Sunday Butterflies

With the wet spring it seemed like it would be a difficult year for butterflies, but now the hot summer has started (even if there have been a few torrential showers) the local butterflies have started to appear:

A Large White:

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A meadow brown:

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A peacock, less distinct with it's wings closed.
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A red admiral
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And a small white:
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Return to the Ock

Anyone who has heard one of my talks this year will know that the summer is not one of my favourite seasons for walking along the Ock - it's often hot, there are squadrons of small biting insects and the with the foliage so high it's very difficult to see what is happening on the river:

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Where it is possible to see into the river, a family of swans have moved in:

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Making the most of the recent warm weather and the abundance of small insects, the damselflies are emerging, such as this splendid banded demoiselle

 Although harder to see than in earlier in the year, the water voles are still present, such as this one lurking inside it's burrow:
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Views of the porch...

Sometime during the 1980's my sister visited a school fate and returned with a small cactus, it lived in the recently built greenhouse where it prospered so well it started to produce offshoots - which we cut off and replanted (our first cuttings) - when my sister and I left home the cacti were left with my Dad, who repotted them several times, watered them, looked after them and probably spoke to them on several occasions.
Now the catci live in our porch in Abingdon and this year they produced these remarkable flowers:.
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Although stunning, the flowers only last for 24 hours before withering.
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But thanks to the twitter feed of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (https://twitter.com/morethanadodo) it has finally been identified as Echinopsis eyrieslli - a native of South America, where it is also known as, rather appropriately, the hedgehog cactus.