Dear Readers, today we’d planned to walk down to Cherry Tree Wood to have a coffee in the café and then hobble back uphill and home. Alas, I was about a third of the way there when I realised that this was probably too ambitious. Discretion is the better part of valour in these situations (cliché alert!) and so we wandered down Lincoln Road and back to Coffee Bank for a Flat White instead.
It always feels a little sad not to be able to achieve a target, but it seems pointless to overstretch myself today, only to be confined to the sofa tomorrow. Slow but steady seems more sensible. In good news, since I’ve been walking with one crutch I’m sure I’m limping less and my back is much less painful, both of which will be important in the longer term.
So, what else is going on? Today I am seeing lots of Large and Small White butterflies tussling in the front garden close to the buddleia – whether this is defensive or mating behaviour I’m not sure, but I am rather enjoying the sight of them circling one another in frantic circles from the office window. I have not seen a single Vanessid though (Red Admiral, Peacock, Painted Lady, etc). Looking back to July 2023, there was an abundance of these creatures, and a Hummingbird Hawk moth. Are you seeing these butterflies and moths where you are?
In other news, I am thoroughly enjoying Tim Blackburn’s book ‘The Jewel Box’ – he takes the moth species that he finds in his moth trap (which is on his balcony in Camden) and uses them to illustrate various ecological points. It’s great revision for me for my next Open University module, which is a Level Three biology course, but also full of great stories.
He tells the story of the Gypsy Moth, imported to the USA in 1868 by Mr Léopold Trouvelet. He was researching moths that could be of use in the silk industry, but unfortunately some of the eggs or caterpillars were blown out of an open window and escaped. Twenty years later, there was an outbreak of Gypsy Moth caterpillars of such severity that one neighbour related that
“In the evening you could hear the caterpillars eating the trees. It sounded like the clipping of scissors”.
Blackburn uses the outbreak to illustrate phenomena such as exponential growth and the statistical analysis of populations, but in such a lively way that you hardly notice that he’s sneaked in a few equations (I love an equation, but then I’m probably in the minority).
Interestingly, in the UK the Gypsy Moth was known from only one small population in the Fens, which disappeared when its breeding sites were cleared and drained. Today, you’d have to travel to the Channel Islands to find a small population, though whether, like the Jersey Tiger, it will reappear is anyone’s guess. The Gypsy Moths that lived in the Fens fed only on bog myrtle and creeping willow, but the moths in the US and mainland Europe have much broader tastes, and can still sometimes be a problem. In fact, I found some pupal cases in Creemore in Ontario on a visit to Canada a few years ago, and I realise that I wrote about this moth extensively then. What a story!
Female Gypsy/Spongy moth (Lymantria dispar) Photo by By Opuntia – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2580261
Very wise to not overdo it! I have to have foot surgery in Nov, so I am watching your sensible approach to healing.
I’ve been reading a lot this year. Books I very much enjoyed are The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo, Small Thing Like These and Foster by Claire Keegan, and The Feast by Margaret Kennedy.
Last year, my top books were by Canadian writer Mary Lawson. My favorites were The Other Side of the Bridge and Crow Lake.
Good luck with the foot surgery! And I love Mary Lawson, I read Crow Lake a while back and thought it was an amazing book.
For something completely different, I am currently reading “The Dictionary People “ by Sarah Ogilvie about the original volunteer contributors to the OED. Each chapter is self-contained and good for dipping into. It is written in an intelligent and lively way. A very great number of eccentrics were involved.
Ooh that sounds interesting, I do love a book about words! It does remind me a little bit of the Blackadder episode where Baldrick accidentally destroys Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and they have to reconstruct it from scratch (starting with ‘aardvark’ of course).
In the past week we’ve seen a lot of different butterflies fluttering about – peacocks have been the most numerous (about 5 or 6 at a time on our buddleia) but we’ve had large whites, painted ladies and gatekeepers in different parts of the garden.
It’s good to read that you’re managing to get out and about, even if not as far as you’d like. I’m sure you’ll soon be striding out down the high street!