Dear Readers, my buddleia really is in a shocking state this year – there is so much honeydew coming from the greenfly that it managed to stick my green wheelie bin shut. However, it isn’t all bad news because a little flock of sparrows visit more or less every day, to give the insect life the once over and to pick off all sorts of invertebrates.
It’s difficult to see properly, but this bird might even have found a caterpillar, which is clearly what he’s really after – you have to work much harder to get calories from a bunch of aphids than you do from a nice juicy larvae. There are lots of baby sparrows about, so I imagine that the parent birds are having to work very hard, especially with the rain being intermittent and the ground as hard as iron. Goodness knows what the blackbirds are doing, they’ll be needing a pneumatic drill to get into the ground around here.
It is lovely to sit at my desk on a call, and to glance up to see a sparrow or a goldfinch feeding, though. And I’m watching as the flowers on the buddleia start to expand. They look most unpromising now, but will soon be splendid purple pollinator-attracting blooms, and no doubt all manner of insects will take advantage. But for now, back to the day job!
Last year the tips of my broad beans were covered in greenfly and for various reasons I never got around to doing anything about it. By July those beans were attracting lots of insects, ants of course, but also including hoverflies and wasps that all seemed to be attracted by the honeydew. I would stop by the beans every time I went past to watch (and thankfully there were also some ladybird larvae to eat the greenfly).
The greenfly certainly attract a whole lot of critters!