I’d read the hype – new moon, clear skies, planetary alignments, solar eclipse, meteor showers. I’d woken around 2.30 am after fitful sleep following a longer-than-usual day of toil: hedge trimming, rush cutting and raking, topped off by the now obligatory twice-a-day watering sessions. I’d hesitated, but I’m a fan of the Perseids, so slipped from bed, grabbed my nightshirt and pyjamas, and, leaving specs behind, crept down the stairs. Years of practice doing this with my eyes closed means this no longer fazes me. Much! Though I did, unusually, in such complete darkness, hover my hand over the handrail. And concentrated on keeping heels pushed back into the risers. Fiona seemed undisturbed, still sleeping soundly.

Outside, with no retinal light exposure to dull perceptions, there was instant delight – the sky was clear, the air still, the silence total — the stars, superb in their clarity and number. Awe-inspiringly wonderful, and I consoled myself with that thought as I waited to see a first shooting star. Eventually one exploded, directly overhead, at maximum neck crane. I opted to count them, and gradually a few more tiny 109PSwift-Tuttle-shed dust specks traced their way through our upper atmosphere, with glorious terminal brightness. Then vanished without a trace, save, somewhere, complex binary digital code recorded on seriously clever camera image sensors. I’d given up trying this, years ago.

Or maybe simple, teased-out words, to record their fleeting, final fate.

It was only when compiling this post that I found a map, above, explaining that I had by complete chance, or unknown influence, ventured outside at peak Perseid time for 2026. Whilst not the most prolific meteor shower I’ve seen, the stars fell just often enough to keep me out there, greedy for more. Or even to see a longer fireball trail. Which I did indeed see. (Though I didn’t produce my usual involuntary, audible WOW,  which is one of the three key determinants in this article, with images, of whether one has seen a fireball!)

It was around meteor number 5, standing in the middle of the yard, that an owl called, somewhere to the east. A strange, unfamiliar, repeated, brief shriek, with no obvious response. Was it gazing upwards too, watching, and plaintively calling?

“More, more more, more, more.”

Echoing my silent hopes.

What was this owl, which I didn’t think I’d ever heard before? Only after writing this piece did I discover its (likely) name – a Little Owl, Athene noctua, a typically secretive bird which is usually heard in the early hours of late summer mornings. You can listen to something very similar to what I heard on this link: https://www.british-birdsongs.uk/little-owl/

Also known as the owl of Athena or the owl of Minerva, it has a wide distribution across much of temperate, warmer Europe, and also as far east as Korea, and down into North Africa. Yet it was only introduced into Britain at the end of the 19th century, and has since become quite widespread, though still uncommon. Small mammals make up part of its diet, earthworms, amphibians and insects the remainder. The male is strongly territorial, staying in one location of about 2-3 hectares in our sort of rural, varied habitat, for most of its lifespan, which can be up to 16 years. There are thought to be between 3,600 and 5,500 breeding pairs in Britain – perhaps a third of the number of Barn Owls, and far fewer than the tawny owl estimated population of around 50,000 pairs. In Wales they are considered to be scarce, and mainly found in the East of the country and Anglesey, so this is an exciting discovery for us as yet another new species that views this place as home.

Maybe it will explore this lost-limb entrance into our big, barn oak’s trunk, which likely has a deeper cavity beyond the opening

3 nights later I heard the call again, this time even closer, though from the warmth of our bed, with the windows open. I thought of creeping out to try to record it, but didn’t want to disturb Fiona. Perhaps I should have done; we’re now both agreed that if either of us hears it again, I should get up and grab the microphone! Or she can try her Merlin app.

However, after this digression, and still beneath the early morning stars, I’d gradually walked back from the centre of the yard, and as I passed our parked, still sheet-wrapped car, another meteor, the brightest of the bunch, fireballed down towards the western hill-framed horizon. I leaned back against the car’s angled side doors, and at last found a comfortable, supportive position to rest.

I gazed heavenwards, heard the owl once more, and remember thinking as the numbers of meteors clicked past 10, that for all these natural wonders, and the immense majesty of this early-hour extraordinary, starlit sky, I’d trade it all for something very simple. Rain.

