What halcyon days, the August 2019 bank holiday weekend.

A record breaker for temperatures across the UK, and here too with heat and wall to wall sunshine.

Yet what of the origin of “halcyon days”?

You have to return to the days of Greek Mythology and read of the goddess Halcyon (Alcyone, in Greek) and her lover, the mortal king Ceyx. Drowned at sea after a trip Ceyx made to Delphi to consult the oracle, Hera sent Morpheus, the god of dreams, to break the sad news to Halcyon, who in her despair, rushed to the coast and flung herself into the sea.

Amazed by this demonstration of love, the gods saved her and transformed her into a bird, a kingfisher, and also resurrected Ceyx as a kingfisher so that the pair could once more live and love together. But making her nest close to the shore near the spot Ceyx drowned, Halcyon’s eggs kept being washed away by winter storms, so eventually her father Zeus arranged for 14 days of calm sunny weather either side of the winter solstice, so that Halcyon was able to nest and rear her eggs.

Such halcyon days are still common in Greek Januarys apparently. Click here for more detail on the mythology.

Believe these myths or not, the passage of time, geography and awareness meant that I’d never been aware of these Greek origins, and always thought of halcyon days as benign, calm, warm sunny weather, even if they’re in the middle of our summer.

But how appropriate in this balmy end to summer here, for me to witness, not once, but three times in 24 hours, the unmistakable flash of iridescent blue beside our stream, for the first time ever, of Alcedo atthis, the Eurasian or Common kingfisher.

On consecutive days I glimpsed it speed away into stream side vegetation. A momentary iridescent flashy blue blur. Combined with a white jettisoning of droppings, shed in fright. Or as a distraction ploy?

Yet was this halcyon vision dreamed? Imagined? A blurry panned pointillist impression. Fleeting as it was.

Perhaps partly so, since I discovered that recent research has found that there are actually no blue pigments in the feathers on the Kingfisher’s back. They are a much drabber brown colour. In common with most vertebrates, Kingfishers lack the ability to manufacture a proper blue pigment. Though the rusty orange of the breast feathers is the result of appropriate pigment molecules in the feather structure. Without a hide and more patience than I can muster, this is probably the best image I’ll ever achieve.

(and it took me three separate viewings, with an ex-radiographer’s keen eye scan of the whole image to find the now settled bird, centre of the image below, but in the shadows beneath the willow branches in the whole image above).

But is the amazing blue, then, a mere trick of light?

Or perception?

As famously penned first by Irish novelist Margaret Hungerford in “Molly Bawn”,

“Is (such) beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Well perhaps.

The scientific explanation for the blue feathers is that it is a “structural” colour, produced by the intricate arrangement of very thin layers of transparent material, which maximise the reflection of light of blue wavelength, over any other colour. Click here to read more, since I find this a very difficult subject to précis!

Or for a really in depth discussion of “Structural coloration in Nature”, click here for a review article by Tong, Bhushan and (rather appropriately) Sun.

No such trickery or conceptual difficulties with rainbow colours. Just being in the right place at the right time to catch the spectral colours diffracted, reflected back and then diffracted again on exiting each falling raindrop. Since the sun is always behind the viewer looking at the rainbow, to be lucky enough to see this first rainbow over The Hut, meant an early rise.

It was worth waiting beneath the Amelanchiers for some shelter whilst the shower moved Eastwards overhead, and eventually sunshine hit the meadow’s grass whilst the rain was still falling. This occurred on the morning of our mid- August pop-up garden open day, when I was up and out early at 7.00 am to check the hay meadow for waxcap mushrooms. This year seems like being a bumper season for them, with many different clusters already appearing.

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At last, the swallows have celebrated and filled the air with Scandi chatter. Chicks have flown. All’s well with our summer at last, in the nick of time.

Capturing images of feeding swallow silhouettes has been worth aching arms, with hand held camera trained for minutes on end, waiting for the parents to return from foraging sorties. Which allowed me to study how the adults manage to transfer, or not, at high speed, their prey.

 

 

Swallows

 

No more do dingy rigid frames, define,

Confine your gloomy world. A spider’s spin, a louse’s

Feathered filth the worst you might endure.

 

For now, just fully fledged and flown, and

Blinking, clear and swept, in drizzly mizzle,

 

You cling, on flimsy wire, and spin and preen.

The muddy feathered rim forgotten. Abandoned taut horizon.

 

No calendar alert, the dog days disappearing fast,

You’ll soon be gone. Autumnal calm restored

 

Between the low stone whitewashed walls and slated slopes.

