Day 13 #30DaysWild Monarch Butterfly Picture

I more-or-less completed my Monarch butterfly this afternoon, using Faber-castell pastel pencils and pastelmat card. There will be a few finishing tweaks to do. Some of you may have seen my drawing at an earlier stage of its metamorphosis here. I followed Emily Rose's detailed (and free!) tutorial here. I used a blue card rather than the recommended green, which I didn't have.  

Day 6 of #30DaysWild: Monarch Butterfly Sketch

Plain Tiger (Danaus chrysippus), Western Peloponnese, Greece, 2010

It has been a wild and windy day here, with showers and a rainbow. I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to make a start on my drawing of the Monarch butterfly, following Emily Rose's brilliant guidelines which you can find here. This is my second attempt at one of her online workshops, and bit by bit I am getting the feel of the Faber-Castell pastel crayons she encourages her students to use. As you can see from the photo below, I still have a way to go, but never mind. 

Work in Progress: Monarch butterfly

I particularly wanted to try my hand at a Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) because, as you can see from photos 1 and 3, we saw a fairly similar butterfly, I think a Plain Tiger (Danaus chrysippus), near Pylos in the Peloponnese a little over ten years ago when we were celebrating our Silver Wedding. These Tigers are sometimes known as 'African Monarchs'. 

Plain Tiger (Danaus chrysippus)

Monarch butterflies are well known for their long-distance migration. Their wings, as you can see in my incomplete drawing, have black lines. They normally navigate by the sun, but when weather conditions are not so favourable, they resort to magnetism as you will discover if you read this article in National Geographic. Monarch larvae feed on Milkweed. 

Plain Tiger butterflies are possibly one of the earliest species to be depicted in art. An image of what appears to be one of these insects was found on a fresco in an Egyptian tomb in Luxor. I am not entirely sure whether the red and yellow flower in photos 1 and 3 is Blood Flower or Scarlet Milkweed (Asclepias curassavica), but I think it looks as though it may be.

Day 5 of #30DaysWild: my response to Dr Miriam Darlington's 'Being close to the grass' Prompt

I don't find it easy to reach the grass on account of my mobility issues, but during the last few days the grass in our garden has practically reached me, particularly when I am sitting down. This extra growth is because we attended last year's Suffolk Wildlife Trust Nature Summit and made a pledge to 'say no to the mow', with the exception of a walk-through trail, which has been invaluable during lockdown for my shielded exercise. 

A couple of days ago I was sitting outside, scanning the blades of grass for signs of ladybirds as we have more blackfly than ever. I was not exactly richly rewarded, but I did find a couple of 7-spots, like the one in the photo above and below. 

We often imagine a bird's eye-view, but what would it be like to be half a centimetre long and surrounded by a green jungle of stalks? Authors like Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, 'B.B', Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson, Richard Adams, Kenneth Grahame and numerous others have, to one degree or another, given this question some kind of thought. A number of these writers were creating imaginary landscapes: others had political messages to impart. Some have helped us to adjust our outlook and perspective, enabling us, in Blake's familiar words, to see 'a World in a Grain of Sand'.

Would I write a poem myself to explore the nature of the ladybird's grassy wilderness? Well, I might, but I haven't just yet. Instead I decided to have a play with one or two of the Photoshop and Photoshop Elements filters, bearing this thought in my head. These are a few of my resulting images, some more fantastical than others. I hope they will make you smile, but perhaps they will also help you to share my ponderings...

This last ladybird, the one above in a mosaic-filter style, is possibly my favourite of the experimental images. I think this is because it reminds me of an exquisite stained-glass window in Alloway Parish Church in Scotland, Alloway being the birthplace of Robbie Burns. The text accompanying the image is from verse 22 of the eighth chapter of Genesis.

You can see these Alloway stained glass ladybirds above and below. They are part of the Four Seasons Window, designed by Susan Bradbury.  

Next time you see a ladybird in the long grass, why not take a moment to wonder what its world must be like. 

Grass features in a surprising number of poems. I am posting links to three that you might enjoy...

• A Blade of Grass by Brian Patten
• In Tall Grass by Carl Sandburg (beautiful, and elegiac in tone)
• On Not Mowing The Lawn by Mary Oliver

* * * 

This post was written in response to Dr Miriam Darlington's #30DaysWildCreativity Facebook prompt. You can find Miriam on Twitter: @MimDarling

 

Spring sunshine, flowers and insects at NT Ickworth (still too early for lambs...)

