The Next Generation in the Garden

The garden has lots of caterpillars and nymphal plant bugs and minute spiders as the next generations begin. Calophasia lunula, the Toadflax Brocade moth, is a recent immigrant to the UK but is now very widely spread - we have a good population every year, a very attractively patterned caterpillar. Plant bug nymphal stages are difficult to tell apart but generally they are found on the same plants as the adults which helps!! The garden has dozens of small flower spiders with different colours and pattern.

Challis Gardens

Francoise and David kindly dressed up in their Edwardian clothes and joined a group from our camera club at Challis Gardens in Sawston  for an evening shoot. We were lucky with the weather so there was beautiful golden sunlight just breaking through the trees. I decided to use a legacy f1.8 50mm lens which is ideal for an evening shoot except that it is manual focus only which I didn't always get spot on. I also used a full spectrum camera as the light faded  - have included one colour balanced and one b/w from that camera (interesting which clothing absorb, radiate or reflect infrared etc. Thanks David and Francoise for an enjoyable evening.

Saturday Evening Flying at Duxford

The skies cleared completely on Saturday in time for the Flying Evening at Duxford which concluded with these motorised gliders equipped with lights and fireworks. 

Dragonfly Day at Paxton Pits

 We have not been at all lucky with the weather for events this year. Our Annual Dragonfly Day in July with the Dragonfly Society (Paxton is a Dragonfly Hotspot ) had to be cancelled because of rain. Our replacement day yesterday was dry but overcast, breezy and cool so not the variety of dragonflies that we hoped plus the Dragonfly Society could not attend the amended date. However, over 30 people turned up for the event and took part in one or both of the walks. Here a few images from the day (Willow Emerald plus the Emerald Damselfly that we hoped but failed to see, Common Darter, Common Blue Damselfly, Blue-tailed Damselfly, Migrant hawker plus other insects including the very spiky Comma caterpillar and the Darwin Wasp (Ichneumon in old terms!)).