Monday, July 09, 2007

Nige: La Lotta Continua

Well me I'm still en vacance, i.e. in a pleasant state of mental vacancy (and glad of it, what with the satanic Alastair Campbell everywhere and the Tories seriously proposing to raise tax on booze). So, resuming my agreeable duties as the W.H. Hudson of the Blog, I took a long walk on the well wooded common where, attentive readers might recall, I spotted an early White Admiral butterfly (June 11). This time there wasn't a White Admiral in sight, disappointingly, but I was handsomely rewarded with a round dozen of these spectacular beauties gliding elegantly around the woodland margins - a heart-lifting sight and a fine example of the splendid profligacy of nature (all that useless beauty, to steal a phrase from Elvis Costello). On the other hand, while sheltering from a shower, I noticed a woodpecker hole in the tree opposite - and then, peeping out of said hole, its beady, malevolent eye firmly trained on me, a squirrel! There is no escaping them...

8 comments:

  1. PS: My Title box seems to be dead - hence no title...

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  2. You have your "title" or headline as we call it in the trade.Rather good, I thought.

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  3. Superb - how did you do that?

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  4. Magic, Nige, Black magic.

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  5. At the risk of provoking frenzy among loyal bloggers, I must also mention my proudest butterfly spot of the day - a Purple Hairstreak spotted as about 5 yards with the naked eye, sitting with wings folded on an oak leaf. A female, it looked as if it might have been ovipositing, but I couldn't be sure.

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  6. Nige, you worry me with all this chat about butterflies and missing titles when there are more pressing issues to discuss. You didn't say if it was a red squirrel or a gray squirrel. Nor did you assure me, should it turn out to be the latter, that you did your duty as a true born Englishman and clubbed it to death with a large stick.

    Should the gray squirrels ever realise they have a safe haven here at Thought Experiments, do you know what damage they might do? They'd be after poor Bryan's nuts (a Tesco variety pack, of course) quicker than the sharp end of Jeffrey Archer's boot. To paraphrase Elvis Costello, you should really be 'out in the woods with your squirrel gun'.

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  7. Chip, it was the worst of squirrels - a grey masquerading as a red, but it had forgotten the tufty ears. The brute was clearly on surveillance duties and trained in self-defence. Still, so long as it's in a woodpecker hole, at least it's not in the blog.

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