And summer's lease hath all to short a date

Summer is drawing to a close. The swallows are still here but the days are getting shorter and the winds have an autumnal feel. The fields have a shorn look as the combines gather the grain and the balers leave the giant rolls of straw to be picked up later on the prongs of a tractor. No chance of boys making forts out of these as we did with the man-handled bales of my childhood.

Yesterday, I had my first bramble from the hedgerow, a sure sign of autumn and the sloes are just taking on their bluish tinge. Next week it will be St Philbert's day when, traditionally, the young hazel nuts, the filberts, are edible though we are too far north. It will be a week or two yet before ours are ready.

I visited Pease Dean and Duns Castle reserves to try out a new app on the I-pod. It is a bird song identifier.You record the song and then ask for a match from the songs on the app. It works fairly well. It quickly and accurately identified the test subjects ...goldfinches, wrens, blackbirds etc but the thirty-second recording time means that you have to try over and over because, birds being birds, they will stop singing or calling just after you've pressed “record” and start again after the thirty seconds are up! It was less efficient with calls such as the buzzard circling over head. I suppose the wind noise distorted the recording. Still, a useful tool for the bird watcher.

Butterflies are everywhere. Their presence, just seeing them, seems to make life a bit more pleasant. They will be getting their eggs laid and it is a great excuse not to be too tidy a gardener. Nettles? ...Oh, I leave them for the butterflies. 

Red Admiral

Peacock butterfly

Unfortunately, the ride-on lawn mower has induced people to extend their mowing operations down the verges from their houses, farms and caravan sites for long distances, creating neat, barren strips of turf and further reducing the availability of weeds and seeds necessary for our wild life.

The insect world is getting its breeding done before the winter takes its toll. The bumble bee queens will be looking for a nest to overwinter with next year's generation in their abdomens while the rest, their jobs done,will die. 

A buff tailed bumble bee queen is impregnated

The forest shield bugs will lay their eggs in cracks in the bark of oak trees ready for next spring.

 Forest shield bugs mating

The blackbirds are fledging their second broods of the year.

Young hen blackie

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  It is all hustle and bustle, the lazy days of summer exist only in song and time is passing.

Spring Prologue

Whanne that Aprille with his shoures sote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote

Not much has changed since Chaucer’s day; April still brings the rain though whether it will be enough to pierce the current drought is debatable.  In the  fourteenth century, it was more about the crops failing than not being able to wash the car at the week-end.

A break in the downpour allowed a visit to Pease Dean, a deep ravine that defeated invading armies for centuries until it was crossed in 1786 by what was, in the eighteenth century, the highest bridge in Europe.   It still stands as a tribute to its builders carrying massive articulated lorries, unforeseen in the time of drays and coaches.

The dean is home to a huge variety of  woodland plants including the  bluebell, the English variety, with its coy, drooping  flower, said to hang thus to protect the pollen from the rain, unlike it  more upright Spanish cousin who didn’t need to develop this trait.

Unfortunately, the Spaniard is so widespread that hybrids are common and neither has the fragrance of the native species.  The bluebell like wood sorrel and ransomes or wild garlic is an indicator species showing the age of a wood.

 The rare Northern brown Argus butterfly can be found here but it is too early yet to see them so I settled for a commoner but still beautiful Peacock

And smalle fowles maken melodye

The dean was full of the song of warblers and tits as well as the harsh cackle of magpies and the omnipresent coo-cooing of wood pigeons. Trying to get a shot of a dipper, I made the mistake of crossing the burn by way of some stones.  Wet and slippery with the rains, they proved treacherous underfoot and I ended up in the burn.   As I returned home soaked through, LotH pointed out that it is more than half a century since I had licence to play in burns and I must learn, even at this late stage, to act my age and not my shoe size.

The terns are back in the bay, having completed their epic journey to Antarctica and back.   I watched them fishing like children ducking for apples.  Graceful and fast they are the “swallows of the sea”    Their terrestrial counterparts, the swallows, should be appearing within the next week.   Year upon year,theycome winging in, usually within twenty four hours of the last arrival date.   
They amaze me.   I can never take their sight for granted. 

 I hope the weather improves for them.

Post script 
The first swallow has indeed arrived and the cuckoo flowers have bloomed ...and still...
... the rain it raineth every day
... as in the fourteenth, so in the sixteenth and the twenty first centuries
... the uncertain glory of an April day