This is how our poached egg plants (liminanthes douglasii) looked over the Bank Holiday weekend - it is a wonderful plant that is not in flower very long, and is an annual that I just allow to set seed in the vegetable garden and then pull out. It attracts hover flies to start with and then a little later on, as above, it attracts bees. The honey bees in our garden have not been doing so well so it is lovely to see them looking well and feeding on the poached egg plants.
Over the last three days, I've had three "sightings" that I've enjoyed. The first, on Sunday, was the hares again. I say again - but who knows if they were the same hares? However, they were in the same place, so it seems likely to me. But this time, there were three hares - or rather, six pairs of ears. It was rather difficult to see the hares properly as the corn is now growing quite fast (much better than my own sweet corn I might add) and so most of the hares could not be seen - except for their ears. But once I had seen them, I did see their heads and some of their bodies as they moved around.
Then yesterday, cycling home after some much wetter conditions than of late, I saw some black and white birds on the cricket pitch at Willen village. This is where the magpies congregate - in very large numbers. (They must be increasing at quite a rate I think - we used to look out for the second when we saw one when I was a child - now I frequently see 10 or 12 or more at a time...) But these were not magpies, they were oystercatchers. Nothing unusual about that - except the location. Willen, in my experience, does not host many oystercatchers. The last I saw locally was one flying over Bury Common in Newport Pagnell about a year ago. These two were probing in the wet grass - and were still there this morning.
My last treat was as I was leaving work at the Open University around 6.30 and noticed a brown squattish bird as I was cycling past the football pitch. Looks like an owl I thought and started to carry on.........then realised that this was a bit unusual and also wanted to see whether it was indeed an owl. So I turned the bike round and went to walk onto the pitch. The bird had been quite still - and I wondered if it was injured - or fairly newly fledged. As I got a bit closer it flew off into a nearby tree and undfortunately I had no binoculars with me, but it was clearly a tawny owl - I supsect a fairly young bird perhaps not long out of the nest. So it was quite a happy person that continued their cycle home through the grey early evening - and then on the lane, I saw and heard a chiff-chaff. Again nothing very unusual except that I am only just starting to learn about warblers. I've always found small brown or greenish brown birds tricky to identify - like lots of other people - and as for warblers, have never even tried, until I paid some attention to a radio 4 programme last year that was about warbler songs. And I think I do now recognise a chiff chaff call - and the bird calling certainly looked like one to me. So a good few days considering it is fairly wet and miserable - though the rain was desparately needed for the garden.
And on a different note - here is some of the wildlife from the garden
