The Small Things

We're extremely fortunate to have good friends who live in Suffolk who come up to look after the house while we're away, and they do a splendid job of nurturing the year's vegetable seedlings until we return, but then there's a mad scramble to plant them out - cabbage, kale, broccoli, brussel sprouts, leeks, carrots, onions, salad leaves, radish, rocket and, in the greenhouse, potting up cucumber and tomato. It's 'work' which we thoroughly enjoy, particularly in this May's continuing fine weather.

However, one of the great joys of being home is catching up with what's new in the small world that surrounds us. So this moth - I have failed to identify it - helped immensely by sitting on the folder which contains our annual records of where we plant vegetables, while....

....these green veined whites were making sure there will be lots of new butterflies to help eat the vegetables once we'd grown them.

There are plenty of bees around to pollinate our fruit bushes but this is a new one to me, a bumblebee which is tiny. To give an idea of how small it is, it was keenest on the flowers of one of our hebe varieties, which are just on 8mm across. It's difficult to identify but may be an early bumblebee, Bombus pratorum.

In the croft fields around us a host of new flowers have appeared including this one, half a dozen of which are tucked into a corner but don't seem to have appeared anywhere else. The best identification I can make of it is star of bethlehem, a species which can be highly invasive.

Then we have to catch up on the latest in small birds visiting our feeders, like this very smart male siskin and a less usual visitor....

....to the seed dispensers, a pied wagtail.

Meanwhile, on a slightly larger scale, noisy warfare continues over our heads as the hooded crows harass the local buzzards.