Teabags

We changed to Fairtrade tea a few years ago, buying both Teadirect and Clipper. I only recently realized that Clipper teabags are biodegradable while Teadirect's are not - they hang around perfectly identifiably after a year in the compost bin. I suppose after a longer time and more disturbance they would physically disintegrate, but that would just mean small pieces of nylon in the soil rather than large ones.

So, anyhow, we have become obligate Clipper teabag buyers. Happily both Somerfield and the Co-op on Camberwell New Road sell them.

So what's it all for?

This little lovely is a lime hawk moth on the pavement just down the street yesterday. Our instinct was to take it to a safer place - a shrub outside the house.

But the life of the lime hawk moth doesn't quite fit the fairy tale. As an adult it doesn't feed - it mates and dies; perhaps ours was already on the way out.

Near the shrub there is bucket with water for pot plants. One of the local boys wanted some water for his water pistol and we had a look in the bucket and found that it was teeming with animal life: mosquito larvae, tiny red worms, water fleas (I'm pretty sure) and even smaller creatures going about their business. It's enough to make you believe in spontaneous generation.

Well, mosquitoes could have laid eggs, and anyhow the water came from a water butt, not from the tap. But a few years ago the water butt was a clean, empty plastic container and the rain came from the sky. Evidently the makings of water life are constantly lurking in relatively dry places.

In sum, Nature goes on in her mysterious and heartless way in Camberwell.

Young things

We first saw a great spotted woodpecker in the garden in 2004 and thought, what a rare and surprising thing. Last year a juvenile visited the fat feeder quite often and this year we have seen both an adult and a juvenile. Last week, briefly, the juvenile was on the fence and the adult was feeding it from trips to the fat feeder. So it isn't rare, but it still seems surprising - I thought you had to go into the country to see woodpeckers.

Of course it is the time of year for juveniles - the garden is full of young great tits and young blackbirds (a young blackbird being fed is of course what the photo shows). And we also identified a pair of young squirrels, a little smaller than adults and behaving in that exploratory playful way that seems to mark the young of at least all mammalian species.