| 2024 | 2025 |
| << April 2025 | May 2025 | June 2025 >> |
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1st: Greenfinches Greenfinches have been making more of an appearance at the bird feeders recently, which has been lovely. This is a fab clip of a single male alongside a male GSW having the place to themselves for a quite feed at teatime!! |
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2nd: Our fox A nice clip of the fox from the early hours of this morning - when we capture one on the trail cams (which is most nights), they are usually aware of the noise as the video clicks on and will turn to look as this one does. We are not sure if this is the same fox every night, we suspect it is - we have only ever seen two at once on one occasion. In other news today we saw our first Large White butterfly and yesterday our first Red Admiral. We also spied mating swallows on the telephone wire and dared to hope a pair may nest in our barn again!! And in plant news, we have a Yellow Archangel flowering on the drive raised bank - we haven't seem this one before!! |
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3rd: What a cheery sight The buttercups are on fire this year - what a fabulous sight they make    |
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4th: Naturalised saplings Each day we are spotting more and more naturalised trees/ bushes coming up on the land. To date the list is as follows: Oak, Ash, Blackthorn, Beech and Willow. We are not sure how much longer we will be around but imagining our land in 10, 20, 30 years is an exciting prospect!! And we hope we find more! Beech and Grey Willow   Blackthorn and Oak   |
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5th: Nettle tap moth Last year we saw oodles of Nettle Tap months throughout the summer and autumn and now, as spring takes hold, we are seeing zillions of these guys - the Nettle tap caterpillar, all neatly wrapped up in sticky webs inside folded leaves of the nettle plant!! It's a great way to be successful - to have just one offspring per nettle leaf, spread all over the land. We look forward to seeing the resulting moths soon! And the bottom photos show our rather sorry looking perennial plug plants that we hope will recover after their three days in transit, and one of our many, many, many naturalised oak saplings!!    |
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6th: We very much need rain John's and Stonechat Ponds   Spider and Wagtail Ponds   Nick's and Nick Junior Ponds   Yellowhammer and 07 Ponds   08 and Mipit Ponds   |
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7th: Stock doves and scrapping hedgehogs | |||||||||||
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8th: Birds Opposite ends of the land: a blackbird and chaffinch at the bird feeding station and a stonechat and linnet on the wires above Oak field. And chuffed to say that yesterday, we saw yellowhammers in the ash trees above Yeti's gate - the first for a while!     |
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9th: A first time visitor to the bird feeding station Not sure the other birds were impressed. Meanwhile, we continue to delight at our male blackbird and his skilled mealworm collecting and we were rather delighted to get a shot of a Willow warbler today, not the best but it's a record shot at least!!   |
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10th: More birds Another lovely day behind the zoom lens, this time capturing our first Blackcap and Swallow       |
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11th: The world of Macro A fabulous day with the macro lens today, firstly by the ponds and then with the contents of last night's moth trap. Spotted Cranefly and baby Pond Skater   Water Measurer and Froglet   Maybugs May bugs fascinate me and made me shudder in equal measures. They are the clumsiest flyers and knowing that at any second they could simply close their wings and fall to the ground (or down my neck) makes me want to run a mile... 🤣 Set the moth trap last night and caught THIRTEEN!!! If you let then crawl on your hand, those legs are like super-charged Velcro, they just don't want to let go. And they really buzz. Whilst the adult beetle only lives for around six weeks, the larvae spend between three and five years growing underground. If you look closely enough, I think that's a smile on the left hand photo - maybe they are kinda of cute too?? And those fan-like antennae are fab!!   Poplar Hawk moth   Foxglove and Common Pug moths   Narrow-winged Pug and Scalloped Hazel moths   Green Carpet and Flame Shoulder moths   |