Fliers

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Enough of that. Today I have some fliers for you…

The photos below are all on Flickr.

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We were pleased to see this little chap on the porch recently. A pert little bird.

A Common Yellow Throat. We’d not seen one before.

Though in all likelihood we have, without realising, as they would blend in with the many little brown jobs that populate the hill. This one just happened to catch Grant’s eye.

What sounded like a tap on the window one day proved to be a large butterfly.

So I went outside and watched it fly in great loops around the garden.

*Eventually I persuaded it to land on the coneflowers.

“What happened to your milkweed missus?”

What indeed. It is a messy sort of plant that does tend to take over a flowerbed, though I didn’t banish it. It simply failed to grow and I have missed seeing the Monarch caterpillars this year. Hopefully they are having a decent season in the lower field where it thrives.

Along with the field thistles, golden rod and assorted other unidentified growth.

It’s been too warm to venture down lately but I may get there next week.

The buddleia hasn’t done well this year either but fortunately it has enough flowers for the few hummingbirds that visit.

Sometimes I see them in the tree above the Roses of Sharon.

And often when I’m out doing my rounds, I hear one buzz past like an oversized bumblebee.

To help sustain these delightful creatures, I prepare sugar water for their feeder. I read yesterday that bats drink from these feeders. I don’t think they have discovered ours but if they did they would be perfectly welcome.

Bats scared me when I was a child, but even then I would not have begrudged them food.

Cows were my greatest fear, then spiders and bats. I was unlikely to encounter a bat although my mother met up with one in our kitchen in Cambodia, much to the alarm of both parties. The flat where we first lived there overlooked the Tonle Sap and toward sunset every day we observed flocks of birds returning to roost from the spit of land that separated that river from the Mekong which flowed into it further along. As the birds came back, bats flew out in the opposite direction, hundreds of them.

In the ruins of Angkor, the smell of bats permeated the air. I think I came to associate them with decay but I don’t anymore.

Bats, birds, butterflies. How wonderful it must be to fly.

*Truthfully, persuasion had nothing to do with it.