Not a proper wish, just a drought-jaded hope. After reaching 13, which seemed appropriate for the date, I quietly returned to bed, perhaps 40 minutes after I’d left. Fiona still seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

The following day we both climbed Longevity Hill, armed with camera and her smartphone, a colander and a white sheet as the about-to-be-eclipsed sun dipped behind the Hut, around 7 pm. As with the Perseids, we were strangely underwhelmed by the much-heralded solar event -the sheet and colander not working well in quite a warm breeze. We were far more focused on the smoke drifting from the hilltop fire to the South, near Talley, and the much bigger, and more distant, fire beyond the line of the Eastern hills near Rhandirmwyn. The ambient evening light level beneath mainly clear blue skies did indeed fade as predicted, then gradually recovered to a more normal late summer evening gold. We didn’t notice any obvious decline in birdsong as we had back in March, 2015 – perhaps we were closer to dusk anyway, or the birds, like much else around, were simply exhausted by the unusual weather and unsettled by the unfamiliar smell of smoke in the air.

These fires both followed a similar pattern – for several days smoke had disappeared by dawn, then as winds gradually picked up for a few hours after lunch, the fires erupted again, before being brought under control by a mix of very determined fire crews aided by local Welsh farmers and volunteers.

Fiona has discovered a new resource for information on such events: Firemap Live. A very clever tool for locating and tracking wildfires anywhere in the world, and allowing zooming in for fire status updates based on the latest satellite imagery. Who would have thought that we’d value such information, living in wet west Wales?

A few days after I’d had these tired thoughts and wishes for rain, I’d love to record that the heavens opened. This would be an exaggeration – as of August 22nd, we’d had 4 days with some rain, yet within a couple of hours of it ceasing, the soil looked unchanged, the garden and hills still parched. I’m even developing a simple enjoyment from trying to judge from drip sounds falling into the under-eaves containers how much rain has actually fallen: 0.6, 2.0, 1.5, 0.8mm? I’d mistakenly thought that I could have a morning off watering plants after the 2.00 mm event, until I saw how wilted they were all looking by the afternoon. Then, beginning to write this post, more fell. 4.6, 0, 4.9 mm. Perhaps this was my wish taking hold. Yet the ‘flow’ in the stream barely changed.

Spot the difference that 4.9 mm made.

What a relief to at least have had some rain, and yet barely 3 days later, as dusk fell, the smell of smoke began to fill the air again, and a huge horizon-based, dull grey cloud appeared in the sky in exactly the same direction as the earlier Rhandirmwyn fire’s location. This was from a new, huge grass and gorse fire at Glascwm in the hills even further to the East of Builth Wells. The windows stayed closed that night, but the increased particulates made for yet more dramatic skyscapes in a month which already had a surfeit. Oh, for a dull grey wet scene once more.

In the garden, what is now becoming strikingly obvious is that any shrub beneath a larger tree, particularly any of our oaks which have deeper roots and denser canopies, will be denied much of any light rainfall, and there will be very little infiltration or runoff onto their root systems. They must be able to survive and thrive in our ‘normal’ summer conditions simply by passive water movement through the soil, from neighbouring areas, rather than direct rainfall during the months when the trees are in leaf.

Our temporary guttering system demonstrates this well – 3 identical lengths of corrugated steel. The first, served by slates open to the sky yielded 50 litres from the 4.6 mm rain episode, the next, with partial tree overhang, about 30 litres, the final one, with ‘complete’ tree canopy shading, just 22.5 litres. And this ‘complete’ canopy shading is beneath a tree that is looking really sick this year – no acorns are forming at all on any of our oaks after last year’s mammoth mast year. The leaf canopy is so poor that one can easily look through and see lots of daylight.

A number of recent articles have highlighted how many older trees, particularly oak and beech, may well move into a terminal decline with repeated drought and heat-stressed summers heralding their death. After the hot summer of 2022, 400 trees died at Kew Gardens in London. The latter article highlights another, albeit small risk in the weeks ahead – ‘summer branch drop syndrome’, when large limbs will be shed, or sometimes whole trees will fall during warm, still summer weather with no warning.