But now parental angst shares communal alarm.

 

Look Out, Look Out. And diving, skim the faded leather bushman’s hat,

Protective gardener garb. Brown sweat stained threat, imagined.

 

Yet good to learn that siren call, in time.

Before cool Northern breezes blow, speed you, South.

 

Later, rain abated, hat cast aside and bending low, as

Checkerbloom and Devil’s-bit are troweled in dripping, mossy, magic gravel,

 

The ignored landlord feels the soft increasing pattering

Of drops, on short cropped, thinning hair.

 

These drops are different, dry, and moving

Formicidal, winged and feather light.

A breaking storm, both threatening, and strange.

 

The hat is grabbed once more, and now

The grainy sky’s all peppered black with ginger bodied detail,

Lost amidst the grey.  Excited wheeling hordes appear.

 

And throng the skies. The gardener straightens, listens, looks.

Excited, swoop still chattering, sweeps swiftly on. Still chasing clouds.

 

Back on the wire the broods cluster. Disperse. Reform.

Parents reap the sky’s rewards, and snaffling ants and flies

 

Pinpoint those thrusting orange gapes, at breakneck speed, and braking,

Wings impossibly stalled and furled and wrapped and draped, transfer the catch.

 

In deep throat, headlong rush. Beaks rammed home, hard, such

Interlocked, yet loosely, lip-less snogging.

 

Swallow, little swallow.

 

Swallow.

 

And now transferred, these words.

This energy. This life.

 

Fuse and meld.

 

Fly, little swallow,

 

Fly.

 

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Within 4 days of hanging my solitary bee nest box, a tenant arrived, and over a fortnight a succession of carefully cut and rolled tubes of leaves, each filled with an egg and pollen and nectar to nourish it, have been laid. Being precise about the species is tricky, even with the excellent “Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland” by Falk and Lewington, but it’s possibly the Patchwork leaf-cutter bee, Megachile centuncularis. Click here for more details and images on the BWARS site.

The larvae will pupate and hopefully emerge next summer.

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This is the peak season for flies, butterflies, spiders and wasps, around the garden and 2019 has been exceptional.

The terrace marjoram hums with hoverflies, whilst Eupatorium and recently bought Hebes are covered from dawn till dusk, when the sun shines, in a diverse range of butterflies.

Possibly our best year ever in terms of numbers.

Up at The Hut, the spiders have set up home in force, over the last month.And one was clearly disturbed by me opening the door, so once it had recovered its poise, it whizzed down, disappeared apart from one upstretched, silk grabbing leg, then raced back up to the roof, then back down and up again adding, or repairing, a couple of silken anchor threads.

Meanwhile wasps have reached plague proportions here. Normally wasps are the dominant insect around our terrace Nectaroscordum flowers in late May into early June. This year there were none. The bumbles had the flowers to themselves, yet as the year’s progressed, more wasp nests have appeared under the eaves, in the hay shed, and most worryingly beneath tyre rims in the re-tyred matrix garden – easy to inadvertently kick and then suffer the consequences as a wasp storm appears.

Normally I’d have been more relaxed, but with honeybee hives obvious targets for plundering, I’ve set up several wasp traps, which have collected hundreds. In spite of such a significant haul, it was depressing to watch over a few days the second swarm hive be attacked, to destruction, in spite of my best efforts to reduce the entrance, to help the bees protect themselves. Within 2 days of August 24th, when both the early swarmed colonies seemed to perform the annual brutal kick out of drones, wasps were entering the hive with impunity. Note the larger eyes below, and fatter bodies of the sting less male drones clustered in the first image, compared with the smaller worker bees in the last image. Even after reducing the entrance to as small an opening as possible with the pipe fitting, which another beekeeper recommended as a means of deterring wasps. This trick failed miserably – the wasps got the hang of it faster than the bees and no remaining bees are now obvious. There may well have been an additional issue with this hive which weakened and the wasps were then able to exploit.

With my conscious minimalist intervention approach, I’ll wait until wasp activity dissipates before opening the hive up to survey the scene.

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Throughout all this, the garden has been a real delight with probably our best ever year for Hydrangeas, which our visitors have enjoyed, particularly H. panniculata varieties, along with our two Hydrangea aspera villosa, grown from cuttings, being the star performers. When these were in full bloom, the bushes hummed with honeybees collecting their pale blue pollen. Well worth growing if you have space, for a late season display.

Voting closes tonight at midnight for the Shed of the Year.