30 Days Wild - bees, bees and other stuff

Ladybird nestling in a random flower.

Gorgeous shiny jewel green, possibly, hoverfly, I can't find an ID on him:

Honey bee in Julie's garden this afternoon:

and honey bee in mine too when I came home:

Stay safe. Be kind. Weed your friend's garden.

30 Days Wild - Bee Identification Help

I was in the yard after work and repotted my two remaining avocado trees. The smaller one I cut right back the other day as all the leaves on the main stem had some kind of mildew. I remembered how much they flourished last summer spending a couple of months outside so they will sit on the garden until September. 

I have been keeping an eye on the bees of course; I have so many different things flowering at the moment but they continue to love this purple self seeded stuff the best. I spotted this one and got all excited thinking it might be a honey bee ... but on researching I think not. My best guess is a wool carder bee but would love it if someone more knowledgable could confirm or correct me.

Stay safe. Be kind. Fingers crossed for some rain (just enough to fill the water buttts).

30 Days Wild - Survival of the fittest

Sadly bob 3 died a couple of days ago. They were quite a late arrival and suffered under the size advantage the first two had gained. They were already weakened when they fell over and fell outside one of the protective branches and were subsequently left out in the cold and rain as Dorcha has no way to move the chick back into the centre of the nest. (Apparently ospreys don't have good problem solving skills, but also have razor sharp beak and claws and thus no way to pick up and move the chick).

Then I sat today after work and watched them feed for ten minutes. The closer chick got at least 3 bites for every one that the other managed and Dorcha did not particularly try to share it out fairly, she just put it in the first open beak. It's a tough life being an osprey chick. 

Mark over at 'Views From the Bike Shed' recommended the puffin cam (which is currently showing a burrow box, so they probably have several different cameras) on Skomer Island, which Tish and I enjoyed the other afternoon. Then when I looked on the hosting site, there are random webcams all over the world, including this fab one at Okaukuejo Resort Wildlife Waterhole in Namibia:

Stay safe. Be kind. Enjoy some wildlife.

30 Days Wild - Osprey Joy

 

We watched the ospreys all through the lockdown in 2020, they were a source of much excitement. This year Louis and Dorcha's three 'bobs' hatched in the last 10 days and already doing well, lots of back and forth with the fish. It feels amazing that they go from egg to fully grown osprey in 4 months, then they just head off into the wild and don't really have much to do with each other; then they come back next year and do it all again. I read on the wiki page that since DDT was banned in many places in the 1970s numbers have made a significant recovery and they are not considered endangered. 

Visit the osprey cam here.

Stay safe. Be kind. Admire the raptors.

Shh, shh, shh

I needed this book. William Boyd's 'Sweet Caress' was a charity shop find in Torquay. I reviewed Any Human Heart way back at the beginning of the blog in 2009 (and subsequently listed it as one of my top ten favourite books when I reached 1000 posts in 2016). I loved it. I reviewed Love is Blind in 2018 but did not feel the same way, noting the lack of depth in his female characters. But Sweet Caress did for me exactly what Any Human Heart did, it felt real. 

I don't know if other people do this, but I have an automatic feeling of fondness for anyone who shares a name with people I love. Real people, or characters in books. There is not logic to it. It also applies to people who share my name. I had a lovely exchange with a lady in the callers office once because her name was Martine and we bonded momentarily over having an unusual name. I had a peculiar experience with Rape, a love story by Joyce Carol Oates because the main character was called Martine. And I bonded with Armory Clay because she shares my birthday. The book opens and closes with the shh, shh, shh of the ocean and it reminded me of this that I wrote during my visit to Costa Rica (which reminded me that I am 58, and not 56 as I keep thinking). I love the photos in the book (which reminded me of Austerlitz, which also has photos for added realism), and the references throughout to things that really happen and, occasionally, to real people (though less so than AHH which has a long section with the Duke of Windsor). 

As a teenager Armory survives an attempted drowning by her father, and his mental breakdown, and that of other men in her life affected by war punctuates the book. It is not an anti war book but its theme is the way that the impact of war echoes across time and through generations, leaving indelible traces. She becomes a photographer which gives her a career that hops back and forth across the Atlantic and takes her to the front line in France. People and places recur as her fortunes wax and wane. She falls in and out of love. I liked her because she made real choices, things do not happen to her, she makes them happen. The only thing that annoyed me was the vaginal bleeding. So she gets beaten up during the Maroon Street Riot (apparently not real), which results in internal injuries and mysterious bleeding. This was the 1930s, they would have done a hysterectomy and had done with it. So it felt like a device to explain how a sexually active young woman does not get pregnant, but leaves her able, equally mysteriously, to conceive later in life. But I can overlook small niggles in the grand scheme of the satisfying period detail. So, quotes. The book moves through time across most of the 20th century, but is punctuated by a diary from 1977. This kind of nicely sums up her life philosophy:

"In anyone's house at any given time there will, I suppose, be half a dozen appliances or components not functioning properly. A light fused, a door-handle loose, a floorboard creaking, an electric iron inexplicably giving no heat. In the cottage's case, for example, there is a permanently dripping cold tap in the bathroom, a drawer in the kitchen that will not fully shut, and an armchair that has mysteriously lost one castor. Also, the Hillman Imp seems to be leaking oil from somewhere, judging from the dark stains on the gravel and my wireless reception will switch off completely for ten minutes or so, offering up muffled voices obscured by crackling gunfire, before it bizarrely resumes normal service.

