Fish and Cabbage

10th May
A comment on my last post from Mr Dilo in Romania indicated that I might not have explained the butterfly/cabbage thing adequately. Earlier this year I started a vegetable patch so that we would have a context to film some of our insects, I planted all the usual stuff including some flouncy green cabbages, I kept a few of the plants in pots - they don’t like being confined. The butterflies may well turn their noses up at my pathetic cabbage stubs but if there is no other option, they might lay their bright yellow eggs on the leaves. (I nicked the egg pic from here, where there are also some nice shots of the young hatching and a Cabbage White pupa)


Fishing on Friday didn’t go down well, none of us have wielded a rod (and to be frank, I've never seen the point of all that standing around) but there is a lake on the land that we rent and it is teeming with fish, fishing is the sort of thing a father does with his son ergo etc...

The chaps came back after less than an hour in a state of distress - a fish had responded to the baited hook with such gusto that it entirely swallowed the hook, it all ended very messily, the fish not being the sort of size to bother eating.

The fish are very friendly, they will come if I call them because they know that I have bread. My neighbours have dug a reservoir and want to stock it with these fish so yesterday I went to the lake, and once they were feeding I just dipped a bucket and Hey Presto!





My favourite fishing method is to creep up on the herons, they catch the big fish by stabbing them, if I surprise the birds just as they have made a catch they usually drop the fish as they fly off.








You've probably been irredeemably traumatised by that vision of my unmanicured toes, tomorrow, unless otherwise distracted, I'll tell you about Brenda's party.

Hanging Up Butterflies

15th April
Last week we hung up the swallowtail pupae, they had been in the fridge since arriving by post in January, we wanted to film the butterflies emerging, but first we needed to get them into their launching position

In the wild, pumped up on a diet of fluffy fennel tops, the swallowtail caterpillar finally stops eating and looks for somewhere to pupate. He wanders around in the undergrowth until he finds a woody stem to climb up. Once in place, he spits out some thread, sticks it to the stem and makes a loop which he ducks his head under, held by this safety harness he hangs on the twig until he's ready to emerge.

We emulated this marvel of nature with superglue and dental floss. A series of forked twigs were lined up, each stuck in a flowerpot and ballasted with clay - we spent two evenings hanging the sleeping pupae.

The butterflies kept emerging when we weren’t looking so we put a 24-hour watch on them, cameras at the ready. During my watch and becoming increasingly cold and numb and bored one of the pupae twitched, I jumped and shrieked and everyone ran in to see what was happening – nothing - a Braxton Hicks contraction, a false alarm. The butterfly emereged 4 hours later - and we finally managed to record it .