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proportions. In fact, London’s gulls are still something of a novelty, despite the maritime nature of the tidal Thames.I once had a relationship-threatening close encounter with a herring gull in St James’s Park, but I gloss over that here. It is the black

the rusty-red females. And there were several specimens of the distinctive large black and ashy white Andrena cineraria.Lots of the bumblebee-like Anthophora plumipes have been darting about. The all-black females are often pursued by a posse of black

and fennel just outside the kitchen door.Although markedly different in size from the meadow brown, it's sometimes difficult to identify a gatekeeper, especially in a photograph. However, it has a clear distinguishing mark. In the black eye blob on the front

It’s all looking rather still and damp in the garden now. Autumn, it seems, has come at last. Over the Guy Fawkes weekend, there were reports on iSpot and Flickr of red admirals and hoverflies visiting the sun-lit ivy, but, in my garden at least

stubs, but she is still quite unable to fly. Instead, she emerges from her cocoon and gives off a pheromone scent to attract the night-flying males. These rather unassuming moths are mottled brown with a small white spot on each forewing. She mates

is not that smelly, but the fly may have been following the gentle scent of cavy urine and faecal pellets. Or it may be that the fly was attracted to the warmest sunniest spot in the garden, just outside the back door, against the sheltered south-facing wall where

the mainland European form, orange spotted rather than the yellow speckled ones we get in Britain, and was that a swallowtail fluttering down the road?Each afternoon, as we sat in the garden of the gite, we were visited by hummingbird hawkmoths

down into. We've only been here a couple of hours when someone spots a huge black beetle crawling up the wall--the bloody nose beetle Timarcha tenebricosa, so called for the reflex bleeding of bitter red fluid from it's mouth if picked up. A great