I heard just such an event somewhere in our valley a couple of weeks ago. Standing outside around dusk on yet another completely still, quiet evening, there was suddenly the massive, distinctive sound of the crack and crash of a huge tree breaking and hitting the ground. Familiar to anyone who has witnessed the moments after a chainsaw has cut through a trunk.

This was an eerie and frankly alarming rural sound – we assume large trees are only naturally brought crashing down during storms, or by human intervention. Not by a spontaneous natural process that the tree initiates. It’s something to be aware of as a rare possibility if we suffer more such periods of weather. Trawling through a few references (albeit mainly on arboriculturalist websites), there seems to be no clear understanding of why this happens, but it only seems to occur during water-stressed conditions during or immediately after prolonged dry, hot spells.

I shall return to more thoughts about drought impacts and how it might affect our garden and meadows in due course – it’s a huge topic I’m still trying to process.

For now, let me reprise some of the more upbeat sightings from the last few weeks.

Having been denied access to ponds with water in them, at least on our land (the first time they have nearly completely dried up), damsel and dragonflies have taken a hammering. Despite the lack of water in the stream, both Fiona and I briefly glimpsed a kingfisher on the same day – for me, seeing it whizz behind the house was a bizarre sighting as I was completing a morning watering session; Fiona saw it take off from a branch above the stream, close to one of the few pools which still have enough water to hold a few young salmonids. Though sadly in the now algal-coated gravel bed of what should be a pristine upland brook, I noticed the white underbelly of an upturned, dead bullhead – dead or dying fish in Afon Melinddwr is also something we’ve never observed before.

The day after the kingfisher sightings, I was heading home, tired from cutting some sharp rushes with the hedgetrimmer, walking back past the stream around 12.15 pm and was amazed to see 3 joined pairs of Common Darter dragonflies, Sympetrum striolatum. Locked together and slam-dunking into the surface of the water of this now very sluggish stream pool.

I didn’t have the camera with me, but reckoned it was a sufficiently special scene to be worth the slog back up the hill to grab it, on the off-chance that they might still be there on my return. One of the pairs was, and over the next 3 days, I found that they coupled again around this exact time. The male apparently grabs the female in flight, whether compliant or not, and then seemingly directs procedures over 10 to 15 minutes, in a balletic pas de deux designed to allow her to oviposit her eggs into the water, rather than being placed on specific vegetation.

Otherwise, the red-bodied males patrolled above the water surface, only briefly resting on stones, whilst single females were less commonly sighted.

One of the locked pairs stabbed the water surface several times, and then often flew up 3 or 4 metres, before returning to the stream surface for another egg-laying session.

This mating behaviour would normally take place over ponds, deep ditches, or very sluggish streams – not our usually fast-flowing one. Yet this was clearly their only local water-body option, as it was for the pondskaters, which you can see in large numbers in the film I’ve just edited of these special scenes.

For me, the benefit of just a very small area of water for them to focus on made taking such photos of what are normally very fast-moving insects a little easier, though still challenging.

Will their eggs and larvae survive the torrential downpours and torrents that will surely arrive in the autumn? Who knows?

They were joined on just one occasion by a couple of paired, more sedate damselflies, and a regularly patrolling Golden-ringed dragonfly, Cordulegaster boltonii, which routinely inhabits the stream as its home.

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The swallows have enjoyed this summer, and not only reared a second brood successfully, but have been in full chattering voice on most days. Occasionally joined by huge flocks of house martins which suddenly appear and criss-cross the sky above the house with their simpler chatter. In one attempt to capture this as they circled the large Sycamore tree behind the house, I reckoned I could count over 50 in this single image.

