N is for News, Views Etc . . . Sandown.

I sort of ran out of Mojo on Thursday night, only temporary, had other things to do, so should be publishing again by tomorrow, but in the meantime, I saw the bestest shooting star ever last night, the tail must have been 40/100-miles long, and as it broke-up it burned-out turquoise through to ultramarine, it was worth being born, just to see that split-second of wonder!

Anyway, I tthought I'd remind everyone it's Sandown Park toy fair today!

N is for Nature and Gnome's Stools!

Mixing the 'small scales' here with little animals, small plants and small plastic plants, it's a sort of 'News, Views - Bits & Bobs' with a ragged thread running through it!

I shot these over a few days at the cusp of the months just gone and just arrived, I'm sure they are Ink Caps (Coprinus), but which one (there are a dozen or more) is not so clear, my bible for such things (Philips - of course!) doesn't have a perfect match, these (in the pictures) being a bit small for the 'standard' Shaggy Ink Cap (Lawyer's Wig), but a bit big for the Coprinus Lagopus they otherwise more closely resembled.

The detritus left in the third shots is what you can make the ink out of and which gives them their common-name, except you should harvest it before it gets to the state shown here!

Apropos the Wade / Not-Quite-But-Probably-Irish-Factory-Wade Leprechauns we saw the other day, Peter Evans sent me this a couple of days later and I was saving it for the actual 'News Views' but thought this was an ideal way to mix toys and naturalism!

Those of you with a good eye will have realised - immediately upon seeing the above - that what I wrote the other day was a load of cobblers, he wasn't carving a boat OR a crib . . . he's a shoemaker!

He's plastic and not sitting on an Ink Cap, but rather a Fly Agaric, or at least a hand-painter's idea of a Fly Agaric! And there are shade's of Fontanini in the Carrara'esque sample of Connemara marble beneath the Fly Agaric!

A distant relative (by time rather than blood) used to breed Connemara Greys for the London taxi trade and is known in the family for his pronouncement in the 1900's that petrol engines were noisy and smelly and would never take-off! He (and the taxi trade) lost his horses to the hell of Flanders and as the Western Allies grabbed large chunks of the former Ottoman Empire with its cheap oil (throwing electric vehicles on the scrap-heap for three generations), he chose to retire

Sadly although not distant by blood; he's far enough away for me to be unable to apply for Irish Citizenship - so I'm pinning my hopes on the Tories wreaking Bwreakxit!

Shades of Tintin!

This is meant to be a Fly Agaric too, it's a Hong Kong (branded to a 'KT') plastic cake-decoration version of a Japanese cast-lead miniature garden ornament, the lead versions themselves replacing the even earlier ceramic/pumice ones. It's posed in an apple I rescued from three Hornets . . .

26th September 2017

. . . these three Hornets! Note the nervous beating a retreat . . . twice! I'd chopped a few of the rotten apples up with the mower and they were emanating a cider-smell from the top of the compost-bin!

24th September 2013

They get so drunk on apples at this time of year they can't fly! This chap (probably a barren chap'ess!) fell of the woodpile several times before I started filming and went on to make several more attempts, getting caught in the spider's web again too!

Like human drunks struggling to make their legs walk in a straight-line, it just couldn't get its wings to work properly, buzzing furiously, it was going nowhere, flight-wise!

F is for the First Hornet of Spring . . .The First Hornet of Summer!

I like the hornets, they get a bad press, but are in fact less aggressive than wasps (who are - themselves - less aggressive than their press!) and have become regular visitors to the garden, always happy to pose and never having had a go at me!

Tuesday found all these (cropped and collaged to approximate scale with each other) sunning themselves on the fence panels, although two were also busy making wood-pulp for their paper nests.

The hornet (left) is a newbie, and not much bigger then a queen wasp; half the size of the big brutish-looking ones who will be getting drunk on wind-fall apples in five months time! The wasp is a worker, there has been a queen hovering round the back of the house looking for somewhere to start a nest, but this is the progeny of a sharper one, who's already got started elsewhere!

