One of the great things about spending a lot of time outside is that we happen upon wildlife a lot. Like this comma butterfly, basking on our sweetcorn. Fairly common, the caterpillars feed on nettles (so nettles are good for something!), and the adults tend to appear in July. More butterflies are beginning to appear, and I have been seeing a fair number of speckled woods , ringlets, and small heaths . which hints at the fact our grass is too long in the fields, and of course large and small whites hanging around our cabbage plants!
Yesterday we saw a sparrow hawk, complete with an unfortunate sparrow fly close over our heads whilst we were weeding the courgette plants. We have lots of swallows, rearing their young, sparrows and thrushes, which I thought were supposed to be in decline. The thrush is very welcome as it goes for snails! We usually have a couple of buzzards in the sky circling, looking for victims, or sometimes being chased off by jackdaws.
At night we have seen badgers and hedgehogs - though not in the same place, which is good given that badgers eat hedgehogs…
For us it is all part of the ’standing and staring’, which is a major part of what we are doing here.