These are special moments which we haven’t enjoyed in years, as swallow numbers have generally declined, and in some years they’ve rarely seemed to chatter at all. There must be many insects still around to feed these hungry mouths (up to 850 might be eaten per bird, per day), although our impression is that apart from a couple of now well-filled kitchen fly papers, there haven’t been as many around in the garden. Most of our kitchen flies are fruit flies attracted to the smells from our fruit bowl and small green waste bin. At least our kitchen has maintained a ‘normal’ water-laden atmosphere (usually it’s well over 70!) unlike the outside reading for humidity, when we’ve taken the simple meter for a spell in the sunshine.

There are also far fewer wasps about, apart from close to the entrance of an underground nest I discovered, adjacent to where I was standing (at the time oblivious to its existence), both pruning off rhododendron branches, and later, filming for my last video. They’re having to carry out huge chunks of dry earth this year, rather than mud pellets, to enlarge the underground cavity to allow an expanding nest to grow.- the soil is too dry for mud. Notice also in the lower 2 photos that the wasp to the left is chewing up the cigar-rolled dry rhododendron leaf for use as material for new papier-mache nest building material. I last observed such a nest and mud carrying back in 2021.

 

In the garden and meadows, a few cool mornings to around 4 degrees C, and heavy dew would normally show festoons of spider webs everywhere – not this year, so I think the spiders must also have been hit by a lack of potential prey. Another well-timed walk into the upper hay meadow with the hedgetrimmer to do some final grass topping of seedheads for green hay transfer into other fields was just at the right time to see a large garden spider, poised but hesitating, about an inch from a struggling, golden pollen-coated bee, trapped by invisible web threads.

By the time I returned with the camera, the bee had managed to struggle free, the yellow-bodied spider had retreated to an adjacent furled knapweed leaf, again spared by me during earlier cutting. Only for it to race out at lightning speed down its anchor lines and pounce on a small fly trapped in its then-obvious orb web.

With my encouragement, Fiona has just downloaded the Bugs Matter app to her phone, and we’ll take part in its survey for any journeys we make in the remaining weeks of their survey season up to the end of September. Organised by the charity Bug Life, it’s a simple take on insect numbers. Running this year in France for the first time, it’s giving a frankly scary insight into likely declines in insect populations – a 55% decline in Wales for the 5 years since the survey began, a 60% decline in England. No wonder many of the other life forms which depend on insect-eating might be struggling.

With Fiona off to her monthly book group today, I’ve just been out to clean the number plate before this trip. We were frankly shocked – our car hasn’t had a wash for months, and admittedly we do a very low mileage with little at night, but even in our rural environment, I struggled to see any splats at all from all those weeks of travel. When she returned from an hour-long trip, there wasn’t a single splat at what should be the peak time of the year, for insect flight between our mainly hedge- and wood-lined country lanes.

This insight leads me on to my recent personal discovery of the ‘Great Dying’, more scientifically known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which took place about 250 million years ago, when roughly 90% of all species became extinct. Including the biggest ever extinction of insect species. 70% of vertebrate species also died out. One of the interesting nuggets of information on the linked Wikipedia page about the causes of this event, which it’s thought unfolded over many thousands of years, is the change in CO2 levels: from roughly 400ppm to nearly 2,500ppm. Gosh. And many of the Earth’s fossil fuel deposits hadn’t even been laid down then, let alone been extracted. Or burned.

That’s perhaps worth pondering in the light of current UK policies in this area.

The climate changed: CO2 levels changed. Species died out. And then, life being the amazing creative force that it is, reshaped itself to cope with the changed environment. Adapt and survive, or perish. A different, larger-scale drama of life and death than that which plays out every day in the natural world around us.

Some win, some lose. ‘Twas ever thus, and always will be.

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Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that all the hot sunny weather has made it a wonderful year for butterflies in our hay meadows and garden. And indeed more Hummingbird hawk-moth, Macroglossum stellatarum, sightings than ever before.

I even spotted one catching some later afternoon warmth, resting up on the guttering, high above me, as we drained out the bathwater – a task which has occupied our early evenings for many weeks, now.However, the really common species has been the immigrant Painted Lady butterfly, Vanessa cardui, which first arrived at the end of May, and have clearly produced a large second generation of pristine individuals which have been sighted every day nectaring first on the rather small, poor knaweed flowers. And as that has finished flowering, they’ve moved onto the equally small, but very numerous Devil’s-bit Scabious. Which in both the garden and meadows has proved to be a surprisingly resilient species in all this dry weather.

