Two Hunters

Walking through Speckled Wood on Monday morning the excited twittering of small birds drew my attention to....

....a silver birch in which what I took to be a young tawny owl was perched. I was so close it must have been aware of me but for some minutes it ignored me, after which it gave me....

....a withering look before flying off low through the trees.

We found the warning chatter of small birds very useful during our years in Rhodesia because the noise often drew our attention to the presence of a snake, usually a boomslang as these snakes spent most of their lives in trees and bushes.

It's not often that one looks up from reading the newspaper to see a raptor just below the sitting room window tearing the feathers from a dead blackbird, but that's what happened yesterday afternoon. The raptor was a female sparrowhawk, perhaps the mate of the male who died so tragically a fortnight ago - see story here.

One or two birds, notably a male blackbird, made attempts to chase her away but she simply ignored them.

When she'd finished she flew off with the plucked corpse, hopefully to feed some young.

While the male sparrowhawk was a fairly frequent visitor to our garden this was the first time we'd seen the female.

Storm

Last Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday morning, ir rained heavily enough to cause the local burns to flood, if only for a few hours before the thirsty soil sponged up the precious water. The rain was very welcome but the accompanying vicious lightning and thunder was not, the strikes putting out the lights and knocking out much of the village’s broadband for several hours. Our broadband seems to have been one of several in the community affected for we lost our router, and the 4G network here is so poor that we were unable to use it unless we sat in one of the better spots - which in our case was the balcony. Hence, with apologies, the sudden lack of posts on this blog.

The rain, about 24mm of it, has done wonders for the garden, and our resident rabbits - yes, we now have rabbits rather than a solitary rabbit - have been making the most of it. We now have a larger rabbit, presumably the mother, and….

….two smaller ones, presumably her teenage children.  The family seems to have made a home in the marsh grass surrounding our small pond.

Life isn’t easy for our rabbits. They are constantly being stalked by two cats which belong to the house below us, though I’m not sure that either cat is big enough to kill a rabbit, even a juvenile.

Since the storm we’ve been under the influence of a west to south-westerly airstream bringing occasional but not heavy showers. In the sunny intervals a few butterflies have been out. There are plenty of speckled woods in Speckled Wood and we have more painted ladies than any other species: on this morning’s walk I counted four in a distance of less than a mile.

Otherwise, we have the occasional individual of a species - for example a fritillary and a small copper - but the total number of butterflies coming into our garden, full as it is of the sort of flowering plants which butterflies love, totals less than six in the last three days.

I keep saying how worried I am. This lack of butterflies is unnatural.