Admiring my friend’s sunflowers, I found my attention drawn to this industrious bee, minutely inspecting this specimen for nectar and pollen. Can any apiarist out there tell me exactly what sort of bee this is?
Still at the Horniman Museum, I’m going to take you to the Butterfly House, and show you the Owl Butterfly.
These impressively large butterflies come from Central and South America, and feed on the juices of fermenting fruit, as the feature photo shows.
All these tourists in Barcelona are so boring …
For Monday Portrait
It’s time for Flashback Friday again, and as butterflies have so far been in fairly short supply this year, I thought I’d return to a happy moment in France, in August 2013, when we had friends from England to stay …
There we were at Roquefixade, showing our favourite walking destination off to two of our Harrogate friends, when a butterfly discovered me. Then another. These two creatures played round my wrist for more than half an hour before finally dancing off into the sunshine. They made our day.
I’m thinking they’re the Common Blue (Polyommatus icarus). Any dissenters?
And if you’re wondering why this post is called Butterflies III, here’s why …
In the same month, I wrote about a Butterfly Bonanza, and at the end of July, about the rare Mountain Apollo
With what joy we greeted the lizards we encountered on our recent Balkan Journey! How we miss the companions who shared our daily life in France, during the summer months, at least.
Here‘s what I wrote about them, ten whole years ago:
Summer’s arrived: well, this week anyway. So from before breakfast until long after the evening meal we’re spending as much time as we can out in the garden. And we have plenty of company. Lizards. Common wall lizards, podarcis muralis. They are indeed spectacularly common here. We have no idea exactly where they live, but there are plenty who call our garden ‘home’. We’re beginning to get to know a few.
Easily the most identifiable is Ms. Forktail, she of the two tails. She’s the only one we’ve been able to sex conclusively as well, because we caught her ‘in flagrante’ with Mr. Big behind the gas bottles recently. And then the next day she was making eyes at a younger, lither specimen, and the day after that it was someone else. She’s lowering the moral tone of our back yard.
Then there’s Longstump, who’s lost a tiny portion of tail, and Mr. Stumpy, who hasn’t got one at all, though it seems not to bother him. Redthroat has a patch of crimson under her chin. There are several youngsters who zip around with enthusiasm and incredible speed.
In fact they all divide their time between sitting motionless for many minutes on end, and suddenly accelerating, at top speed and usually for no apparent reason, from one end of the garden to the other, or vertically up the wall that supports our young wisteria. On hot days like this (36 degrees and counting) they’ll seem to be waving at us. Really they’re just cooling a foot, sizzled on the hot wood or concrete. Sometimes you’ll see them chomping their way through some insect they’ve hunted, but often they’ll step carelessly and without interest over an ant or other miniature creepy-crawly in their path.
Mainly they ignore one another, but sometimes there are tussles. These may end with an uneasy standoff, or with the two concerned knotted briefly together in what could scarcely be described as an act of love.
We could spend hours watching them, and sometimes we do. But there is still a bathroom to build, a workroom to fit out, and a pergola to design. The kings and queens of the yard have no such worries. They can do anything: they choose not to.
These peacocks live in North Macedonia, where they have, uninvited but none the less welcome, taken up residence at the hotel we stayed at on the shores of Lake Ohrid, St. Naum. I think they can speak for themselves – as they did, very noisily, every morning.
The rear view proved just as interesting as that draped tail.
… for a few moments – at rest.
And now … a peacock in action. Not for nothing is one of its collective nouns an Ostentation of Peacocks.
I’ll be honest. I conceived and wrote this post as a Monday Portrait. But then Tina’s Lens-Artists Challenge dropped into my in-box: ‘The eyes have it’. I’m not entirely sure she had peacocks in mind, but the hundreds of ‘eyes’ that make up the peacock’s tail, and that slightly penetrating gaze displayed in that head shot allowed me to think I might get away with including this post in the challenge.
I wanted to be in the Monday Portrait from Prespa, but the birds got there first. Am I too late? It’s not Monday? Well, I’m here now …
Look, I got here as soon as I could … And now I’m here, you might wait till I’m properly in shot.
… I’ve had to overcome all kinds of difficulties …
But here I am, ready for my profile to be shown to best advantage.
And by the way: that feature photo. Those gnarled old olive stumps are quite my favourite spot.
After my own breakfast, I had just half an hour to spare to watch this great white egret hunt for his. While I was there, he caught just two small fish. The nearby hens were busy too, as you can hear.
Our Prespa adventure is over now: our Balkan adventure is not. To be continued …
Today was a day of birdsong: of nightingales without end, of golden orioles and hoopoes. It was a day to watch bee-eaters, pelicans, grey herons, night herons flying over the lake. It was a day to watch sows idling away the morning under a shady tree, or goats commandeering the hillside. Or to see a wild tortoise lumbering across the path.
Today, we journeyed to Lake Prespa, Grecian section. To Little Prespa to be exact. We are staying on an island where we were promised a cacophony of frogs – all night – and a plethora of pelicans. The frogs are delivering: but the pelicans, up to perhaps 80% of them, have been decimated by avian flu. They were not there to greet us as we hoped. But aided by powerful lenses, we finally saw them. Trust me, they’re there, and there in abundance, roughly in the middle of the first shot.
I’ll send just one more postcard this evening, taken just as the sun set.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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