Hairst*

We approach the autumnal equinox. The full moon of September, the Harvest Moon, has just waned.  Before artificial lighting, its glow allowed farmers to take advantage of a dry spell and harvest their crop well into the night.

Driving home under its light, I came across a newly dead fox, no doubt hit by a car. It looked young, not much more than a cub with its soft red fur and black ears and socks. Part of the dispersal as the young foxes move out seeking territories and mates for themselves, this one hadn’t developed the skills needed to survive alongside humans. Few of the local community would mourn the death of a fox but it did make me feel sad.

The next day, I did have a chance to save a furry creature from the wheels of the cars when I found a black hairy caterpillar, a hairy oobit, crossing the road and ushered it into the verge. Hopefully it will grow up to be, I think, a leopard moth.

The fields have a roughly shaved look, and the last of the swallows have departed. Only last week, the tail-enders of this year’s brood were sweeping over the stubble like tiny jet fighters and then, in one day, they were gone on a journey already taken by their parents to a place they have never seen. How do they manage it?

As they move out, the long straggling skeins of geese come honking in from the north.

The hedgerows are flushed with haws and berries awaiting the return of those other visitors, the redwings and fieldfares and. hopefully, waxwings.

Haws, Hips and Scrogs

The warm sun still brings out the butterflies and dragonflies around the loch but after it sets the twilight has the cold touch of coming winter. Once more, the year is on the turn.

*Hairst,  the Scots for autumn is synonymous with harvest. Hairst-home is winter.

Cornflower blues

After the visitation of the Painted Ladies in August, ( Blog 31/07/19 ) other butterflies having been appearing in the garden. The recent burst of hot weather has helped to bring out more species fluttering around the fields and by-ways

Following a path by woodland, I tried to capture the latest batch with the phone camera but their compound eyes mean that they are off as soon as you approach, dancing enticingly from plant to plant never settling long enough to get the phone close to them. (Memo to self - bring the SLR the next time.)

Green veined white on thistle

Comma

They did lead me to a field of pasture being munched by a contented flock of ewes and there, along the field edge, growing among the sheep sorrel, were cornflowers.

Once, these "weeds of cultivation"were common in cereal crops as their names suggest, - cornflower, corn spurrey, corn marigold, corn cockle. Now, due to the use of agri-chemicals, most are rare but their seed can survive for a long time as witnessed by the proliferation of poppies along any roadside verge after digging by local councils or service providers.

Cornflowers, like poppies, grew in the churned up fields of the Western Front in WWI and were adopted by the French as their flower of remembrance – le bleuet de France

Now, they are seldom found in Britain except in gardens as part of a "wild flower" sowing or where environmentally friendly farmers have reintroduced them.

Wild flower meadow

My few were almost certainly survivors from an older time still managing to set seed despite the munching of the sheep.

Sheep sorrel

Sheep sorrel is a food plant for the small copper butterfly. I saw none that day but worth another look (with a better camera!).

Odd how the flowers of remembrance the field poppy and the cornflower are scarcely to be found in the countryside where they were once so much part of the landscape - a lost generation of blooms.