Weatherwise, it hasn’t been
a great summer here, on the whole, and the signs are that it’s downhill from here. After a very warm ten days or so in July, we had
a mostly disappointing August – remarkably dull, grey and with a chilly wind
from the north, for much of the month.
September has been better, with a couple of warm days but mostly just
nice autumnal weather: plenty of misty mornings, pleasant days and cooler
evenings once the sun has set. Although
the summer has been dry overall, it hasn’t been exactly the sort of weather
that we might have hoped for, and now change is on the way, with wet and windy
autumnal conditions for the next few weeks.
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| Lefty's morning bath |
The depressing
August weather was all the more depressing for coinciding with the end of the
birds’ breeding season, when the juveniles start dispersing and the adults take
themselves into hiding while they moult.
For a few weeks the entertainment of their comings and goings declines
quite noticeably, as does their interest in the bird feeders, though they do
enjoy the birdbaths; moulting must be a slightly uncomfortable business, and a
nice bath seems to help. The birds are
still around, but often relatively inconspicuous (and mostly silent) in the
tree canopies or out in the hedgerows, where there’s plenty of food for them,
though a family of long-tailed tits did turn up on the fatball feeder one day. They’re always a cheerful sight, clustering
together with their tails sticking out in all directions, until they decide
they need to be somewhere else. A couple
of warblers (chiffchaffs?) have been catching insects from the treetops, and a
pair of tawny owls calling mournfully in the evenings. The robins are marking out their winter
territories with melancholy-sounding songs; sadly the thin robin who mostly
hangs around the patio seems to have damaged its right foot, with the claws all
clenched together as a sort of peg-leg, though it appears to be managing well
enough. Perhaps I ought to call it
Righty the Robin, on the same lines as Lefty the lame pigeon.
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| Long-tailed tits on the fatballs |
Lefty, with his
lady, seems to have raised at least two youngsters; we watched them pester him
(unsuccessfully) for food one day. He
wasn’t having any of it, even when one of them jumped on him like an overenthusiastic
toddler, and they went off to find their own supper. The pigeons at the bottom end of the garden, meanwhile,
who are quite tolerant of our comings and goings, spent much of the late summer
trying to nest in the plum tree. It wasn’t
much of a nest, just a few sticks high in the canopy, and the cold August winds
destroyed it at least once, but finally they seem to have succeeded: a
youngster has been calling to be fed from the nest over the past few days.
The August
winds also gave a further battering to the poor old buddleja, which
nevertheless managed to flower well enough to attract a good number of
butterflies. Red Admirals and small tortoiseshells
were well represented, and there was a painted lady, but few peacocks this
year; however I did finally manage a definite identification of a small
skipper, which I thought I had seen several times in the past but which were
flitting about too fast for me to see them properly (which is why they’re
called skippers). This one sat on the buddleja
for long enough for me to get my phone and take a photo. We ought to have a healthy population of large whites in future, too;
the netting over the brassicas failed to keep them off the broccoli, and their
caterpillars have eaten the plants bare.
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| Small skipper on the buddleja |
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| Red admiral |
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| Painted lady |
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| Large white butterfly caterpillars - no broccoli this year! |
If
the butterflies provide garden interest by day, and the owls by night, it's the
hedgehog that we look for in the evenings; we've seen him or her a few times
when we've been returning from supper in the summerhouse after dark.
Slugs do not seem to have been a problem this year, and this may be the reason
why!
