Oh Midge !

Yesterday Morning I gave the side bushes a serious trim, I filled six bags with leaf cuttings in the process. Nice job well done.
This morning I saw a little face poking out of the top of the big bush. This is a dense laurel bush with a lot of fine cross branches, but little Midge, from a neighbours house, had climbed to the top. It appears that he was chasing blackbirds, clearly not realizing how quickly they can move. The old male blackbird had been taunting him to follow and Rosie eventually went out to help the poor cat down. What a dopey cat!

Postscript.

Well blow me down with a feather. Casper, Midge's brother, is sitting up in our neighbour's tree, waiting for the birds to come to the feeder.
Just to seal the deal, the old blackbird is sitting where Midge was photographed an hour earlier, watching Casper at a distance. It's like the script in a soap opera........
Better focus on the camera this time.

Composits and quick shots

The Dorothy Clive Garden is a two part arrangement, with a forest full of Rhododendrons and Azaleas in an old quarry site, and a sloping formal garden. The two sides are separated by a cafe. The image above is a composite across the Rhododendron garden and the photograph below is one of the typical flower beds of the more formal side.
This garden rates amongst the best I have seen. Below is a 14 frame composite image of the lower pond and rock garden.
Whilst taking the composite frames I saw chaffinches skimming the water lilies for insects. They were quite successful in their hunt. The finches were settling on the lilies or the reeds to eat their captured prey. It is the first time I have observed this kind of behaviour in chaffinches.
whilst the chaffinches required a quick hand and eye to capture the images, the bees on the poppies also needed precise photography in order to capture them on the wing.
The time spent in such fine gardens is much treasured.

Past History Tour

Having been on a blitz to convert all of our old negatives to digital format, I have come across an interesting set of pictures. In 1985, Rosie and I went on an historical tour. In the same week we visited a number of sites both alone and with friends.
Grimes Graves is an ancient flint mine. You can go down one of the pits and explore the working conditions of the time. There is also a good visitors centre with a well qualified warden to answer questions and show examples of tools made on site. The whole area is spread out in the Thetford Forest in Norfolk, where hundreds of pits were dug to extract quality flint nodules for the manufacture of hand axes and other tools.

Cockley Cley boasts a reproduction Iceni village. It is a very atmospheric site, though a little static, giving a good idea of how the Ancient Britons would have lived. The site is accessed by a bridge and there is a stockade and a number of building, including this round house made of timber and rushes. A central fire hearth would have heated the building, the smoke permeating through the roof, keeping the thatch clean and free of bugs.
West Stowe is a Research village built in the Anglo Saxon style, with rectangular huts. Some are built over pits with raised floors which give insulation from the cold ground in winter. The site has re-enactments in full Anglo Saxon costume which involve events from everyday life, use of tools and weapons and the occasional skirmish. This was an extremely active and engaging visit.

Castell Henllys was a later visit. This site in Pembrokeshire is an Iron Age fortified village. It is also the site of an on-going archaeological investigation and our tour guides was an archaeologist from the site. One of the key features is the experiential side of archaeology - seeing what it is like to sit in a round house with a fire burning and food cooking - finding the relationship between people and livestock. The reconstruction is based exclusively on archaeological evidence.

Pictures in water

Today, I spent some time with my camera, taking photographs of newts and tadpoles through the water. It is quite a challenge to avoid reflections on the water surface. It is also difficult to capture fast swimming creatures with a normal shutter speed. These photographs are the best of 20. The others do not merit discussion.
Some newts use their legs together to propell them through the water.
Other newts rotate their limbs alternately in a very comical fashion. It seems that free swimming is a variable skill to each newt.
I quite like the shadow of this tadpole on the stone. I was following a newt when I took this picture
Occasionally, when the surface of the pond is clear, tadpoles will swim across partly submerged water lily leaves.
We have smooth newts and palmate newts. They spend most of their time crawling in the weed looking for small invertebrates to eat. It is only when the water is clear and warm that they swim freely for brief spells, then they return to the protection of the water vegetation.

Too hot to do anything

This little frog is one of last years tadpoles. It is about 3cm long and is one of a pair of small frogs in the pond today.
Hot, Hot, Hot......the temperature is well above the expected seasonal mean and everything in the garden is either growing like crazy or sitting in the shade. The pond is so warm that the frogs are getting out and sitting on the pad. The cats are just walking past them with no hint of mischief and the frogs are not moving away. It's too hot to bother!
The big frogs were the first to escape the pond as the heat is drawing the water out and the level is falling steadily. I must put a hosepipe onto it and fill the pond up again. Something I have not needed to do for a few years.
I counted 21 frogs at one time. There are probably a lot more, since some of them are diving into the deep part of the pond to escape the heat.
These two stayed on this pad for over an hour before they plunged back into the water. They were not in the least concerned when I took this and several other photographs. Even less so when one of our cats came to investigate.
Even the frogs at the top of the pond were sitting on the weed, in the shade of the iris leaves. I bet as the temperature drops this evening they will be out in the undergrowth looking for slugs and beetles to eat. At least they should limit the size of the slug populations before I plant out my courgettes.

Garden Insects

Today has been one of the warmest days this year, with a daytime temperature of 22 degrees Celcius. The seasonal norm would be around 15 degrees. With this early summer, we have seen a significant increase in the garden insects. Notable is the early appearance of the Speckled Wood butterfly (above). This is a summer resident in our garden and is normally seen from the end of May to September.
Another early and abundant insect is the Holly Blue butterfly, which is seldom seen this far north in the UK. We have quite a population at present, flitting about the top of the garden and spiralling high above the hedges in the sunshine, giving a flash of bright blue on the upper wings.
Several species of Bee are now active, from this large bumble bee to the much smaller solitary bees and worker bees which are busy collecting nectar and pollinating the flowers and blossoms of the garden plants.

The frogs are also back in the pond - I counted 9 yesterday - they dive for cover whenever anyone approaches the pond, so this makes it difficult to estimate numbers. The newts have cleared almost all of the tadpoles from the pond. Large numbers of newts have survived the mild winter and the excess food has left us a very strong community of amphibians. Slugs and snails are also very abundant this year. Quite a challenge for organic control methods.

The Roaches

On the Roaches with Hen Cloud in the Background

Having lived in Stoke for years, being within a short drive of The Roaches, I can sadly say that I have not made the effort to walk or climb on them before. There was no work today, so Rosie and I took a day off - to explore The Roaches. This is the best weather we have had so far this year, with bright sunshine and a warm fresh breeze.
These hills are a craggy outcrop of Gritstone above the town of Leek in Staffordshire. They are a favourite nursery site for rock climbers, with some very good faces. I had a chat with two such souls who were disappointed that the main crags are out of bounds to climbers whilst a pair of Peregrine Falcons are nesting there. We saw one of them flying over Hen Cloud this morning.

We had been on the hills since 9.30 this morning and were coming down near to Lunch time. We met with two rock enthusiasts who were looking for a horizontal fault in a rock gully. They had tried to find the fault before without success. I looked carefully, but could not see any evidence of a horizontal fault line. Apparently, they had a guide that said there was a fault showing slickensides (grooves caused by fault movement). The line of the fault is apparent along the higher face of the crag, but not at the location stated in the guide. Time to go down for a cuppa.