Garden Update

Well the recent sunny weather and rise in temperatures has certainly provoked further life in the garden.

Butterflies have made a most welcome appearance with two Springtome specialities turning up within a couple of days of each other. Firstly only our second ever brimstone flew in briefly settling for seconds and then went on its way. Then a pristine male orange tip only the third ever for the garden. More predictably a few worn peacock and commas, large and small white and a small tortoiseshell.

Bee flies have continued to appear and our bee hotel has got visitors already.

Two hedgehogs on the trail cam gave some promise of another attempt at brreding-only time will tell. Tadpoles continue to thrive in the pond and woodpigeons are probably sat on eggs.

The dawn chorus is reaching its crescendo with robins starting in the pitch black soon to be joined by what sounds like hundreds of blackbirds and then ends with a mixture of house sparrows, wrens and dunnock-something to behold on these Spring mornings.

The warm weather has also brought out some mosquito type flies. Backlit by the evening sunshine they present an interesting and challenging photo opportunity.

Finally for now I have been experimenting with trying to photograph our local bats. There is a narrow window of opportunity from the sun going down (at about 8 pm) and the light disappearing completely at around 8.30. It involves getting a high shutter speed in low light by whacking up the ISO. Not always easy and very much a work in progress. I think there will be a half decent shot to be had if I persevere.

As the weather warms up there is plenty more to look forward to and indeed be thankful for. We wont be locked down forever, there is still a lot to be thankful for and a lot of it is literally right on our doorsteps.

Peacock Butterfly

Brimstone (record shot)

Bee Fly

Bee Fly

Bee Fly

Bee Fly

Comma

Orange Tip

Hedgehog (taken on trailcam)

Springtime in the Garden

I have been focussing on photography from the garden just recently.

Nothing rare but a nice opportunity to see and appreciate what is just on the doorstep.

Garden Wildlife

Well seeing as everyone is ‘confined to barracks’ so to speak, I thought I’d do a post on our garden and the wildlife we have attracted since moving in.

Hopefully I will do a few more posts over the coming weeks as the season changes.

We live on the south side of Beverley and thankfully when they built the estate they did leave a good amount of greenery and the footpaths nearby provide decent wildlife corridors.

When we moved in the garden had a slate border, brass in the middle and 3 or 4 ornamental trees, it was pretty much a desert.

Slowly but surely we have made little improvements to the habitat and eventually we have seen some good results.

The slate border has been replaced with a mixture of wildflowers and shrubs.

We have built a pond.

We have created 3 logpiles.

We have put up 3 nest boxes.

Last year we let the grass grow tall in the middle of the lawn.

We have placed a few feeders with different food around the garden.

So what have we had?

Starting with mammals;

We had our first hedgehog about 3 years agon and last uear they built a nest! They have recently become active again and can be seen regularly on our trail camera.

The other pretty cool critters we see quite often are wood mice and they come out either late evening, during the night or early morning. They were quite active over the summer and it is likely they were taking food for their young.

We have had house mice, grey squirrel and also we get a couple of bats flitting over the garden on warm summer evenings.

Birdwise we have had the following actually in the garden

House sparrow

Tree sparrow

Dunnock

Blue tit

Great tit

Coal tit

Long Tailed Tit

Chaffinch

Greenfinch

Starling

Blackbird

Song Thrush

Fieldfare

Robin

Wren

Carrion crow

Rook

Jackdaw

Magpie

Woodpigeon

Collared Dove

Blackcap

Herring gull

Common gull

Lesser black-backed gull

Black headed gull

Sparrowhawk

Housemartin (nesting under the eaves)

Birds seen flying over include;

Common buzzard

Peregrine falcon

Red Kite

Kestrel

Greylag goose

Pink footed goose

Cormorant

Mallard

Teal

Pied wagtail

Yellow wagtail

Meadow pipit

Bullfinch

Birds heard include:

Tawny Owl

Chiff-chaff

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Skylark

Pheasant

We haven’t done too bad for butterflies either-16 species so far as well as 5 hummingbird hawk moths!

There has also been a myriad of creepy crawlies, bees, flies and spiders(none of which are my speciality)

There have already been some great sightings so far this year-nesting robins, hedgehos(s), wood mice,tadpoles in the pond and a flyover red kite.

I hope to do a few more posts over the coming weeks and as the season goes on hopefully there should be more things to enjoy.

Its testing times at the moment, but it has certainly given me some time to reflect on things to be thankful for. Exploring the natural world can be good for the soul and it is literally on your doorstep.

Stay safe, thanks for reading.