur being a hope that, somewhere, I might catch a glimpse of that rarest of insects, a butterfly.

In the event, having walked all the way up to the gate and back again, it was only as I approached the house that I spotted one, a meadow brown which, seeing me, landed as close at it dared, stretched out its wings, and said, "Photograph me!"

Watching the Birds

By the time we finished our last African safari, now over ten years ago, I had come to believe that driving around in a vehicle was the worst way to see game, and that either walking out to find it or simply sitting in a hide waiting for it to come to me, were far preferable. Of course, had I been the 'twitcher' sort of big game hunter, where seeing the 'big five' was the ultimate goal, then sitting and waiting for them to oblige would have been a non-starter.

For over two weeks now I have been obliged to do the sitting and waiting, made more difficult by the fact that I have to lie on my back with my sick foot above the level of my heart. Fortunately, our sitting room window looks directly out onto the wooden ramp that leads down to the back garden, and from this we have hung several bird feeders which draw the local birds - particularly as we had also just taken delivery of some very fine sunflower seeds.

So while the beautiful goldfinches and siskins quarrel around the feeders, other small birds like the yellowhammers hop around underneath, enjoying the steady rain of seeds from above. And I, from the vantage point above them, sit and watch their antics with great pleasure.

The Joy of Wild Orchids

For the first time since I spent six days in the large hospital in Inverness, this morning I managed to walk out beyond the confines of our house and up the track that leads to the forestry. I managed a couple of hundred metres, which seemed a huge achievement at the time, but it was sufficient to take me as far as the nearest group of....

....wild orchids. They are a little past their prime and paler than the usual local northern marsh orchids but I was thrilled to see them.

It was a small step in what is evidently going to be a long road to full recovery but it gave me great pleasure.