It was a horrible morning: cold and mizzly, with a fierce, swirling wind. This wan’t enough to keep the Plumpies at home, their schedule for completing their life tasks being pretty inflexible, and there were several being blown around the garden when I ventured out. They didn’t look to be enjoying the conditions any more than me though, and I doubt they stayed out very long – personally, I couldn’t wait to get back in the warm.
There were two females working the pulmonaria, separable by their colouring: the other one was, as you’d expect, almost exclusively black, with orange pollen brushes and just a scattering of orange hairs on her face and lower legs, but this one has far more orange on her, including patches on both sides of the abdomen, which is why I’m calling her Ginger. For the past few seasons I’ve had one or two largely brown females in the garden (which I think is colouring more typical of European Hairy-footed Flower Bees than British specimens), but I don’t remember seeing one as blotchy as this before. I’ll have to look back through my Plumpie photos and see if I can spot any others.
This afternoon R and I went into Stratford for lunch, and as I knew that this photo and several others from my brief morning shoot were sharp, I didn’t bother taking the camera. “After all,” I said, sententiously, “not everything needs to be photographed.” However, this is absolutely not what I said two hours later when we were walking back along the riverbank towards the car, and I spotted an immature Cormorant on the river. “Where?” said R, who hadn’t seen it. “Just dived,” I said. “Wait a minute…. there it is! And it’s got a fish! A HUGE fish!! OMG!!! AND ME WITHOUT A CAMERA!!! AAARRRGGGHHH!!!!” By the time the Cormorant had managed to work the fish into a position in which it could swallow it, I was coughing up feathers at my own stupidity – when do I ever not have a camera with me?? In my defence, it’s almost a month since I last saw a Cormorant on the Avon, so today’s was hardly predictable. But still – that’ll larn me.
R: L2, C7, D5.
