A slight Hiatus on the Home Front....

or "Apologies for no major post last week..... or this, and this and that for that matter"

Sorry... with all this fine weather, and a need to get spuds in the ground at the right time this year... I hadn't pre-prepared anything...
But the moth trap has had two airings so far this year... and we've started to get visitors to the windows at night!
The Swallows are back... swinging in and out of the barn.... and paying a visit in here, too... which took a bit of juggling to create an escape route....
The Black Redstarts are back, as well....and the duck gave us a nice present the other day... a fresh egg that she'd laid on the fly down by the old apple tree.
How do we know it was fresh? Because anything like an egg down there wouldn't have lasted overnight....
A Little Egret had been fishing in the bief...and flew past the bedroom window just as I looked out... no need for binos...
The Nightingales are back... three singing males at least... and a Zizi was singing from the wall early doors... a Zizi is the Bruant Zizi... or Cirl Bunting... relative of the Yellowhammer... with a similar song but it keeps what it doesn't want a secret... "Little bit of bread and no..."
It misses out the "cheeeese"
We've got a group of young Viperene Snakes [Lat] Coulevre vipérine who have holed up together just inside the barn door... four is the maximum seen at one time.

So here are a few pictures taken recently.....

Here's the Bruant zizi... aka: Cirl Bunting.... zizi'ing his little heart out!!

There are four Viperene snakes in this picture
... count the heads... one sunbathing...
three in the gap 'twixt barn wall and the metal...
sunwarmed...
hinge.

Three from the moth trap....
R>L: a Brindled Beauty, a Small Lappet and a Lunar Marbled Brown....
the curate who named the last probably had cataracts.... it is all grey!!

 

A hoverfly.... hovering!

An Ichneumonid wasp...
possibly a female Ichneumon xanthorius based on looks and flight period.
{But, only experts can really tell... and not from photos!!}

Black Redstart [male].... showing his "shirt-tails"!

And finally... for the moment... an orb weaving spider.
Tetragnatha sp.... possibly Tetragnatha extensa which is the most common...
but I need the other side to be certain...and this one was...
thirty centimetres off the ground in stinging nettles!!

Bad GPS? Food source? Migration?

This evening I was sitting on the bench outside the house [to be] planning how to tackle the next stage [with a glass of Anglo-Dutch Wildflower in hand] when I noticed that hundreds of Swallows, House Martins and the occasional group of what looked like Wagtails [no binos, so couldn't confirm.... just going on jizz] passing EAST overhead. Everytime I thought they'd stopped another flight came over... there was group after group [not all directly overhead... to misquote Tennyson "Some to the left of me, some to the right... straight into the east flew the X-hundred"]Straight down the Aigronne Valley toward Le Petit-Pressigny.... BUT, was someones Tom-Tom misfunctioning?
An hour later they all came back, drift after drift... or, as I later thought, were they following a rich food source down the valley and then returning to roost.
We thought we'd seen the last of the Martins and Swallows last week.... were these Northern ones on their way South, tapping a rich food source... or was it just bad programming by the makers of Swallow-Tom?