Birds and Beasties

At last some sun! My green tomatoes are gradually turning red but the flower on my pepper plant shrivelled up and fell off, so alas my first attempt at growing them has been a failure. The garden still looks pretty colourful and I’ve started preparing for next year. That’s probably bigging it up a bit – I’ve sown 18 Astrantia seeds to be precise. I ran out of compost and couldn’t be bothered to make a trip to the garden centre – never do today what you can put off until tomorrow is my motto. I have had one success, well 3 actually – I took cuttings from my mum’s Christmas cactus and they’ve taken – one has even started to produce a bud – sorry, it does look a bit rude but I think I’ve just captured it at an unfortunate angle.

It’s been quite an interesting few weeks where garden wildlife is concerned. I noticed something was eating the leaves of one of my rose bushes – I’ve not encountered this before. Anyway I’ve looked it up and discovered that the hundreds of little caterpillar things are rose sawfly larvae. I’ve consulted various wildlife Facebook groups and am told they won’t kill the rose. I’ve also been informed that rose leaves are their only food source, so I’ve left them in situ – I don’t want to starve them, but I hope the advice is right!

I spotted this colourful little bug enjoying my lavender – apparently it’s a Rhopalidae – Corizus hyoscyami – I have to say I prefer its common name – Cinnamon Bug. Up until recently they were confined to the south of England but they wanted more adventure in their lives, so they’ve travelled as far as Yorkshire now – that would explain why I’ve not noticed one in my garden before.

And take a look at this beastie – originally from Morocco it arrived on the south coast of England in 1957 and took about 50 years to reach Scotland. I spotted this one on one of my water butts. It’s a type of Opiliones – Dicranopalpus – it’s not a spider, it’s a Harvestman (or woman, I can’t tell). Hope I don’t put you off your tea, but look at its body – it’s like a suit of armour. In case you see one, please don’t swat it, they’re harmless to humans. They do try to deter predators by secreting foul tasting chemicals and if all else fails they self amputate one of their legs. This is a bit creepy – the detached leg keeps moving for a while, the theory being it might confuse a predator and allow the other legs time to run to safety. Mine had all its legs at the time of being photographed.

I was in my bedroom a few weeks ago and thought I heard a squeaky toy – I checked but Lily hadn’t got one. Then I realised the noise was coming from outside. I looked out of the window and saw two birds perching on two of my patio chairs. I rushed for my phone but only managed to capture one (on camera that is). I’m told they’re juvenile sparrowhawks. Now you may have noticed the ‘bird’ in the middle of the table. We purchased him some years ago as a pigeon scarer – he was useless, but we gave him a second chance recently when we wanted to discourage a pair of wood pigeons from nesting above our back door. I asked a twitcher friend whether the sparrowhawks might have thought it was their mum. He looked at me a bit despairingly before acknowledging that anything is possible. The juveniles sat there for over quarter of an hour before one flew off, followed quite a bit later by the other. I think they had eventually realised that their ‘mum’ wasn’t going to provide them with dinner and they’d better sort something out for themselves!