Nature Chain Winsley

 23 June 2025  Coming of age! Legitimate fledgling blue tits with fluffy, brownish down, not yet smooth feathers or blue...Three or four of them are regulars several times a day - a smile of delight every time to see them through the window at the end of the hall! But suddenly  A young squirrel is now up there, cheeks full like a hamster! And then another! ... both stuffing themselves,  within the ‘protecting anti squirrel’ cage!... just like children faced with a sweetie jar! A collared dove joins in - often two, so they are maybe rearing young, as is the garden robin. Wildlife Gardening: Birds need feeding in summer, the RSPB has confirmed it helps keep up the population, particularly those becoming more scarce. And fresh water is also a must – for drinking and bathing and preening to keep feathers good.  - two young town corvids sunning themselves to rid feathers of mites, lice etc.  In another wildlife garden, young mammal visitors are less greedy and ...

  16 June 2025 JP meadow butterflies A pink hillside... a meadow of wild Marjoram with Hemp Agrimony highlighted with purple Knapweed – a feast for butterflies. Here  a Common Blue with fabulous, almost metallic, shot-silk effect wings of blues tinged with purple drinks deep. The Small Heath  looks  very different: they always rest with their wings closed revealing the underside of their wings. Bob Drower’s wonderfully clear photos show the amazing detail of butterfly wings – hairs and scales. These tiny scales overlap like roof tiles and create the colours and patterns. These are the ‘dust’ that you might see falling from the wings when a moth attracted to the light collides with a window, or if you touch moth or butterfly wings (best not to as scales are part of efficient flight). Through a microscope, butterfly and moth wings appear like the scales of a lizard or the feathers of a bird – reflected in their group name: Lepidoptera: derived from the Greek Lepido ...

  9 June 2025 River In the flower bed a bumble bee ram-raids its way into a Pink Campion bud and sucks nectar deep and long   It is the time of plenty and pressure – the clock is ticking for the halcyon days of summer sweetness and sorting out the next generation. By the pond two spiders sit smug at the edge of a web laden with insects – a welcome insight into the numbers of tiny creatures floating and flying invisibly on air currents up high (aerial plankton) as well as low within sight. We see these tiny midges/gnats flying up and down, maybe competing, in the shafts of sunlight filtering through sheltering bushes. And they are not only good food for spiders, but feed our night flying bats, and by day swifts and the occasional swallow hawking across the sky, scooping food out of thin air. The professionals have appeared during the last few weeks... the damselflies and dragonflies . With the effortless superiority of ancient lineage with aeons of fine-tuning of design...

 2 June 2025 Feeding/Waiting >River fest Wild animals are frantically feeding... or waiting and still. Bumble Bees stock up their pollen baskets from Columbine (Aquilegia) – cultivated  or wild. Foxgloves really do act as gloves, sheltering insect or valuable pollen prize and nectar Lower flowers on the foxglove stem often have lots more pollen than nectar, which encourages the pollinator to go on up to higher flowers in their nectar search, and so distribute pollen further up the plant to higher flowers. And there is a smaller less obvious visitor too, looks like a beetle!  Superb moth camouflage allows them to just wait for night darkness to hide them. This moth would be invisible against bark or amongst shady foliage... it is in a collecting tube and about to be released, having been identified (Common Marbled Carpet Moth) for county records for assessing insect biodiversity. By the garden pond, a newt  sits it out in the shade. Two-spotted Water Hoglouse...