Large Chequered Skipper and other goodies at the shooting range

The what skipper, I hear you cry? I certainly did, and I thought I was pretty clued up about butterfly species that I might expect to see in France. But no, I saw a lifer and I didn't even know it existed!!

Different habitat from at home is key here. K is a member of a shooting club and the location is beside a military base in a forest. Not just any kind of forest but at least in this spot, a very damp forest, which has green grass within even in the driest of summers. There are plenty of ditches which remain damper still and I usually see dragonflies here. Why am I going with K to his club? Well I have been shooting with him in the past and immediately saw that the surrounding area would be interesting to explore, and so on the rare occasions when the sun shines on a spring or summer Saturday morning, I go along, armed with my camera, to do a bit of shooting of a different kind! I have only been twice this summer which attests to the infrequence of sunny mornings, at least on Saturday! 

This is the place where I saw the Chequered Skipper a few years ago which was very exciting, so I at least knew that species existed. The Large one is not quite so striking; in fact is rather drab on the upper side, but the underwing markings are beautiful. I couldn't get really close to it as it was very flitty, indeed it's flight pattern has been described as unique - it is very 'bobby' for want of a better word. I got to observe it for quite a while when it was too hard to take photos.

This butterfly is found on the western side of France and its habitat is in damp forest rides and clearings and marshy heathland. The larva feed on various grasses and the butterfly is on the wing from June to August.

Large Chequered Skipper (Heteropterus morpheus).

By contrast, here is the Chequered Skipper (Carterocephalus palaemon) that I saw here several times in May 2014. You can see that I managed to get a lot closer to this species!

Yes, that is my finger there. It was a magical moment. One of the pictures of it on my finger is in my banner image above.

I've seen other interesting butterflies here, as there are a number of disused tarmac roads round the back of the range, where sunlight penetrates and butterflies and other insects can be found around the edges on the flowers. The best place though is the (infrequently) mown grassed area where the archery targets are - here there are flowers in amongst the grass and taller wildflowers and bracken around the perimeter, which includes a ditch. The only downside is that we only get to come here in the morning, and often the bees and butterflies etc are only just waking up close to when we have to leave. I'm not sure about coming here in the afternoon, as although it is outside of the actual military camp it is primarily a part of it and the range is used by the police and military outside of the Saturday morning civilian club slot.

This is the place where I first saw a Dingy Skipper (Erynnis tages), and as I have (for the first time) been seeing a number of them around my home territory, I am including an image that I took here in 2014. All my recent shots have been a bit rubbish. There are some skippers that like to rest on vegetation so it is quite easy to photograph them, and others that rarely do!

Back to last Saturday and for the first time I saw a Red Squirrel there. It was quite an amazing, if very brief, encounter. Now the moment I spotted the squirrel on the edge of the mown grassed area and started to try to focus on it, it was off.... and then I realised it was running towards me, so I just snapped and snapped (never mind camera settings!). It came really close, looked at me, seemed to realise that I was a human and not an archery target board, and then legged it!

It stopped one more time to check on me, then off it bounded again and my photos after that were of a blurred bushy tail. We used to have Red Squirrels living in our garden, but I haven't seen one in years now so this moment was all the more special for that.

Some dragonflies have been out and about these two times I have been here this month.

I think is a female Common Darter (Sympetrum striolatum).

The following one I think is a male Ruddy Darter (Sympetrum sanguineum). I haven't much time for IDing at the moment but it seems that Ruddys have black legs whereas Commons have black legs with a pale stripe. Here's a good link which helps with ID. 

I was hoping to see, and was so pleased when it appeared... a Silver Washed Fritillary (Argynnis paphia). Not the best specimen but never mind! I've since seen a tatty looking female in my garden. This one is a male.

I'll leave you with a piccy of me shooting my OH's Smith & Wesson revolver. I call it his Cowboy Gun. So be warned - don't mess with me!!

Adios Amigos!

I won't have time to do any more blog posts before leaving for our MoHo trip to the Pyrenees and Spanish Mediterranean. This is our holiday that I planned whilst having chemotherapy - I decided we would have a decent holiday when it was all over and I had had some time to recover. Of course at the time I never imagined that we would have bought a motorhome and that our holiday would be in that! I have managed to extend the original 2 weeks to most of September now *big grin* - well we need to get our money's worth! - OK that is my excuse. :-)

So I won't be blogging whilst away but when I do have access to WiFi I will upload some photos to social media, so if you are interested you can follow me on the following sites to see the photos, which are all posted publically.

Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/mandy.allen.5095

Twitter
https://twitter.com/MadameMoorhen
I am akaMillymollymandy and @MadameMoorhen
(I've never understood why one needs two names on Twitter) 

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/chateaumoorhen/ 

I hope you all have a wonderful rest of summer and I will catch up with you in October! xx

Red squirrels, ducks and a mystery chilli

It's so rare that I get an opportunity to photograph a red squirrel. I see them often but they are very wary here and bound off at first sight of a human. They live here in our garden and there is, we think, a drey up in a Spruce tree near the pond.

So just as I was walking past that tree about a week ago, I heard a familiar sound coming from a nearby tree and looked up. Luckily I had my camera in my hand! I think the squirrel was scolding me for going too close to its drey.

Pics are a bit grainy as I still wasn't close enough and I've had to crop an already zoomed in photo.

Just to change the subject I forgot on my last but one post about lazy summer days to post a photo of Doris duck learning how to do the bottom's up pose.....

They are so funny when they do this. They also swim under water, quite a way sometimes then come up and splash about wildly. Sometimes they do this after mating, when they're feeling a bit frisky! They do always have a jolly good bathe after sex it must be said!

Had a bit of a shock recently as one night the naughty ducks refused to come into their shed and the next morning Rachel the Rouen was missing. I searched high and low, fearing the worst, looking for signs of entry by a fox. Nothing. No sign of her, no feathers, no holes in the perimeter fence - it was a mystery. Then my OH went to look again and found her straight away. Oh yes, she'd gone broody and was sitting in a nest under a load of brambles by the pond - on six eggs and a pine cone. This corresponded with the fact she'd stopped laying 7 days beforehand.

We were then faced with the dilemma of what to do - not really wanting and certainly not needing more ducks, not happy about her staying out on the nest at night, but also rather drawn towards having some cute ducklings about the place. In the end we decided we would let nature take its course, thinking that not all eggs would be likely to hatch, and that predators would likely take some of the ducklings anyway.

We shouldn't have worried as she came off the nest in the evening and happily let herself be herded into the shed. The next day she was back on the nest in the morning, then came off it once in the afternoon and again later on and went happily into the shed for the night. By this time we knew it was unlikely those eggs were ever going to come to anything as they need to be kept warm all the time. She turned out to be total rubbish at being broody as by the next day she'd forgotten all about it and now they're being eaten by the magpies and crows, so that kind of solved that problem!

And just so you don't think I spend all my time photographing wildlife, and watching the antics of ducks, I do actually do some work in my veg patch occasionally...... and I'm wondering just what the hell kind of Jalapeno pepper this is supposed to be (Jalapenos are a short fat stuffable kind of chilli)! I'm sure I didn't get my labels mixed up, and even if I did, this is most certainly not a Piment d'Espelette either!! Maybe a seed of a different variety got into one of the packets? Time will tell I guess - not that I'll know what variety it is, but neither Jalapeno nor Piment d'Espelette are hot at all so a taste test could be interesting!

Walnuts

Last night on River Cottage Hugh F-W made an amazing looking sweet pastry walnut caramel pie - I've never wanted to make something so bad! We have gazillions of walnuts here from our 3 walnut trees so I am always trying to use them up - I make walnut bread often, always put chopped walnuts in crumble toppings and put them in a lot of cakes too. 

They say a walnut tree takes 10 years to start to produce. I didn't plant mine, they were already there and the year we bought this house was the first year the biggest tree had produced - a couple of nuts. Over the next few years it went from about 2 nuts to 15, then 50 to..... about 1,000 - yes, really, that big a jump! By this time the smaller trees were starting to produce too. 

I can't believe I actually advertised these two smaller trees on Anglo Info 6 years ago to anyone with a trailer or transit van who would like to come and dig them up! You'd need a digger and a huge truck now! It's just amazing how quickly they grow and the diameter of the trunk grows as rapidly as the height of the tree. The reason for wanting to get rid of the smaller trees was (sigh) because they had been planted too close to the bigger tree in the middle. Thankfully it's turned out fine with a bit of pruning although they do rather grow into each other a bit, and one isn't the prettiest of shapes.



 I'm so glad I kept the two smaller trees as they produce a larger nut - can't taste any difference but they are easier to find and pick up, and look, well, prettier!


Here's how they look now, nearly 6 years later - the two smaller trees on either side of the big one.

This is just a very small amount of the nuts I have collected this year - and yes I really, really had to stop myself from counting every single nut collected, which I have been doing until last year (1,859). Yes I'm a saddo!

And this little chap/chappess (in fact there may be two of them) who live in my garden help to 'propagate' by burying their nuts EVERYWHERE in my flower beds and veg patch and lawn - come spring I am weeding out walnut trees galore as he/she never seems to be able to find their buried nuts - but I can't be cross - how can anyone not love red squirrels!