Vignettes from an atypical Welsh summer:

The early bird catches the worm. But not this year.

With almost no rain falling since the 4 mm that fell on July 2nd, the worms are in summer aestivation survival mode, and deep out of reach.

Having tied themselves in knots first.

The moles have largely stopped pushing up new mole hills, the ground is simply too hard and dry. They will be at risk from starvation and dehydration in such extended periods of heat and drought, as they hunt for anything in their existing tunnel network, or if lucky, raid their underground larders of food stashed away when there was a surplus earlier in the year.

I’ve stopped my project of counting molehills in all our fields for now, as grass has grown and haymaking began, but will numbers this autumn and winter reflect a high mole fatality rate this summer?

Beginning the count back in October, the graphs show the strikingly higher number of molehills in our two fields kept as wildflower meadows for hay, compared with the other 4. All 4 fields are of a roughly similar size. Possible reasons for this were discussed in this earlier post.

 

So pity the slugs and snails which we usually have in abundance.

They’ve moved up the potential food source preference list for our blackbirds and thrushes. One morning, as thick mist coated the roof slates in rivulets of precious dew, and the sheet over the car clung to its shape, saturated (there’s still plenty of water in the air, if not the ground), I paused as a blackbird shot past me at knee height with something huge in its beak. It dropped it in fright as it passed – one of our huge Welsh black slugs. These may help to sustain the birds as other options and sources of moisture disappear from the landscape.

I can’t ever recall seeing a blackbird with one before, but then these are exceptional times in our usually wet climate. 20 minutes later, the slug was still there – presumably bashed to death by the blackbird, pre-flight. An hour later, and all that remained was a yellow slime trace. Another bird had found and treasured this.

Juvenile song thrushes are seen in the garden most days, and I’ve lost count of the number of different anvil sites around the garden, now littered with snail shells. Snail and slug numbers must be taking a real hammering, (sorry). As if moving around and surviving in such bone-dry vegetation weren’t hard enough already for them. The rain will surely return, and their population numbers will recover, thanks to the few lucky or toughest survivors.

With the news that Natural Resources Wales has just declared that the whole of the nation is now in a drought, for a country defined by its ever-green vistas, these are unusual and challenging times.

NRW says it’s been the driest July in 190 years, or since records began.

Here, a few personal figures add a little more specific local detail.

Our average rainfall in July since I began recording it in 2013, has been 101.2 mm per month.

The previous driest July was, strangely, last year when just 58.71 mm fell.

And this year, we’ve had only 6.5 mm fall.

Which also makes it, by a large margin, the driest ever month here since my records began.

The buckets are placed in hope, beneath our gutterless eaves.

However, rainfall only tells part of the story of a drying landscape, as any experienced Welsh haymaker will tell you.

Length of and the nature of soil covering vegetation, sunshine or cloud cover, wind strength, dewfall and of course both day and night temperatures all contribute to the speed of desiccation of the land. I’ve never regularly recorded temperatures here.

We’ve certainly had day after day of largely cloud-free skies and temperatures into the low thirties on several days, with high night-time temperatures often limiting dew formation.

The insolation as measured by our PV inverter has also been at record levels – despite our system now being over 15 years old. We’ll surpass the previous record of 609 KWH recorded in June 2020; we rarely exceed 550 KWH

On the plus side for dessication, though not comfort, wind speeds have been typically low for many hours of each day, as one would expect in a sustained high-pressure weather system, and have fallen to almost nothing on most nights. Not so good for an electricity supply system increasingly dependent on renewables.

For any readers who haven’t been intrigued by this story, the UK came very close, apparently, to its electricity supply keeling over on the very hot night that England were playing Ghana in the World Cup – which would have been very difficult to explain to the nation. Fortunately, as you can read in this blow-by-blow account, by Matt Oliver and Jonathan Leake, the French came to the rescue at very short notice and in the nick of time.

There was temporary relief and delight in waking yesterday to a murky morning and the staccato rhythm of raindrops dripping into the array of buckets and trays set up along the roof’s dripline, to catch as much as we could of the 2.5 mm that had fallen overnight. The forecasts had not predicted this amount, and some of our birds loved the chance for a refresh after dusty days, as they head into their summer moulting period.

The soundscape has changed as well – the idyllic garden warbler left us, or at least its song stopped abruptly in early July, and in days of near constant sunshine and heat, most birdong has reduced dramatically. The landscape became quieter until the sheep in the fields across the stream grew noisier as the grass turned from green to white-green to brown. I don’t think it’s a case of lost lambs; I reckon they’re desperate for a change of pasture, and some fresh food. But there’s little available to most commercial farmers locally as grass scorches and hay/silage fields fail to recover from their scalping at harvest time.

