The young ones

The summer is passing before we’ve had time to grasp it. It’s like chasing a butterfly. It is moving faster than you think. The winter barley has been cut though the spring sowing is yet to ripen. Apparently the yields are very poor after the dry, cold start to the year It has meant that NCC has had a brief access to the stubble fields before they are ploughed, harrowed and seeded once more. She has had great fun flushing up families of partridge, the young ones now being quite capable of flying away from her clumsy blunderings into the headrigs
The haws are just starting to blush pink and the geans are hanging with cherries that no-one but me seems to pick. The butterflies are out in force.

Green veined white

The young buzzard has fledged and the adults seem to have moved on but the youngster …I’m sure it is the young one… has stayed close to the nest, plaintively pee-youing, presumably in the hope of a meal. It’s not just human offspring that are unsure of making their way in the world.

LotH was intrigued at the sight of a queen red-tailed bumble bee being fertilised by a drone just at the patio door. He will die and she will look for a nest site to hibernate until the spring.




She would have been less intrigued by the elephant hawk moth caterpillar that I found on some common willow herb. Three inches long with fearsome eye spots, he was the stuff of creepy crawly nightmares though his parents are really elegant.

Funny how the most unprepossessing of youngsters improve with age.






Elephant hawk moth caterpillar

My collection of attractive, minor cascades continues to grow with the addition of the Corbie Linn – literally, the waterfall of the crows - and crows there were, cawing away in the surrounding woods. The Corbie Linn
It was worth a stumble and nearly a headlong drop to get a picture. Luckily I escaped with a few scratches and slightly bent specs.
A timely reminder that my young days of agility are long past.