Photo-a-Day  (Sunday, 4th August, 2024)

A lovely scene. It reminds me of a line from the film "The Family Way"...."You can't beat Nature for beauty, Ezra!"

Beautiful pic Dennis,thanks.

Such a very pretty scene Dennis.
And thank you.

That is a lovely clock Dennis.

The council's are letting the weeds grow to help the bees.

Dennis, I'm with the rest of PAD's. Really lovely photo. It seems councils are getting the hang of leaving some grass areas alone & just cutting round the edges, its amazing what wild flowers there are hiding away underground.

A lovely photo and it’s nice to see the wild flowers. I have noticed this year there are hardly any bees on my Lavender shrubs. There’s usually hundreds of bees buzzing away over them. This year it takes me all my time to count about a dozen. There’s definitely a lot less bees about and butterflies. I don’t know what is causing the low numbers. It’s very strange.

Excellent. That wildflower bed, in front of the new health centre, is really eye catching, and frames the shot perfectly.

Veronica. The very low numbers of bees, butterflies and insects has been noted nationwide, Down here in Somerset we have only seen 2 Cabbage Whites !! so far this year. We have an allotment and have noticed over the last 10 years that the summer westerly winds have got stronger and this seems to be offputting to the flying insects. Indeed we have seen more Gatekeeper butterflies (which stay by the shelter of hedges) than Cabbage Whites. We have yet to see any Red Admirals at all this year.

Another unusual thing this year is huge numbers of jackdaws and very few small song birds. We have even seen far more jackdaws than magpies which has never happened before. Weird times.

Good unusual photo Dennis, I was trying to see what the clock faces depicted, but couldn't fathom out what was on them, however Chris Ready has a blog spot and says the faces were designed from drawings done by local schoolchildren:-

https://aspullchrisready.blogspot.com/2010/07/

Though it doesn't say what the drawings depicted, maybe it was something from local life the schoolchildren were wanting displayed, and maybe a story to be told again.

The impact of the loss of insect life over the years is really being seen now, and not just with the loss of pollinators such as species of Bees, and other flying insects such as Beetles and Butterfly's, but also the flying insects which birds such as Swallows and Martins feed on, and not forgetting Bats which feed on the night flying insects. The sky at one time was full of whirling Swallows and House Martins and then at dusk the Bats could be seen flitting around, not many of either to be seen now, though destruction of where they roosted and nested can be blamed too.

You are both right Carolean and Cyril. The wind and rain has a lot to answer for as pesticides and artificial grass as well. Paving over gardens to park cars can’t be any good either…sez me putting pebbles down instead of turf to save mowing.!

Dennis I’m always looking for a reasonably priced bungalow in Aspull but hard to come by.

John, there are some nice bungalows on St Mary’s Road built in the days when Aspull had its own Council. I don’t know if any are for sale, but I dread to think what they would cost today.

Cheers Dennis .