Wildlife summer 2012

[ronm]

Our first swallow here today and also heard our first cuckoo 

[Roma]

A friend sent me these pictures last week.  She found this badger asleep in the nest box with a dead hen.  She left it hoping it would go away next night but when it was still there the following morning and did not appear very well got the local SSPCA to remove it.  A PM showed it had few teeth and other health problems.  A local vet with an interest in wildlife told her old male badgers get evicted from the set and do not usually survive long on their own.   

[Lesley Cox]

If the hen was dead Roma, had the badger killed it?

[Roma]

If the hen was dead Roma, had the badger killed it?

Yes the badger had killed the hen.  They have had hens killed and eaten by badgers before. 

[Lesley Cox]

So the badger killed the hen, then itself died? That's terribly sad somehow, for both of them, the hen that it was needed so badly by an ill and perhaps starving badger and for the badger who was not strong enough to benefit from his kill, or even eat it apparently. Such is life - and death - in the natural world.

[Olga Bondareva]

Late to dinner. 

[mark smyth]

A friend who studies badgers once told me most dead on the roads are males. I'm meeting her later and will ask again

Olga lovely butterfly photo. What is the flower?

[ronm]

A wonderful picture of the Orange Tip butterfly ( Anthocharis cardamines ), Olga. Only the males have the orange at the tip of the upperside of the forewings. Not easy to tell but I would say this ones a female.
Thanks for showing this lovely picture.

[Olga Bondareva]

What is the flower?

Pulsatilla flavescens, Mark.

Thank you ronm especially for explaining male/female difference! I am not good in butterflies. Usually they only follow flowers.

[Roma]

I saw a male orange tip on a dandelion today but it did not stay long enough for me to get my camera.  It was the first I've seen this year.

[ronm]

For anyone just getting interested in butterflies, here's a nice article from a while ago. With some great Orange Tip photos included.


http://www.srgc.org.uk/monthfeature/june2004/content.html

[fredg]

A few shots of maybe not so wild life.
Not as many youngsters around as I would have expected.


1, 2 & 3 Coot
4 & 5     Greylag goose
6 & 7     Canada goose

[Anthony Darby]

Double page spread on what we are doing to the planet in the New Zealand Weekend Herald. The ecological overshoot meaning that we currently will need 1.5 years to replenish one year's human demand. Grimm reading about humanity's ecological footprint and the gap between that and nature's productivity, but one bullet point alarmed me:

"Birds, fish mammals and other vertebrates are taking such a hammering they are shrinking in average size - about one-third smaller than in 1970".

Confirms what I have noticed. The song thrushes in our garden do look smaller than what I remember.

[Lesley Cox]

That will also be very bad news for those fishermen who like to boast of their catches and the one that got away, let alone the one they stuff and hang on the wall.
Sorry, I know the subject's serious but I couldn't resist.

[Anthony Darby]

I just wonder if it was meant to mean something else? Quite often key words are missed out from the original (WWF) version as the reporter doesn't quite understand it? I must admit I have to read some parts of the article several times, and even then I'm not convinced I really understand the "Global Hectares Per Capita" part.