One night, as these ewes began to fall silent as dusk fell, a lamb was still calling regularly, as I did the last of my now regular four times daily watering sessions, rotating around different areas of the garden. Using spring, and stored IBC water in rotation, by battery-pumped tank water from a hose, or by watering can. All very labour-intensive. Broaching the fifth of our 1,000-litre IBC containers for the first time to try to salvage some plants in the beds surrounding the crisping croquet lawn, I’m very aware that we still have August to negotiate. The spectre of last summer’s very dry hot August, and indeed the even hotter, drier summer of 1976, which only ended at the end of August, haunts me as the prospect of a dried-up stream and house water supply remains very real.

I became more concerned that the lamb’s bleating didn’t seem to be moving. Aware that the few sheep now grazing our retired neighbour’s fields don’t get the frequent checks that Glyn always managed, I thought I should investigate. Aided by Fiona, as expected, we soon found her, trapped by her stuck head in a pig netting snare, incapable of reversing out from the hedge foliage she had been pushing to reach. The old fence posts had rotted, and the normally taut wire was too flexible. Try as we might, we couldn’t manipulate her head free, so had to resort to wire clippers to cut a square to free it.

The flies were already gathering around, attracted no doubt by the urine and faeces trampled grass where she had probably struggled for hours to free herself. Another day, and she would have succumbed, and the flies and their maggoty offspring would have got to work. All just staying alive, as they know best. The lamb bolted away up the hill to hunt for fellow sheep and the safety of others before night fell.

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Earlier in the month, I’d turned to leave the table after an early morning cuppa and noticed a couple of different fly species apparently competing for the delight of a still-moist bird dropping on one of the nearby stone slabs. They seemed very focused and competitive and didn’t mind me walking past to access my camera for a picture to remind me of this event. By the time I returned, they’d been joined by first one, then two, then three more. At least 4 different species, all jostling to prod their proboscis into the bird shit.

Reflecting on how quickly so many flies had arrived at the scene of the poop, I discovered several fascinating aspects of fly biology, new to me.

Like many insects, they possess very acute senses of smell. Mainly thanks to the fine hair-like sensilla structures which cover their antennae. These contain specialised olfactory receptors (neurons) which can detect different chemicals. It’s only quite recently that a new form of receptor sensitive to ammonia has been located in some fly species. And since ammonia is released from materials like sweat, urine and rotting flesh that many flies find appealing, being able to detect its presence from long distances is vital for flies. The receptor also works in a different way to all the other common odour receptors, relying on an ammonia transporter protein found on the outside of the cell to get the neurone to fire impulses when the chemical is detected. Read how it was researched on this link.

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Despite the heat presenting challenges to our honey bees, struggling to keep hive temperatures down, I was able to experience the amazing sound of honey bees putting in an incredibly long shift.

With foragers out soon after dawn after the hotter nights, I checked them on one very warm, humid evening around 9.30 pm, and was amazed by the sound coming from the hive, clearly audible from many feet away. And bear in mind that both hives featured in the video below have thick cork insulation which will limit sound transmission somewhat.

There were a few bees still fanning air around the hive entrance, but the majority of the sound you can hear on this short video comes from the tens of thousands of bees inside the colony who are working hard to evaporate water from the nectar, and indeed from water placed onto the comb, in an effort to keep internal temperatures down. A huge amount of energy is required to evaporate all the surplus water in flower nectar (around 75% typically) down to the more concentrated 18% or so, at which level the honey will be ripened, and stable enough to keep very long term behind a wax cell cap.

I’m intrigued that the frequency of the humming – much lower than the pitch of an angry bee buzz, is around the 153 Hz frequency, which is sometimes used in sound therapy and as an aid for relaxation and meditation. I found the sound another extraordinary insight into what goes on unseen in a honeybee colony. If honey had a sound, perhaps this would be it.

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Early in the month, blessed with the lovely weather, but before real water supply issues kicked in, we hosted a rare whole family get-together over a weekend. Fiona had organised food and games for all, after I kicked the event off with my outside Uuni-cooked pizzas on the Friday evening. Much fun was enjoyed bar a moment captured on camera by me in the shepherd’s hut, when one of our delightful angelic granddaughters stepped to the side and snagged her flowing locks on a spider’s web. She was blissfully unaware at this moment that a spider web thread was stretching behind her. Her mother and sisters could see the thread.

It took Grumpy a few moments to disentangle the worst of the web and point out to the now distraught group, that without spiders, there would be way more flies in the world. And that anyway, spider’s web is just a special form of silk, with some sticky blobs on it. It was soon forgotten.

