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Butterflies like oregano, flowering that is. It grows pretty much everywhere in my parents' garden and walking past clumps of it stirs up scores of butterflies. Bumblebees like it too, crawling around the purple flowers en masee. It smells good to humans too, sort of like cardamom-laced coffee.
I've just spent some time outside looking at the incredible aerial stunts of swallows. I tried to chase them with binoculars but whoosh! and their gone, in some completely random direction. Chirp, they say now and then.
Other birds say chirp too, when they spy a cat.
But they won't eat slugs. No one eat slugs, it seems, not even all the toads that crawl about the garden. One of them has made a sort of nest under some planks -- Toad Hall! I bought a small granite toad at a local stoneware store; it sits under some tall decorative grasses.
There are more things the birds don't like, other than cats, for instance buzzards ("ormvråk"). There are several near here, who come gliding forth now and then. All the other birds get highly agitated and attack them. One buzzard came sailing by a couple of times when we had lunch outside. One day it made a very low fly-past and made a soft cry as it looked down at us, before thermalling off. Thrilling!
No need to mention all the berries. After yesterday's blueberries, I today spent a couple of hours picking large amounts of raspberries from a small patch of the acres of raspberries now growing in a clear-cut area, where there formerly grew quite a lot of cantarelles. Of those I've only found one mycelium, that produced large amounts some 15yr ago -- and again this summer! And I mean _large_ amounts. Yumm.
Finally, the sky is blue with ribbons of cirrus and tufts of cumulus, hardly a contrail, not even the roar and buzz of cars and jet-skis. It's late afternoon and the the slightly slantwise rays of the sun highlights the atmosphere, showing us how thin and amazing it is. For once, the sky doesn't look like something on normal old Earth, but like a _planet_, that is, some other planet that isn't home. Like an artist's rendering of a scene from an alien planet's surface, like something from "Farscape".
I've just spent some time outside looking at the incredible aerial stunts of swallows. I tried to chase them with binoculars but whoosh! and their gone, in some completely random direction. Chirp, they say now and then.
Other birds say chirp too, when they spy a cat.
But they won't eat slugs. No one eat slugs, it seems, not even all the toads that crawl about the garden. One of them has made a sort of nest under some planks -- Toad Hall! I bought a small granite toad at a local stoneware store; it sits under some tall decorative grasses.
There are more things the birds don't like, other than cats, for instance buzzards ("ormvråk"). There are several near here, who come gliding forth now and then. All the other birds get highly agitated and attack them. One buzzard came sailing by a couple of times when we had lunch outside. One day it made a very low fly-past and made a soft cry as it looked down at us, before thermalling off. Thrilling!
No need to mention all the berries. After yesterday's blueberries, I today spent a couple of hours picking large amounts of raspberries from a small patch of the acres of raspberries now growing in a clear-cut area, where there formerly grew quite a lot of cantarelles. Of those I've only found one mycelium, that produced large amounts some 15yr ago -- and again this summer! And I mean _large_ amounts. Yumm.
Finally, the sky is blue with ribbons of cirrus and tufts of cumulus, hardly a contrail, not even the roar and buzz of cars and jet-skis. It's late afternoon and the the slightly slantwise rays of the sun highlights the atmosphere, showing us how thin and amazing it is. For once, the sky doesn't look like something on normal old Earth, but like a _planet_, that is, some other planet that isn't home. Like an artist's rendering of a scene from an alien planet's surface, like something from "Farscape".
