On the way back home from London on Friday I travelled in the company of a couple of birding enthusiasts, people who carry about with them a notion of the week of the year in which to expect to hear the first cuckoo of spring. One of them is a local farmer and it is clear that he is doing an immense amount to work with the wider environment.
Badgers are a wonderful creatures, though weighed down with an excess of sentimental clap trap put upon them by people who’ve never seen one and who don’t share their living space with badgers; for farmers they are a nightmare even without the spectre of TB. Where my house is they’re not a problem at least as far I’m aware – the property is too deep in town. But the additional land on the outskirts adjoins the open farmland outside town and there badgers potentially will be destructive. And once they’re present there is nothing to be done.
The other birder I fell into the three way conversation with is a school teacher and I learned that the local school is currently crossing everything against badgers having moved in beneath the portable classrooms that are due to be replaced by more permanent structures in the next 18 months. If a badger sett is found under them that’s it for the local children. Draughty cabins through winter for the foreseeable future.
The farmer is nurturing at a distance a small colony of curlew, going so far as to install an electrified fence to deter foxes after last year’s nests were destroyed in one bleak night. I have an open invitation to go wandering among the grasses and weeks in that part of his farm he is in effect turning into a mini wildlife sanctuary. Farmers get bad press for their dependency upon chemicals and other trappings of modern farming practice but that represents a distorted caricature of the truth.
In the meanwhile the Small Magpie seems to have settled in for the long haul. Can’t it find anything to do? Get out, meet a girlfriend/boyfriend? Save up for a down payment on a nice little place of their own? Make baby eurrhypara hortulata perhaps? Another udea olivalis was in the kitchen this morning, too. Move on guys, please.
The great news was a new species and not only that but one I’m very nearly certain I’ve an ID for.
Diamond-back Moth (plutella xylostella)
A foray into the gardens turned up no moths today in what are still chilly and moderately blustery conditions (this isn’t called Flaming June without a liberal dose of English irony) but I did find my first (green) lacewing of the year, and two striking new inhabitants:
Enoplognatha ovata
Unidentified beetle
The beetle and the spider, of similar size, were found on the underside of strawberry leaves – but at opposite ends of the strawberry patch.
