Home Again!

Home again and back to the old routines! The wild boar are looking well: the sows, having weaned their piglets, have recovered condition and their coats gleam with good health. The black boar, meanwhile, is full of his usual swagger and looks fine in his summer coat.

While we were away there was a good deal of rain and the beaver ponds are almost up to their winter levels now.

The beavers have worked on the bottom dam and raised its parapet, as the photograph below shows.

The next photograph shows the lawn by the burn, carefully grazed by the beavers.

For much of the summer I have watched this Yellow Loosestrife (Lysimachia vulgaris) spreading on to the silty shore of one of the ponds. For a long time I couldn't make out what the young shoots were and then I noticed the parent plants a few metres further inland.

Yellow Loosestrife is an inhabitant of 'ditches, marshes and by lakes and rivers' according to Stace's New Flora of the British Isles.

My new lens has made it possible for me to take more satisfactory photographs of invertebrate life. Here is a beautiful hoverfly. Could it be a male Marmalade Fly (Episyrphus balteatus)?

Here, in summer mode, is the lowest pond along the burn that the beavers are reclaiming.

The winter barley has been cut and the straw baled in this field next to the Dean Water.

The mystery trapper has removed his apples and carrots from near the entrance to the lodge and the trail camera has gone. Perhaps he is trying his luck somewhere else? I hope not.

I didn't see a beaver in the Dean Water yesterday evening, but one slapped its tail near me as I sat and waited by the water.