Oh please – just make it stop now.
As I ate my breakfast this morning the sun came out, my spirits lifted, and I was looking forward to taking the macro and searching the garden for invertebrates. But by the time I’d dried my hair and donned appropriate clothing it was raining and blowing a gale, so instead I spent the morning at my desk, grumpily thrashing through old photo files.
This afternoon it was looking brighter again, and R suggested a trip to Hillers. I spent a chilly half an hour in the hide, and then the sky blackened and it started hailing, so I made a run for it back through the garden to join him in the café. They have a wide variety of really lovely hellebores at Hillers, and their spring bulbs are now coming through too, but the weather is beating all the flowers to the ground and nothing is photographing well, so I was lucky that the dunnocks at least were posing for the camera.
I’m so fed up with this dreary weather now, I barely know what to do with myself. According to my wildlife records for last year, I was already logging bees and hoverflies by this stage, and I’d seen and photographed my first Brimstone butterfly of the season. Right now it’s almost impossible to imagine that the race will shortly be on to record the first bee-fly of the year, or that ponds will ever be warm enough for a dragonfly larva to decide that it’s time to take to the air.
Just to cheer us all up though, the lovely Mollyblobs has created a vision of spring which I heartily recommend you to check out. I will, of course, be stealing her idea at the first opportunity.