We were thrilled that our local blacksmith, Alec Page, had managed to complete a commission job we’d given him back in March, and delivered and assembled a unique swing seat he’d fashioned from an initial design Fiona had drawn up. With his typical attention to detail, flair and technical know how, he’s crafted a unique item which we’ll always link with this special weekend. It turns out to be the most relaxing seat to sit in, with an almost perpetual motion created by the simple act of sitting in it. Already we’ve spent many happy minutes, sitting and enjoying the often very peaceful scenes in the valley beyond.

The ridiculously long video below was handheld filmed and recorded by me towards the beginning of July around 6.00 am. Camera in one hand, microphone in the other.

Why make it so long, when nothing really happens? Apart from the scene-crashing blackbird.

It’s just a simple visual canvas for the changing, evolving, serene rural morning soundscape, and if you make it over halfway through the video, you may or may not find the gentle visual rocking disconcerting – it isn’t, in real life.

But I know that this film is unlikely to appeal to the frenetic-scrolling brigade. Slow down, folks.

There are even some glimpses of what part of the swing looks like towards the end – the full details await discovery by any future visitors to Gelli.

It is indeed a serenity swing.

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A walk along our drying stream early in the month, where salmonids are hanging on for now in the deeper pools, allowed me to see a pristine male Silver-washed Fritillary, Argynnis paphia butterfly nectaring on bramble flowers. I’d only ever glimpsed one flashing by in the garden at a distance once before in 2018. It’s Britain’s largest, strong-flying orange coloured butterfly. Much bigger than the more common Comma, below. Even better was seeing one in more typical fast-flitting flight on the bank behind the house a couple of weeks later, dipping down to oviposit on some of the common dog violet plants growing there.

You can tell it’s a male by the distinct dark scent stripes on its forewings, which are used during its courtship flight, as I describe in this post

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Throughout all of this, work in the meadows has continued, and deciding how to manage wilting shrubs has been challenging, as water gets rationed.

A hare has been seen one more time in the garden, but not in the meadows, although I’m certain I’ve found a hare trail through our upper meadow from one gate, down to another.

Not so thrilling was finding young rabbits in the Malus copse, and later, in the main garden.

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I’ve experimented with removing surplus seed heads using our Li-ion hedgetrimmer.

Partly to reduce the risk to any hares, and partly to conserve the understorey of leafy growth which protects the soil from excessive heat and drying. It works well, and is probably almost as fast as a proficient manual scythe would manage, without the need for regular blade sharpening or peening. It can also be used quite selectively to avoid later flowering plants such as knapweed and devil’s bit scabious.

In the lower hay meadow, we’re already using the sheep for aftermath grazing, and making a point of moving them every couple of days. To avoid excessive compaction or overgrazing, and also thinking that they are more likely to act as vectors for seed transfer into the currently less floriferous (non) hay meadows. There have been a few studies on the role of grazing ruminants in different grassland ecosystems which have attempted to assay seed survival and seed gut passage transit times, though not in the UK in recent times. It would seem that 48 hours would be the maximum time for seed gut transit – hence the need for regular pasture rotation for this method of seed transfer to be of any likely benefit.

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We leave July 2026 with mixed feelings.

A time of much hard work, and many useful achievements.

A memorable month for our weather.

Many happy family memories.

And a hope that rain returns to us soon, as well as to all the other parts of the UK and world where it is sorely needed right now.

And a hope that our new leaders will reflect on the need to plan to mitigate and prepare for such climate change effects in a rational way, and not be seduced by simple fixes, or chasing illusory targets to try to halt a changing climate.

For anyone who wants to reflect on the current mainstream narrative in Britain, I would suggest you challenge yourself to listen to these two recent, excellent talks. A grasp of any form of scientific critical thinking or careful analysis has rarely seemed to be a pre-requisite for climbing the greasy pole of politics. However, click below, and you might learn something new from a couple of articulate, older scientists who seem to have a much wider knowledge and grasp of the subject than any of Britain’s current politicians.

The Actual State of Climate Change (2026) with Physicist Steve Koonin

Climate Change: What the Data Actually Shows with Geologist Scott Tinker

And then determine if, as was the case with me, these talks have unsettled you, and whether you might question the current narrative which has been pushed for years.

Perhaps your worldview might need to adapt accordingly.

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Finally, what music to include to play out this July, in this special hot dry sunny summer of ’26?

Two pieces came to mind, which need no introduction. From the year after the drought and heat of summer 1976, when the world was a very different place:

And slightly more recently. From 1984.

Another memorable date, another memorable song.