The tactic of restricting the supply of bird food does seem to be paying off slowly and the feeders have frequently been visited by blue tits, great tits and coal tits, often with six or eight birds present at a time. Some are even prepared to chance their luck when I am sitting on the decking about five foot away.
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| Peacock |
A completely chance sighting was, with reasonable certainty a holly blue butterfly that passed over the garden without visiting. The buddleia I rescued when it was blown over in early spring has survived and produced its first butterfly two days ago, a good looking peacock and there have been numerous small whites, the odd large white and two green-veined white. Speckled wood and painted lady have appeared on occasions and a single, battered meadow brown landed on the fir hedge at one point.
The peacock was the first I have seen here since the spring but there were some when I visited Dumfries at the end of July, along with several painted ladies, small tortoiseshells and a few red admirals. I also saw the same orange-bordered moth in the town centre I struggled to identify a couple of weeks back.
Apart from seeing a nice bullfinch cycling back from Gosforth, the last couple of weekends have been devoted to social activities, but a spontaeneous visit to Cherryburn House produced a good number of painted ladies (definitely a painted lady year!), small tortoiseshells, peacocks, meadow browns, a couple of commas and red admirals and a single small skipper, not very clearly marked. I wished I'd taken a count and made a second submission to the Big Butterfly Count - especially as the forecast for the coming week looks distinctly bleak.
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