I’ve also seen more common blue butterflies than ever before, which is very exciting since it’s long been a goal of mine to try to establish a colony of them in our upper hay meadow. Both flashier males and browner females.

I mused on the fact that their English name frankly undersells them. Their scientific name, Polyommatus icarus, is far more exotic and descriptive: Polyommatus means many eyes – which they do indeed have as ‘ocelli’ in wonderful patterns on their underwings.

As for ‘icarus’, I had to refresh my memory of the legend from Greek mythology. One version is this:

Icarus’s father Daedalus, a very talented Athenian craftsman, built a labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull.

Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus in the labyrinth (or a tower overlooking the sea in some stories) because he believed Daedalus had given Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, a ball of string to help Theseus escape from the labyrinth and subsequently defeat the Minotaur.

Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings for a daring escape bid. One for him, and the other for his son, made of feathers held to a leather frame crafted from their sandals, with threads from blankets. And using beeswax to stick everything together. Before trying to escape from the island (or tower!), he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun or the sea. Icarus forgot the warning, or became dizzy once airborne and soared higher into the sky. The heat from the sun softened the wax. Icarus could feel melted wax dripping down his arms. The feathers fell off, one by one. Icarus kept flapping his “wings”, trying to stay aloft. But he soon realised he had no feathers left, fell into the sea, sank to the bottom, and drowned.

The butterfly was first named by the German entomologist S. A. von Rottemburg in 1775. He originally gave it the scientific name Papilio icarus, before it was later moved into the Polyommatus genus. Quite why he chose icarus remains unclear – the butterfly is small and doesn’t fly particularly high, usually skipping just above the level of the tallest grass stems, before landing on a suitable nectar flower, or its larval food plant – often common birds’-foot trefoil, Lotus corniculatus. Perhaps the clear blue colour of the male’s upper wings is indeed reminiscent of a summer sky, or the sea, and was reason enough to choose this name.

No matter, it’s a stunner, and I’ve just discovered that, like its larger cousin, the once extinct from the UK Large Blue, it benefits from a wonderful mutualistic relationship with meadow ants: the caterpillar secretes a honey-like liquid which the ants adore. In turn, they protect the caterpillar from several potential predators, and even occasionally carry the larva into their nests where pupation can safely take place. In recent years, more meadow ant nests are growing in size in this area of the meadow, which is always left uncut. This may well make this nutrient poor, south-facing slope, rich in bird’s-foot trefoil, a perfect site for the butterflies to establish a viable small colony.

Watch this brilliant Dutch YouTube for some excellent photography on the lifecycle of these butterfly gems, from an amazing young Dutchman  Bart Coppens.

The other butterfly I must mention is another summer immigrant, the Clouded Yellow, Colias crocea – previously I’ve only glimpsed one fleetingly, in July 2023. This year I’ve spent a few sessions trying to get a good photo of them. They fly incredibly fast, and rarely seem to settle for long – usually when the sun disappears and they quickly drop down amongst vegetation, where they always rest with their wings closed, and are brilliantly camouflaged in this posture.

My best photo came on our last sighting – in the garden, when one settled beneath a Geranium, a few feet from where we both were standing.

In the upper hay meadow they led me a merry dance, but I did take a sequence of (mainly) very blurry images from a considerable distance, managed by simply pointing the camera in their vague direction as a pair of butterflies danced around the field, high and low. References say that there is no significant courtship involved with this species, yet to me, particularly in the last image of this series, it looks very much like a male and female which were cavorting through mid-air.

In the last photo, the female butterfly is above and to the left – she has yellow patches on the dark bands at the margins of her fore wings. Yet these are not really discernible on the underside of her forewings. Which suggests that this image is showing the female flying upside down! A fact borne out by the position of her antennae, which would normally project slightly from above her head. Here they are pointing forward, yet down relative to the head, suggesting she may be flying a loop-the-loop. Might this be evidence of courtship, or simply her trying to throw off the attentions of an interested male?