The Rotunda

We visited NT Ickworth for the first time this season, hoping to see some early colour in the spring sunshine. The Aconites and Snowdrops were at their best.



Nuthatch - you can just about make it out...

We saw our first Nuthatch of 2017, high, high up in one of the trees. We have seen Nuthatch and Treecreeper here on previous visits, so we knew where to look.

The next three Nuthatch photos were taken here last year: I am re-posting them just to give a better idea of colour and shape. These are such fine birds.

The lovely photo below was taken by David this afternoon...

... while I spotted this branch of early blossom.

There were plenty of catkins on the trees...

... and tiny clumps of a plant that I had assumed was a form of miniature Comfrey or Lungwort, but I suspect it is something else altogether. Any ideas, please? I feel the black spots on the leaves ought to provide a clue.

We saw one Great-spotted Woodpecker in flight and heard drumming in the wood. The hole below, taken with a zoom lens, was high up on a trunk. I'm still wondering what is inside... 

You can see the snaking path of Snowdrops and Aconites. We were looking for the Woodpecker...

The spring flowers were magnificent...

... in their clumps and swathes.

We were particularly surprised to see several bees hard at work in the Aconites.

They were not the only ones who had been beavering away. The wood sculpture took us by surprise as it is a new feature, and as yet an unfinished one.

We found this board, telling us more about it.

The sculpture was well done, but I was not entirely sure that I  felt it fitted the ambience of this otherwise unadorned woodland walk.

This bee in the photo above has evidently 'bagged' a good amount of pollen. I wonder if these bees are from a local hive.

My thanks to David for the photo below...

And finally, what mammals did we see (apart from the sheep who are expected to produce over 1000 lambs in the coming weeks)? Well, two Grey Squirrels... and deer, or at least these rather fun recycled log-and-stick deer, egged on by a pair of log-snowmen!

We made a couple of purchases at the secondhand bookstall before leaving Ickworth in the glow of late afternoon sunshine, rejoicing in the knowledge that longer lighter evenings lie ahead of us.

Brown Hawker Dragonfly - Flatford Mill

We saw reasonable numbers of butterflies in the RSPB Wildlife Garden at Flatford when we were doing the Big Butterfly Count, but we were both feeling that dragonflies and damselflies were hard to find when this huge Brown Hawker caught our eye. It is a female, and those bronze wings look stunning when the sun catches them. The male of the species has additional blue markings.

Flatford Mill, Constable's inspiration for The Haywain

Incidentally, if you live within range of the Suffolk coast, you might be interested in one of the Poetry in Aldeburgh events (Saturday 5 November, 10-12 noon), a Poetry and Drawing Workshop. This session will take Constable's landscapes as a starting point (alongside poetry). The leaders hope to include drawing from observation and from the imagination.

Constable Country - RSPB Flatford Wildlife Garden

Flatford Mill, painted by John Constable

We always enjoy a visit to Flatford, with its Constable connotations. The RSPB Wildlife Garden is a particular draw, especially when there are usually butterflies on the wing.

Saturday was a 'reasonable' afternoon by the standards of the summer. We entered the garden and were a bit surprised to see so many autumnal seedheads in August! 

I don't think we managed to spot one butterfly, but the volunteer staff member was very helpful and pointed out some other insects that we might well have missed.

The selection below shows these creatures and also a couple of mini-beasts that we spotted for ourselves.

Camouflaged Shieldbug instar nymph on sage

Not an insect this time, but an as yet unidentified arachnid!

The closest we came to a butterfly! A Mint Moth (thank you, RR, for confirming ID!)

A Willow Emerald damselfly

There were quite a few Bumblebees around

Blossoms of Hope Collaboration

And now for something a little different and rather special. My kind and creative friend and poetic collaborator, Kay Weeks (in the USA), has done a wonderful and spirited watercolour inspired by my one of my photographs of Loch Scavaig on the Isle of Skye. Kay's painting is the blue and indigo one in the centre of the invitation card above.

Travellers love to cross the unpredictable waters of the sea loch to reach the magical Loch Coruisk, painted so vividly by Turner and described by Sir Walter Scott as 'that dread lake'.

Loch Coruisk ...

... with its guardians

I am touched and humbled that Kay has chosen to put her painting of my photo forward as part of the Portraits and Profiles: Inspirations in my Life project to raise the profile of Blossoms of Hope, an organisation that supports the Claudia Mayer/Tina Broccolino Cancer Resource Center of Howard County General Hospital. 

Thank you, Kay! 

Rendez-vous in Philadelphia: me (left), Kay (centre), David Gill (left)