Hummingbird Hawk Moth

I have had a busy morning, I finally found time to go outside where my cup of tea was waiting for me and started talking to daughter who was sat cross legged on table, as she does, eating her breakfast, when out of the corner of my eye I spied it! I had been waiting to see one all year so I rushed in for camera - it had the wrong lens on of course but I thought best try and get a photo quick before it flew away! so snapped these two photos, daughter then told me it had been there all the time she had been out there but hadn't realised what it was, at which point I relaxed a bit and decided to check the settings and the photo previews, when I looked up again the moth had gone and has not returned yet so for now these will have to do!

Look to the skies

It was Cosford Airshow today, which meant we might get some impressive planes over our garden, so camera was kept close by just in case! Mr S and daughter were not disappointed when this Vulcan flew right over our garden

then later on and I presume marking the end of the show the red arrows flew over

Azure damselfly

Another gem from the weekend this beautiful azure damselfly spent most of Saturday in our garden

22-spot ladybird

Yesterday I found this tiny 22-spot ladybird in one of our raised beds on some lily leaves

Unsprung photo - mason bee

Last night was rather exciting for me as BBC Springwatch Unsprung shared my mite infested mason bee as the bug of the day photo,
here is the screenshot of my bee's big moment!
Nature isn't always pretty
If you want to hear what Nick baker had to say about it you can find it on bbc i-player for three weeks

I photographed this bee on Monday morning slowly crawling over our outside table it could hardly move as it was so weighed down by the phoretic mites, I made up a sugar and water solution and put some drops of it on the table for it to feed from, which it did, then I popped indoors for something and when I returned it had gone
But I did manage to take these pictures before it went

thunderstorm approaching

parading mallards

Attention!

Quick March!

About turn!

Quick March!

At Ease!

Fall Out!

I've always said I wanted ducks in our garden, I never expected them to come in the form of two male mallards though!  - another first for our garden -stayed for around an hour on Saturday evening they would have stayed longer if our dog hadn't realised they were there!

Brimstone

This beautiful brimstone visited our garden today, I had to break off conversation with daughter to rush inside to find my camera, shouting 'stay' 'stay' 'stay' as if it understands dog commands!!!
Any way it stayed and floated from one flower to the next for two or three minutes, long enough for me to get some photos -we haven't had one in our garden since August 2010 so you can imagine my excitement!!!!

Lime Hawk-moth

We have put our trap out a few times this year with mixed results, last night came up trumps though - with this beauty resting on top. Our first ever Lime Hawk-moth

Wood Mouse

We had a visitor to our back yard earlier on this evening, cleaning up some of the dropped sunflowers, this cute Wood Mouse. I photographed it through our dining room window, but it spied me and froze just staring - eyes bulging, not even twitching, so I quickly took this photo and moved away from the window as I didn't want anything swooping down and taking it or worse still for one of our neighbours cats to get it, I went into kitchen and watched from there he was still staring at the dining room window, but then darted back under one of our old sinks - safe!