Wandering wildlife

The Met Office keeps telling us that it’s going to rain (mostly on a Tuesday for some reason), but then it doesn’t.  There has been one day with a little drizzle and a few minutes of actual rain, but that’s it.  The garden is parched and, water shortage or not, I’ve been occasionally watering a few plants (mostly in the vegetable plot) as well as the pots.  The lawn is brown – we’ve only cut it twice this year so far.  There might be rain in the coming week; it will be welcome if so.

The ground is hard and solid, which makes weeding difficult; it’s also challenging for wildlife, which can’t find worms and slugs and can’t dig down to reach them.  August is always a quiet period for birds anyway – they seem to keep a low profile while they moult and recover from having been busy with breeding – and in the heat we were only seeing a few sparrows and tits coming for an early morning drink (apart from the everpresent woodpigeons).  But the partridges have been brought in for shooting (a pointless business as far as I’m concerned) and are flocking around; a group of twelve wandered through the garden one day.

Wandering partridges

After one especially hot (for us) day – nearly 33C (about 100F) in the shade – the birds suddenly reappeared.  Robins are getting their new feathers, and we’ve had a warbler and a green woodpecker in the garden.  More unusually, a duck has been seen wandering the village with her five ducklings (there seem to be a lot of them down in the valley, where there are a few artificial lakes, and loud bangs in the mornings suggest that they’re being shot, probably for someone’s fun).  The ducklings invaded a conservatory in the village, which housed a collection of cacti whose owner had waited for years to see flowering, and the ducklings ate the flowers, to her annoyance!

We also have a couple of leucistic (whitish plumage) juvenile sparrows; unlike albinos, they seem fine and flock with the other sparrows.

The butterflies are fewer now that the oregano has finished flowering (and mostly been cut back before it can self-seed), but the buddleja is keeping some of them busy, including at least seven hummingbird hawkmoths, which are having a really good summer.  A few roe deer were seen in the field behind the garden one day – they don’t usually come so close to the village in daylight; I wonder if it was the heat that brought them there?

The dry soil has made us worry about our hedgehog who was seen a few weeks ago out in daylight, possibly to feed herself up to give milk for her hoglets.  We’ve bought some dry cat food and have put a little out in two places in the garden, along with saucers of water, every evening.  The food gets eaten, and we have wondered if we’re inadvertently feeding the neighbours’ cats; last evening I sat out in the summerhouse until well after dark, and can confirm that a little hedgehoggy shape trotted by and ate and drank to its little heart’s content.

Seeking sustenance

Apart from a little drizzle for a short time about 10 days ago, today we had the first rainfall since some time in the second half of June – a heavy downpour followed by a couple of hours of steady, light rain.  Whether it will make much difference to the plants remains to be seen, and I doubt if it will do much for the reservoirs; the weather has continued to be mostly very warm (including today, even in the rain), and the forecast for the next week or so is similar. 

Harvest, 1st August

Despite the heat and drought, the garden has been giving me some usable produce; the tomatoes have started turning red (or orange depending on the variety), my climbing beans ‘Blauhilde’ have started cropping, the carrots continue to do well, there are lots of blackberries in the garden and in the hedgerow across the lane, and the plum tree has also produced prolifically (now running out of steam).  Most of the plums are in good condition; I've discovered that plum moth damage causes premature ripening of the fruit, so while the early ripeners had a lot of damage, the main crop is mostly fine.  Worth remembering for future years.

The search for food has been occupying the wildlife, and I’ve had to make a few adjustments to accommodate their needs.  The fallen plums have attracted a range of visitors – a female pheasant makes a daily appearance, a juvenile pheasant has also had a peck around and a hedgehog has been seen there a few times, including in the daytime (so I assume she’s a nursing mother, as they will occasionally come foraging in the day).  I’ve been happy to leave fallen fruit for them and for the blackbirds, who also enjoy a meal there.  I haven’t cleared up all the fallen apples, for the same reason.  The fruit provides sustenance but also some liquid in this dry weather.

Blackbird scratching among my leeks

As I’ve commented previously, I’ve been netting my brassicas against cabbage white butterflies.  But when I uncovered the broccoli to cut a few heads for the kitchen, I discovered that aphids had got under the net.  The butterflies couldn’t get in, but neither could the ladybirds that have kept my broad beans clear of blackfly, nor the blue tits that have been eating the flies on the plums.  So I’ve taken the net off – the cabbage whites can’t do much damage to broccoli anyway – and put it over the leek bed, which had been mulched with compost removed from the tulip pots, and where the blackbirds had been digging enthusiastically for worms (and upending the leeks in the process).  On examining the kale, which had also been netted, I found what looked like an infestation of flea beetle that had damaged all the leaves; that net has now also been removed, and I hope that the plants can grow through the damage.  I have replacement seedlings for them anyway.

Hummingbird hawkmoth on the buddleja

The butterflies have also been looking for food; the oregano is now mostly past its peak, but the buddleja is proving a big attraction, including for hummingbird hawkmoths (this year has been good for them, apparently, although we always get a few each year).  A large cluster of plums in the plum tree, too high for us to pick, turned rotten and attracted several red admirals at a time.  While summer pruning the apple cordons, I was about to cut out the flowering stems of the symphoricarpus (snowberry) that suckers through from next door’s garden (to stop them seeding), until I noticed a pair of holly blue butterflies nectaring on the blooms.  I’ve left the snowberry for the time being, and will cut it back later.

Holly blues on the snowberry