Of birds and bees

I always feel the need to see our Crow Wood after a few days away, just to check its all still there (!) and see what has changed. Even after a week, different plants die or come into flower. When we went to Sweden it was in the middle of the heatwave and since then the weather has cooled and it has rained quite a bit. Along the southern edge of our wood is an area of hard compressed ground that used to be a track and Scabious flowers like it a lot. A few years ago deer browsed all the plants down to short stalks so I now put up GlitterBang scarers and they really do work, so much so that the Scabious patch is now twice as big. They are now in flower and showing once again what great plants they are for attracting insects - bees, butterflies, hoverflies and beetles, all flock to the flower heads.
Also today I found several young Common Lizards sunning themselves on the various tin sheets I put out for reptiles. I learnt to catch lizards as a boy on Hayes Common, just near where we then lived; the secret is to approach very slowly indeed and with as little noise as possible otherwise they are off into hiding at the double. The same strategy has to be applied to get photographs !

Young Lizards sunning themselves on a tin sheet

Honey Bee on Scabious flower

A Long-Banded Longhorn Beetle (Leptura quadrifasciata) on Scabious flower

Hoverfly