Somewhat Forlorn Butterflies

The two mature Buddliea bushes in my back garden have been very slow to blossom this year, which has been a major disappointment to me. The florettes have only just begun to really show within the last three or four days, and I was beginning to worry that they would flower so late that no insects would still be around to do their work.

Sunday afternoon finally saw a reasonable number of both the butterflies and bees, I had only seen Cabbage Whites in the garden so far this season. Now I was seeing the more colourful varieties, the Tortoiseshell, Small Brown and Peacock, but upon closer inspection those visitors were in a parlous state, so having had a warm fuzzy over seeing the increased numbers of butterflies gracing my garden, I was now much saddened by seeing the tatty and battered ones that arrived. I doubt these specimens have long to wait before the end comes.

The bees seemed in better condition, but even before Sunday I was seeing battered wingtips on those. The gallery of images I have created shows that they were all hard at work catching up on lost time as they gathered the fresh nectar, and the bees seemed happy to bulldozer past the butterflies as if they were not there. The butterflies seemed far more concerned when their own species arrived on the scene, and would often fly away rather than stay their ground.

The various species of Whites were still keen on mating as they would often fly off and do their aerial pirouettes when confronted on a buddliea blossom. This now the last of any flowering in this garden, so once these visitors have left I really only have Autumn to bring colour to the garden till Spring next year.

Avian Visitors to my Garden

Every so often I find surprise visitors to the garden. On this occasion, the most attractive was a goldfinch. This is the first time ever; I have pigeons and collared doves, robins, blackbirds and blue tits.

I stopped filling the bird feeder for a while when I found I had a grey bushy-tailed animal stealing from it, and so I left it a week, before refilling it. Instead I have been putting out seeds and peanuts in the morning on the ground, but that rather favours the pigeons and collared doves, whereas it is the smaller birds I wish to encourage.

This small gallery of just nine shots was taken through the closed and dirty kitchen window. I then cleaned the window, both sides and found a number of very unwelcome but very dozy flies, which I swatted on the nice clean window! The corpses were then picked up and put out as an offering to the birds, and were obviously considered tasty as they were scoffed within a few minutes.