To prey or not to prey... that is but Nature... raw in tooth or mandible!!

I was strolling round our watermeadow, early doors...
looking for interesting pictures of the wildlife...
when this scene occurred in front of me...
I was just about to take a picture of the "Pea Penny-pipes" when it was pounced upon by this Blue-tailed Damselfly...

Quite a tussle occured until, very suddenly the Blue Featherlegs stopped resisting...

....and she crawled forwards onto a dead plant... where I could see through the viewfinder what was happening.

The reason Pennipipes had suddenly become subdued was very clear... the female Common Bluetail that attacked her had chewed through the thorax and consumed her flight muscles!

You can see from the side shot here that her thorax has been chewed from start to finish...

...and that was enough for the smaller damselfly... who, having fatally crippled the Featherlegs... went off and rested just above on a dying nettle!!

I moved Penny Featherlegs to a wild carrot flowerhead where she would be more visible to predators... doubting that the Common Bluetail would be back for more.

and this final photo is a close-up I took before leaving, which shows the extent of the damage.

Sorry, Nature isn't nice and twee.... it is nasty... but with beautiful moments!
Given the number of warblers we have here...
and the swallows, tits, wolf spiders, big bushcrickets...
and my favourites... the huge wasp spiders... carnivores all...
the Bluetail itself could have bought it by the end of the day!!
Even sparrows and other seed eaters hunt insects at this time of the year....
to feed their growing young.

This whole episode lasted... taken from the time of the photos...
09:54 18 - First shot - pounced a few seconds earlier.
09:54 44 - 26 seconds to cripple her.
09:56 24 - Finished meal in 2 minutes & 6 seconds!

The protagonists... or the diner and her meal are...
Common Bluetail / Blue-tailed Damselfly (Ischnura elegans) l'Agrion élégant  [female]....
Blue Featherleg / White-legged Damselfly (Platycnemis pennipes) l'Agrion à larges pattes [immature female]
all taking place in our water meadow / flood plain of the Aigronne River.

And no apologies for the title!

Return of the moorhens

Once again the moorhens gallinula chloropus gallinules poules-d'eau are building a nest on the millstream outside our bedroom window. One bird (probably the female) is directing operations and weaving twigs into the cushion shape that will be the base of the nest. The other (the male) is doing most of the fetching and carrying.

Now don't tug, dear

We cannot tell whether or not this female is Myrtle, our soap opera star from last year, or one of her daughters. The male may well be inexperienced, because last year's male disappeared before the chicks hatched.

I'll just go and get some more, dear, is that right?

The flag iris, site of the moorhen nest for the past three years, is this year spread out across the stream bed, and looks unlikely to produce enough cover for the birds. This nest is an innovation, set upon a stone, possibly a piece of masonry from the old forge. However, as Tim puts it, they will have to go up another six inches to be in with a chance.

There's a nice twig over there ...

Did you know that moorhens have teeth? And scarlet underpants?

Presently the water is clearer than we have seen it for years, and there is plenty of waterweed. Today we heard the clear whistle of a kingfisher for the first time since autumn last year. The mallards anas platyrhynchos canards colvert are nesting a little further upstream than last year. The duck is as dignified and the drake as attentive as ever. It's getting better!

Posted by Pauline.

In go the trout

Yesterday on our way into the village we saw more than the usual number of white vans and cars parked by the bridge.

Taken through the car window - did we mention that it was raining?

It would appear that the issues that we described here between the members of our local fishing clubs, the Gaule du Grand Pressigny of late memory and the AAPMMA "La Truite de l'Aigronne" are resolved and the AAPMMA has taken over. Fishing permits are on sale and the stocks of farmed brown trout and (non-native) rainbow trout were being released as usual.

Large red boxes were shuttling from the back of the pick-up to the river bank. Grey boxes waited to be emptied. The colours identify the species. Further along the river, a smaller red box was in transit, carried gingerly across a field. Meanwhile...

Monitoring the dispersal of the fish

As for the person with the bucket heading purposefully for the river bank, we will charitably assume you also were monitoring the dispersion of the released fish, and not helping yourself to a bucketful of gawping tourists....

Wet, wetter, wettest!

The first weekend of this month saw the end of a very wet week... in fact the wettest since we've been here.
Since Thursday, November the First, the rain didn't seem to stop falling for more than a couple of minutes.
And, if you needed to go outside at that point, there was still some rain "in the air".
I made this comment on another blog...
"We are currently flooded at this end of the Aigronne... the bief is up two foot from the norm... our neighbours fields are awash, one containing winter wheat, and we have a flooded meadow.
The meter is reading almost an inch of rain for the last twenty-four hours and it is still bucketing down. The plastic gauge is over half full... can't read the divisions... I am looking at it with the telescope from indoors... but that's around three inches since last Saturday!"

The two pictures on this entry are taken from the bedroom window... I wasn't venturing out at that point.

The main meadow... awash from end to end.
The bright reflections are from the water... under our big willows...
in the recently ploughed field on the far bank...
and from the reflection beyond the big willows to the new willows on the right...
the rather 'flat' appearance of the grass is caused by the flowing water.
There is even some on the plateau where the forge stood...
look at the reflection of the sky...
just beyond the wood pile in the foreground....
the highest ground on that bank!!

I haven't yet connected up the Weather Station to the computer... but we have a plastic tube rain gauge that I've been emptying on Sundays. From the morning of Sunday the 28th October to last Sunday morning a total of 96mm had fallen... as I emptied it around mid-afternoon, that doesn't include the millimetre that the rain gauge was showing at midnight... that fell whilst I was over in the longère beginning this post.

Grand Café Créme anyone?
This is the view the other side of the new willows in the previous photograph.
Silty water doing our meadow some good... but...
Silty water covering the recently recovered weed in the bief!
As I complete this blog entry for posting....
there is still standing water in the ditch between the two meadow areas

As Gaynor blogged there were floods everywhere... especially effected were the newly planted fields of Winter Wheat.
But I commented elsewhere...
"I have no sympathy though for the farmers who cultivate the floodplain, rather than leaving it for grazing or hay. The ploughing has created a rise at the field edge and a hollow in the middle... result, now that the river has gone down a little is that, between the bridge and the poplar plantation there is now a visible river edge on the lefthand side that matches the righthand edge by the road.... leaving in the middle a lake that won't drain for weeks. There are newly planted crops here that will not now come up... and the field will not be dry enough to re-work until the late Spring... what a b#**~y waste! Until two years ago, this was a regularly mowed hay meadow!"

We have a goodly number of 'eleveurs' of beef cattle around here, as well as La Borde and Grandmont just up the hill from us who are both milk producers. The new wash of silt over the fields that are grazing land will ensure a good hay crop... or, in the case of M. Deschartes, a small holder with a small herd of milkers, living just above the hill from Gatault [also a grazier/cattle dealer] good grazing. His cattle are on the in-by land around the farm... or under cover... at the moment, so the good cuts of hay he got from the meadow at the bottom of the hill, before he let the cattle have free rein, will help over winter with the quality of his milk. Both he, and the cattle dealer at Gatault, use the flood plains for what they should be used for... grazing!!

Others cultivate right up to the river edge... just to get that extra bit of cash... and then moan that all the work currently going on on the river is causing the flooding... when they are using land that should never be cultivated. How on earth is Yohann, the river technician, going to get the water quality he is after with some of the local agriculturalists causing problems like this.... with the fields cultivated right up to the water courses, the fertilisers, manure and worst, the slurry will continue to run off and pollute the river.

What hope is there for the river life?
And the wildlife that depends on it...
how can the Kingfisher hope to feed...
lucky dip?