During the hour or so we spent in the garden yesterday afternoon with the sun out we saw only one butterfly, a white, which moved through so quickly I couldn't identify it - until....
....I stumbled across this little gem feeding on a clover flower. It's a small copper with a wing span of about 25mm when fully extended.
The lack of butterflies is upsetting as we've spent the last two years planting this garden so it would attract insects. At the moment we have a variety of flowers available including pansy, aquilegia, kale, clover, lupin, raspberry, blackcurrant, buttercup, gorse, bugle, strawberry, a beautiful pink-flowered hawthorn.... I could go on and on.
Yet, so far, this has been a dismal year for butterflies. We are now into the official British 'summer' so, with this in mind, I took a walk this morning with Mrs MW to see if our local 'hardiest' butterfly, the speckled wood, was on the wing in Speckled Wood....
....which it wasn't, probably because the air temperature sat at a miserable 15C, the grass and leaves were damp, and the sun was obscured by blanket of low cloud which spasmodically delivered a thin drizzle.
Thankfully, the walk did produce a few moments of real pleasure as....
....just past Speckled Wood the path skirts a large field beyond which lie the railway line and the village - and in the middle of the field, despite the human noise, which included the heavy traffic on the A9, a....
....roe deer hind was enjoying breakfasting on the farmer's lush pasture.
The deer knew I was there. She knew, I suppose, that if I had a dog with me the dog couldn't get to where she was. And perhaps the deer has been photographed before because she didn't seem in the slightest worried by my antics in trying to digitally capture her.
Then, in just one place in a clearing in the dark Scots pine plantation, I stumbled across a mass of white flowers of the....
....delicate wood sorrel. Beautiful!
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