Brueeeuk! Puk-puk-puk

Or, she's done it! This morning we saw Myrtle the moorhen, back on her favourite flag iris bed with at least two newly hatched chicks. This is a definite case of the triumph of hope over adversity. There's no sign of a resident male - she must just have used her gentleman friend as a sperm donor. He probably came from a neighbouring territory where he had a mate of his own. That explains his somewhat shifty look as he sidled away. Myrtle appears to be a single parent by choice. That won't get her a council flat.

She has modified the ruins of the old nest to create a nursery platform on which she was brooding the chicks. As chicks will, they were shooting off in all directions, and she was rounding them up. Many of the iris leaves are arched over, and she has woven them together forming a bower in which she can hide them if she wants to.  In this picture, the yellow horizontal stems are part of the platform.

Myrtle's nursery

Unfortunately the growth of vegetation has made it almost impossible to photograph the little family, but we hope to bring you better pictures soon. Meanwhile...

Myrtle is behind the left hand teasel, and I'm sure that's the red head and yellow beak of a chick

Blue

On the D750 between Barrou and Descartes is the Sablière Bergeresse, a sand and gravel quarry currently undergoing "environmental improvements" on the boundary of La Guerche and Abilly. That is not the subject of this post. Just two fields along in the Descartes direction, on Sunday we saw a blue field. I thought at first sight it was linseed, but then realised it was a rape (colza) crop blued from end to end with cornflowers (centaurea cyanus, bleuet des champs). It's spectacular - worth a special trip just to see it.

Feathers

As well as resuming their courtship, the tawny owls strix aluco chouette hulotte are moulting. I found a feather in the hanger on my potting bench, which had been in use the previous day. They were singing to each other in the  hangar during the night, exchanging trills and soft calls in the most intimate way. The acoustics of the hangar seem to suit them, with one metal wall, one mortared stone wall and two open sides, which allows for a quick exit, not to mention a selection of handy metal beams to perch on for singing, canoodling and grooming.

I found the second feather in the front garden a couple of days later, after another operatic exchange in the hangar. It is more obviously damaged than the first, having lost the tip.

Both feathers are coverts, which spring from the bird's "upper arm", as it were, and cover the bases of the main flight feathers. The first is a greater covert, and the second is I think a lesser covert, from  close to the bird's body.

From www.rspb.co.uk, diagram by Peter Grant

What gives them away as owl feathers is their velvety surface, which gives them a slightly out of focus look, and the fine fringes on the edges of the feather.

The part played by these features in flight is to break up the turbulence of the air passing over the bird's wing into smaller vortices, and smooth it out, thus reducing the noise made by the bird passing through the air. The smoothed air flows silently - thus the owl is silent in flight and attacks without the noise of its approach alerting its prey. You can read more about this here.

With thanks to Tim Dixon, tutor, Birdwatching, York Educational Settlement, early 1980s.

A choosy Dame and some burst bubblewrap!

Saturday morning I rescued a rather worn looking, female Humming-bird Hawkmoth [Macroglossum stellatarum] Moro-Sphinx from the inside of the kitchen window.

This is one I took earlier.... 2006, actually!

Their larval foodplants are bedstraws....
here we have the biggest of the lot...
Goosegrass or Cleavers [Gallium aparine]Gaillet Gratteron.
I wish it wasn't so abundant....
it pulls my young trees over....
and then buries them completely...
so I released her where there was a patch that is unlikely to get the chop in the "foreseeable".

She immediately began to lay...
it was fascinating to watch...
I thought she was feeding at first....
but it dawned quite quickly that she was hovering mainly at the unopened tips.
She would hover up and down a tip...
decide it wasn't right, or too small...
then move to another.
If it was deemed suitable, she laid an egg...
by dabbing her tail against the underside of a leaf about two inches lower...
she chose nice fat tips...
presumably with plenty of growth to come.
I will keep an eye open on that patch....

On the subject of laying eggs, the daft Fox Moths have been at it again....
laying on the edge of the door frames....

Rather like little eyes... or perhaps humbugs?

and another, an Ubu moth [Unknown because unseen], laid a batch of eggs directly on the glass...

Little round marbles...

they seemed to be doing nothing and....
as they were in full sunlight...
I thought they'd probably cooked...
and then, just as Pauline and I were going out...
I noticed each one had a black dot....
"I'll photograph that later", thought I...
on our return...
they'd almost completely hatched out.

All hatched out....

These pix give some idea of the hatching out process...
some of them crawled away...
others abseiled down the three feet on home-spun silk!

...and almost all gone!!

Now all that is left is the burst bubblewrap!!

They were leaving silk trails before they left the vicinity of the egg mass!!