Those insect photos are spectacular @Fairygirl I will have a good look at his website to see his technique. It isn't easy to get that quality.
The tiger beetle head is a stack of 31 photos. I've never been able to get one to sit still long enough to get one decent photo Fractions of a millimetre between photos though. Really impressive skills.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
Not exactly gardening but my daughter and son in law went open water swimming off Port Mellon on Sunday. As they turned to retrace their swim they were joined by a seal pup and an adolescent seal who followed, chased and played around them for some distance, swimming below them, going in front at speed then waiting for them to catch up. Eventually the bigger seal went in front of them, rolled onto its back and blew an enormous raspberry before the pair disappeared to find another game to play. What a special treat that was. It is not uncommon for seals to grab the ends of flippers when they find human swimmers but this was deliberate playing.
A quick glance at the lawn yesterday and saw 2 deer browsing under the apple trees. Nothing unusual about that as the doe, kid and buck are in residence. Then I looked closer and it was one roe deer and one muntjac, happily browsing side by side. Never seen that here before.
I think there’s going to be a bit of a sad end to my swallow season … the pair of swallows that built a nest on the hanging bat in our porch and fledged 3 chicks from their first brood have laid a second clutch of 4 eggs. The female has been sat on them now though for 21 days. All my other swallows have hatched at 15 days so I’m pretty sure these won’t hatch now but the female is still sitting on them and turning them. It’s quite sad to see and I wonder when she will realise and give up. They’re such beautiful eggs, it’s such a shame. This is the downside to having a live camera trained on the nest, when everything goes well it’s great but it’s not so nice to watch at the moment!
Overall the season has been very successful though and the three pairs of nesting swallows have had 14 swallows chicks between them and they’ve all successfully fledged.
It's always sad when it doesn't go to plan @CatDouch, but look at how successful they have been It's the same as frogspawn or plants that produce hundreds of thousands of seeds. It's because they don't all make it....
It's a place where beautiful isn't enough of a word....
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
Everything you say is correct @Fairygirl 😁 and I would reply with the same comments if it wasn’t my swallow 😂 but when I watch her singing away whilst sat on her eggs I just feel so sad for her. Even though, of course, my sensible head tells me that at some point instinct will tell her to abandon them and she’ll fly off and not give them a seconds thought. I wonder if Mother Nature knew that it was very late in the season for eggs to hatch because if everything had gone to plan the chicks wouldn’t have fledged until the very end of August and normally the swallows here leave on migration during the first week of September 🤔
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Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
What a special treat that was.
It is not uncommon for seals to grab the ends of flippers when they find human swimmers but this was deliberate playing.
It's the same as frogspawn or plants that produce hundreds of thousands of seeds. It's because they don't all make it....
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
I wonder if Mother Nature knew that it was very late in the season for eggs to hatch because if everything had gone to plan the chicks wouldn’t have fledged until the very end of August and normally the swallows here leave on migration during the first week of September 🤔