animals – Page 16 – don't confuse the narrator

visitors

This creature was buzzing outside my window this morning, investigating all the cracks and crannies that might give access to the space that the old blind used to roll up into.

Folklore says that if a bumble bee comes into the house it means you’re going to have a visitor. I don’t know what it means if a hornet comes into the house via the pelmet box. But perhaps I should be prepared for a lot of visitors with nasty stings.

feather brained

The village is running an ornithological photography competition.

mantis close-up of head and antennae. Probably Empusa pennata adult male

Sadly, although many birds visit the garden – blackbirds, hoopoes, azure-tailed magpies, jays, warblers, black caps, treecreepers… – not to mention the herons down by the river and the hawks and eagles who share our airspace, they all have a nasty habit of flying away before I can get my camera out, let alone focus it.

So unless I build a hide in the greenhouse and stalk what I think must be a pair of black redstarts who are nesting there, or set up the step ladder on the verandah and try and peer into the swallows’ neat adobe home, neither of which seem to be recommended courses of action, I don’t think I’ll be entering the competition.

I have, however, had a little more luck taking pictures of this marvellous creature with his spectacular feathered antennae. (Go on: click the photo and check him out close up!)
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plagues & pests

A BBC website headline announces “‘Black Death pit’ unearthed”, and is followed up with a story starting:

Excavations for London’s Crossrail project have unearthed bodies believed to date from the time of the Black Death.

When I read the news, my first thought was of Quatermass and the Pit, so I hope they don’t find any bugs like the one in the photo.

The bug – a langosta in Spanish – has been there for weeks, hibernating discreetly on the bead curtain. At one point there were two of them (hibernating discretely, I suppose).

It looks like a grasshopper to me, but langosta translates as locust, so I guess I should just be glad we don’t have a plague of them.

Which bring us full circle to the Black Death and that burial ground.

watch the birdie*

Bright plastic pegs
perch along the clothes line:
a flock of tiny parrots

(*Perhaps the post title should have been “wash the birdie”!)

cheese dreams

Insomnia found me browsing the web when the headline Cheese fire causes traffic meltdown in Norway tunnel caught my eye.

As a cheese lover, how could I not be interested in a story that starts:

Some 27 metric tons of flaming brown cheese (brunost), a Norwegian delicacy, blocked off a three-km (1.9 mile) tunnel near the northern coastal town of Narvik when it caught fire last Thursday. The fire was finally put out on Monday.

Twenty-seven metric tons of toasted goat’s cheese: a turophile’s delight!

(I gather brunost is made either from goat’s milk or a mixture of goat’s and cow’s milk, though perhaps not from the breed of mountain goat whose rather hazy photo I snapped in the Sierra de Francia, Spain.)
Continue reading “cheese dreams”