The bee seems to be a carder or mining bee of some sort, or maybe a rarer eucera? People tend to call them all bumble bees but most of them aren't! I shoot loads of fury bees through the year and one day I'll sit down with a good bee-book and sort all the pictures out - then I'll really bore you!

Earlier (last week particularly - but for most of a month now) we've had some lovely weather and a lot of butterflies have been out, I've seen holly blues, an over-wintered peacock (in March), lots of brimstones and various small whites (mostly female brimstones and female orange tips), these are speckled woods which were sunning themselves on the Spirea

At the same time I caught this ant dragging a fortnight's rations home to the nest! I have a little video I'll try and upload to Youtube, if successful a link will follow. I think the victim is a smaller beetle larva.

That worked! I'll have to do more video's? 

My favourite butterfly at this time of year (it used to be brimstones, but they are two-a-penny!) is the orange tip (or copper tip) and they can be fidgets; difficult to catch, but on cool mornings  they prove a little sluggish before they've topped-up the tan, and can be photogenic!

Something that's really hard to shoot is the bee fly, it never stops and so is never in focus as every (literally 'every') fibre of its being is vibrating like a humming bird! I love them, they seem to be a cross between teddy-bears and alien Starfighters - little pointed triangles of purposeful fur!

This is some kind of dwarf euphorbia I think, the flies and hoverflies love it at this time of year.

I also shot these commas at the end of March, the wing-edges are lacking the usually more uneven topography or crenellations distinctive of the species (particularly the left-hand example), probably due to them being over-wintered specimens who's wings have somewhat 'rounded off' with wear and tear!

It also has the darker colouration of the winter generation. The commas have two generations per year, which makes the instinctive behaviour of each all the more remarkable, as all the genetic coding has to jump a 'season' in order to get the child to act like the grandparent, not the parent!

We dumb, curious monkeys struggle to teach basic manners to our children with the aid of a compulsory schooling process, a police force and a judicial system - yet we're threatening most butterflies and most other life on earth!

S is for Spring!

Well, although it's getting colder by the minute this afternoon, and we've had two-and-a-half days of intermittent rain mist and drizzle, we did, back on Monday/Tuesday have the most glorious days of warm sunshine, bringing the Mirabelle plum out in a thick shock of ivory-cream blossom and getting the blood stirring in the wildlife...

This young Blackbird came right up to me as I weeded the rockery, looking for little bugs and things to breakfast on, bold as brass!

There were several Brimstones flying around but they didn't land long enough to catch on film, but this Tortoiseshell, was sunning itself for quite a while on the lawn and I got some nice shots.

It's funny - I think the brimstone is probably my favourite butterfly, or equal with the orange-tip, while the Tortoiseshell is usually only photograph-able at the end of the year when his/her wings look like the one that got away from  Manfred von Richthofen's flying-circus, all shattered and bitty! So there is a symmetry in not getting a shot of my favourite but getting the best shot ever of one I usually don't shoot!

Finally a moth that had the appearance of being fashioned from bits of sun-bleached bracken...as it emerged from a clump of er...sun-bleached bracken; there is the cleverness of nature in all her wonder summed-up in a little thing less than an inch across!

 

 This little mouse looks a bit damp as I had to rescue him from the mouth of Frodo, who was having a wail of a time not killing him for sport! I then had to engage in a great deception with Frodo, helping look all round the wheelbarrow for the 'escaped' mouse, so that he didn't blame me for loosing it.

As I was doing so, I saw the mouse had not gone far before stopping to groom cat-slobber off it's whiskers, so I then had to distract Frodo further, in the hope he wouldn't spot it. In the end the mouse disappeared down the back of the privet hedge, Frodo got to kill my bootlace and everyone was happy!

S is for Seeds and Fir Cones

These may look like normal cones, but they are both the size of a house-brick!

M is for Minerals - Rocks and Fossils

Thanks to 'Liz' for this nice group of Rocks, polished fossils and the like...