As with your house, so with your body. I've a bruise on my shin, the remains of a splinter in my palm that seems to be turning septic, an ingrowing big toenail and my left knee cartilage twinges with a spasm of pain when I rise from a seat. We make do - favour the right leg, use the left hand, slip a paperback under the armchair where the caster should be. It amazes me what compromises we happily live with. We limp along, patching up, improvising." (p.175-6)

More philosophical musings:

"I was thinking about the mistakes we all make - or rather the concept of a 'mistake'. It's something that can only be realised in hindsight - big mistake or small one. It was a mistake to marry him. It was a mistake to got o Brighton on a bank holiday. It was a mistake to write that letter in red ink. It was a mistake to have left home without an umbrella. We don't sense mistakes coming, there's this crucial unforeseen factor to them. So I found myself asking the question: what is the opposite of a mistake? And I realised there wasn't a word, in fact, precisely because a mistake always arises from best intentions that go awry. You can't set out to make a mistake. Mistakes happen - there's nothing we can do about them.

I walked along the beach on my little bay thinking of Xan. He was only twenty-seven. Almost 100,000 RAF airmen died during the Second World War, I read somewhere. The fact that Xan was one unit in that huge number makes it all the more terrible. One butcher's bill for one family amongst the myriad served up by that conflict." (p.255)

After the war she marries abruptly and goes to live as Lady Farr in Scotland, having twin daughters, until she is widowed, a period not lingered over. Some time passes and she becomes restless and manages, through connections, to get a posting as a photographer to Vietnam. She manages to keep her distance from the horrors of the war, photographing the place and its people, but then, when visiting an airbase, she appears to witness something untoward and it abruptly returned to England by the authorities. It is strange that I found it more threatening than any of the war scenes, and here she describes her feelings of powerlessness:

"And then they both gave me tight little smiles and we stood up. Brown asked if i had any money and I said only American dollars. He gave me a £10 note that I had to sign a chit for and I was shown back to the front door by puce-suit where my suitcase was waiting for me.

I travelled down in the lift alone and stepped out into the first glimmerings of dawn in St John's Wood. I hailed a passing taxi and asked to be taken to an all-night café. This proved to be in Victoria bus station where - beneath blazing fluorescent light - I ate, and hugely relished, a greasy breakfast and drank many cups of strong tea.

But I was feeling increasingly strange as I sat there in the refulgent cafeteria considering what had just happened to me in the last forty-eight hours or so and I realised I had experienced this sensation before but couldn't remember when. That sense of fearful powerlessness; of other forces suddenly taking over the direction of your life that you had chosen; of being completely out of your depth in what you thought was familiar society. And then I remembered. My 'obscenity' trial over my Berlin photographs, all those decades ago - sitting in the Bow Street Magistrates' Court pleading guilty when I knew I was innocent; learning that my photographs were due to be destroyed; being admonished and humiliated by the judge.

When you encounter the implacable power of the state it's a deeply destabilising moment. In an ordinary life it happens very rarely - maybe never, maybe once or twice. But your individual being, your individual nature, seems suddenly worth nothing - you feel expendable - and that's what frightens you, fundamentally, that's what makes your bowels loosen." (p. 401-2)

It is a while since I have found myself heading to bed early because my book is calling and sitting up later than I should, although that was ok as I have been on leave this week. It was an extremely satisfying read, full of characters to care about and lives well lived. It followed an almost identical format to Any Human Heart, I guess if you have found a formula that works, you stick with it. I take back what I said earlier about his women characters.

"It was still light so I summoned Flam and we walked down to the bay. I stood on the small crescent beach, as Flam roved around the tide rack and rock pools, and I watched the day slip into night, noting the wondrous tonal transformation of the sunset on its dimmer switch, how blood-orange can shade imperceptibly into ice-blue on the knife-edge of the horizon, listening to the sea's interminable call for silence - shh, shh, shh." (p.6)

Stay safe. Be kind. Listen to the ocean.

30 Days Wild - bee rescue

Having rescued a bee from the spider web the other day, yesterday afternoon I spotted one who had landed in one of the various plastic trays lying rain-filled in the yard. He was still wriggling quite vigorously so I assume had not been there long so I used my trusty chopstick (freebie ones that I variously use as plant labels, dibbers, seedling transplanters and now bee rescue devices) to fish him out and place him gently on the sun-warmed arm of the bench. He rested there for about 20 minutes while I drank a cup of tea, looking a little forlorn but twitching occasionally, then:

Stay safe. Be kind. Every little helps.

30 Days Wild - Birdsong, Hoverflies and Scale Insects

Yesterday Julie and I took a lovely walk around the wooded border of Wythenshawe Park. While the park seems to consist of a huge open parkland area that was lacking in deer we stuck to the area of dense woodland around the edge, that despite being very close to heavy traffic, was absolutely full of birdsong. She showed me how to identify the song of a wren, that she had learned recently, and using a phone app we also identified a song thrush. Unfortunately the birds stayed well hidden amongst the tall canopy, flittering tantalisingly across the path from time to time. 

This was the only wildlife we got a good sighting of:

Back at home I was reading Crafty Green Poet's blog and Juliet coincidentally had a post about scale insects, which I immediately realised was this strange substance that I had spotted on the dogwood. Apparently the white bit is an egg sac and the brown bit is the deceased insect that drops dead of exhaustion in situ having spent all their energy producing the eggs. I was worried that they were parasitic and a nuisance but when I checked the RHS website said not to worry and the plant would not be unduly affected. 

In my enthusiasm for the bees I have been photographing anything with wings that visits the garden. Julie looked at my photo of this one and immediately said it was probably a hoverfly, my best guess is a migrant hoverfly. Tish and I found recycled plastic planters in B&M bargains this morning so I will be moving stuff around a bit and enjoying the not-rain.

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't jinx it by mentioning the big round glowing thing.