Common Nature

I'm hopeful that someone with better knowledge of butterfly behaviour can tell me what's going on here. I think these two are going through a mating ritual. The female (below in this photo) is sitting quite still on the grass with her wings flat and abdomen raised perpendicular to the ground. The male was repeatedly bombarding her from above. I was trying to photograph them with quite a high shutter speed but because his "attacks" tended to buffet her, I lost focus 95% of the time. This was the best I could do. They tumbled off over a hedgerow before I could come to any certain conclusions about what was going on. So, er, are they preparing to mate? Or is something else going on?

My Eldest made a bird box with her Granddad over the winter holidays a couple of years ago. We put it in the hedgerow when we got home, and promptly forgot about it.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when we noticed a blue tit seemed to be going in and out of it regularly.

The baby blue tits have hatched! We can hear them peeping inside, and this afternoon I got the chance to sit outside and watch patiently from the bench some distance away whilst the parents darted in and out of the box, carrying in food and removing waste.


A wild blue tit appears!


Blue tit with large green grub in its beak perches on the bramble just outside the entrance.

( +3 )

Happy May Day! Have a macro shot of a bleeding heart from my back garden.

Banded demoiselle perched on the roof of the woodshed. The toddler was delighted.

We get these damselflies as well as dragonflies flitting through our canal-side garden every year, but they don’t often stop and say hello.

[Macro image of speckled bush cricket sitting on the backs of my fingers.]

Made smol friend!