September started well with a successful visit to Lakenheath Fen to spot some Kingfishers. An early morning start meant that the reserve was full of spiders as it is Spider mating season. This month we also had another visit to the garden from a Humming Bird Hawk Moth. They do seem to favour the Salvia flowers.
We just love watching these Humming Bird Hawk moths.
Another Moth that we had not seen in the garden before was this Box Tree Moth. This is an accidentally introduced species to this country from South East Asia. Their caterpillars can quickly strip any box plant of its leaves and eventually kill the plant. Luckily we do not have any Box plants in the garden, we found this moth on the Choisya Shrub
Suddenly the Long Tailed Tits are back feeding in the garden after being missing all summer. There is quite a gang of them this year, such a joy to watch.
A close up macro view of our very large garden spider with a very sucked dry fly.
This is the Yellow Orb Weave Spider at Lakenheath Fen RSPB. There were lots of these and they all varied in markings and various degrees of yellow colour, some very pale and some vibrant yellow, and beautiful to see
Believe it or not, although the two spiders look quite different, they are the same species- but two different colour variants. 'var. pyramidatus' is the spider with the yellow abdomen here- and whilst generally scarcer than the 'normal' colour variant, can be more common in the Fens such as at Lakenheath Fen and at the National Trust's Wicken Fen too. Thank you to Lakenheath Fen for the information.
Kingfisher giving this little fish a fair old wack before swallowing it.
Time for a bit of a spruce up before fishing again.
A little Blue Tit visiting our Bird Bath.
A morning visit to Wicken Fen and a sign on the footpath alerted everyone to some Wasps nests. Not sure what was going on here, but one of these wasps was deceased. It could have been natural causes or maybe attacked by the others. Whatever, nature does not waste anything as the others were feeding on the carcass.
It was a very quiet wildlife morning at Wicken but we did spot this Muntjac appearing out of the reeds. The Greylag Geese did not seem bothered.
Further over on the other side of the mere, too far away to photograph a Fox briefly appeared. This caused the various groups of geese to go into a noisy frenzy. They all swam together and joined up to make one large very noisy group, and then all swam towards where the fox was seen. We would have thought they would have gone into the middle of the mere or even the other way. Still, they probably they had their reasons. Who Knows.
The last weeks of September found us in self imposed isolation due to the dreaded Covid. We have not had it before and we do not want it again.