For the best information and images of these lovely butterflies, check out this page on Adrian Hoskin’s ‘Learn about butterflies’ webpage’.

Recent work is beginning to discover just how sophisticated butterfly wing movements are – the wings themselves are very flexible and bend in different planes creating vortices of air movements which improve the efficiency of their flight.

Watch this wonderful Antlab video for some slow motion clips which illustrate this. The initial scene even seems to feature a butterfly flying upside down before correcting to a more normal position.

 

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Relief!

Eventually, the immediate drought has ended. 15 mmm of rain fell in just a few early morning hours. All the under-gutter dustbins filled completely. All our other beneath-dripline containers were at least half full. Between us, using our Li-ion pumps, hoses and buckets, we shifted perhaps 650 litres of rainwater onto the worst water-depleted sections of the garden. It instantly disappeared, without trace – despite the 15 litres of rain per square metre that had already fallen onto much of this ground.

Later, I completed a circuit of all the fields in around an hour, levelling any fresh molehills, ready to begin an autumnal count. There was a grand total of just 14, and of these, just a single patch of 9 hills that looked fresh and provided evidence of at least one still-alive mole. (We also have a second active one in the watered area of our deep beds.) I dug out a few big thistle rosettes I passed in this quick walk. The soil beneath them was completely bone dry. Where has all that rainwater gone? The stream was a little fuller and slightly cloudy, but it’s clearly going to be a long haul before soil moisture returns to its normal levels. As I type up this last text, driven inside by constant thunder rumbles to the south, more heavy drops are falling on the Velux.

Perhaps we’ll soon return to the more familiar green, green grass of home?

Which inevitably leads me to end with this musical snippet.

Although Tom Jones aficionados will no doubt already know that this was his cover version of a song composed by American songwriter Curly Putman in May 1965, I didn’t. This live version from 1987 is a duet with the country legend Dolly Barton, who sadly died just a couple of days ago at the age of 80. It showcases a more mellow take on it than his original recording, which made it to the UK number one slot 20 years earlier in 1966.

 

This in turn led me to the (new for me) first hit she ever had, written specially for her by the same Curly Putman, and also released in November 1966. Many of her later songs were her own compositions. This song set her on her way to fame and fortune, and was one of the hits from her first album, “Hello, I’m Dolly”  (recorded the year after Tom Jones’ first album was released in May 1965).

With a curious nod to the aforementioned Icarus, it even contains the line:

“You flew too high up off the ground”.

I hope you enjoy the song, as well as her 1960’s dress and hair.

How fashions have changed!

We only own one compilation album of hers, the wonderful collaborative multi-CD ‘Trio’. For this project in 1987, she wrote and performed with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, her song called ‘Wildflowers’. There’s an out-take version on the CD, which is typical of her country style, and appropriate to link in this blog where wildflowers, and letting nature lead by design, is a recurring theme.

Her opening verse:

The hills were alive with wildflowers
And I was as wild, even wilder than they
For at least I could run, they just died in the sun
And I refused to just wither in place

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Autumn approaches fast.

Seasonal stars are waiting to seize their moment, used to hunkering down, dormant through summer’s heat and droughts. Waiting for some moisture to return, and temperatures to dip. They will not be suppressed!

PS. The banner image is of the terminal flower coymb of Clerodendrum bungei, a plant we’ve never really rated before. Its attractive dark leaved foliage has a somewhat pungent, unpleasant odour, reminiscent to me of burned rubber (it was originally named Clerodendron foetidum, by Russian botanist Alexander von Bunge, who discovered it in China in 1831). However, this year the rose pink flowers have produced a beautiful scent, at just the right height to easily bend and sniff as one walks past. It does have a troublesome suckering habit, and hence can quickly spread across paths and pop up in isolation, feet away. A valued plant for the summer of 2026, but one to watch – we observed a large thicket was removed from Aberglasney, many years ago; it threatened to take over.