Taking Stock

Intermittent bad weather and a recent covid infection have restricted my abilities a good deal.  Now I feel like this mediocre summer has slipped by me without managing to take much advantage of it.  The virtual loss of July meant only two truncated attempts to find the purple hairstreaks on the Derwent Walk, with only three or four distant sightings to show for it.  I never even attempted looking for white-letter hairstreak or grayling, finding the only suitable days were those when I had something else on.

The garden has provided the main source of consolation with continuing abundance of peacocks and red admirals on the plentiful buddleia.  I'm pleased though that I have resisted the temptation of repeatedly photographing them this year.  Nothing really substitutes for just observing them in action for a few minutes.  As the ability to take delight in what life has to offer subsides with age, I still find the appearance of lots of butterflies around the buddleia enthralling and probably always will.

It's interesting to note that the dominant visitor at the time of the Big Butterfly Count in July was, here as elsewhere, the red admiral, but by three weeks later the peacock was outnumbering them considerably.  Just recently, the red admiral has resurged and numbers of each are more or less equal.

I had wondered if I have seen more commas than small tortoiseshells this year.  Unfortunately when I decided to start checking about a week ago, numbers of both species dropped off and there isn't a large enough number being seen for comparison.  Painted lady has yet to appear.

It is known that it is a bumper year for the holly blue and I have now counted eight sightings without spending a great deal of time looking for them.  Only one actually landed for a short period of time, typically while I was busy with some sort of chore.

I've cut down considerably on the amount of bird food I put out because of rats but a pleasant surprise recently came from a visit from a female nuthatch, the first for many a long month.  Coal tits have also been more in evidence than earlier in the year.

Of bees there has been much less to report.  The highlight was the appearance of an early bumblebee queen, which presumably was feeding up before overwintering.  I have been keeping an eye out for flower bees but there has only been one genuine suspect that quickly moved on.

My attention was drawn one day by a specimen that seemed to have much more fur on its abdomen than a bumblebee but I think on investigation it is just a common carder bee, which has recently been the commonest garden visitor in the bee department.

Common Carder Bee

When I snapped it from on top, there was no sign of any abdominal fir at all.  Maybe it was just pollen dust.

Butterfly Review

The first weekend in August I was in Krakow to celebrate my son's fortieth birthday.  Obviously the time was mainly dedicated to celebrations of various kinds.  Apart from a chance sighting of a peregrine falcon in the town centre, we did however end up in the zoo.

I'm not a great fan of zoos but bever having visited one since childhood, I did actually rather enjoy myself checking out this and that and confirming my son's impression that the eagle owl had been mis-translated into English on the sign - as I could see it was correctly labelled as Uhu in German.

I won't go into boring detail but here are a couple of the better photographs:

Pigmy Hippopotamus

Leopard

On arriving back home last Tuesday, it was delightful to see several butterflies fluttering around the buddleia bushes.  

I think I have to reverse my pessimistic forecast about butterfly numbers this year as it's apparent that the later flying species have done very well.  Not to be seen before I left, peacocks have arrived from nowhere in large numbers and I see that the Big Butterfly Count has registered a big increase in the number of red admirals.

Here however, the comma has definitely been the butterfly of the year, appearing in twos and threes several times a day in good sunshine.

Peacocks and Comma

Also very gratifying is that I have now seen three holly blue passing over the garden.

The loser in all this may be the small tortoiseshell, which for the first time has been appearing less frequently than the comma.  

On a brief cycling rest stop at Ryton Meadows last Thursday, I spotted two small copper and a small heath.  It may be that the serious fire that devastated much of the woodland scrub last year has had a positive result in allowing the heathland grasses and flowers to reclaim some territory.  It will be interesting to see how this land gets managed in future.

More recently, I have faced a couple of identification challenges at home.

A green dragonfly has turned up on three occasions to sun itself in the garden.

Southern Hawker?

It's definitely a hawker and I think probably a Southern rather than a Common Hawker but the difference between the two is small and I'm no expert.  Interestingly the wings are almost completely transparent.

Likewise the moth I found snoozing on the garage wall looks to be a grey carpet but I couldn't find an exact image match and there are similar species.

Grey Carpet?

It's still one of the most enjoyable times of the year for me when butterflies appear in numbers, weather permitting.