Rainfall: 70.4mm

Temp High: 34.7^oC on 4th

Temp Low: 6.7^oC on 7th

Temp Average: 18.0^oC

I spotted this moth in the back garden. It is a treble bar - the larval foodplant for this species is St John's Wort which I scan every year for larvae and I've never found them.

As the day closed, Christine spotted this garden dormouse inside our caged bird feeder. The birds didn't quite know what to do. He looks quite well-fed.

I had a moth emerge today from the caterpillar I collected way back on May 22nd. It is a feathered gothic - not rare and not the first time I've recorded this in that garden. I've included a photo of the antennae after which the species is named.

It's the time of the returning bird migrations and today we had this pied flycatcher in the garden. I haven't really had time to spend watching the birds this year so I've probably missed a lot.

A southern hawker was laying eggs quite a long way from the current waterline in our pond. This is really clever. The waterline is really low at the moment (not just in our pond). If she really was planning ahead for the pond filling up to a proper level that's quite an acheivement.

I took a lot of other photos in the garden today, but I'll come back and add them as I do the identifications.

We came across this new beetle species for the garden while clearing the last of our potato plants. This is a very gravid female Pterostichus madidus.

Yesterday and last night we had the first meaningful rainfall for 2 months. This black redstart was fighting with a common redstart over bathing rights in this rather pathetic puddle.

There were four kingfishers down by the pond today. These two were sitting on the same branch for about an hour, bowing to each other. The other two were chasing around after each other.

We had a new bug and a new spider for the garden today - the bug is a Codophila varia nymph (found in our cottage garden) and the spider is Evarcha arcuata, a jumping spider found below our pond.

The violet carpenter bee (or a different one) from Monday revisited today and I had the camera all set up ready so I at least got some reasonable photos. They really like our Salbei "Hot Lips", but they have to bite through the base of the flowers as they don't have a feeding tube like a 'normal' bee.

We had our first clear sighting of a violet carpenter bee today. We're pretty sure we've seen them in spring too but we've never got close enough to confirm it. Today I got a couple of photos, but they're not good enough to put up here (I would have put them up but I actually got some better photos at the end of the week - so look there).

Having failed to photograph the violet carpenter bee, I tried my luck with the hummingbird hawk-moths around our lily butt.

The latest addition to our alpine garden is flowering quite impressively (Erodium Hybrid 'Almodovar').

Here's a photo of a high brown fritillary which visited our verbena today.

The goldfinches have been clearing the seeds from our sunflowers for the past couple of weeks.

This enormous great green bush cricket has been hanging around in our potatoes for the last month but today she had moved to our marigolds. She was surprisingly difficult to see considering her heft.

We found two slow worms in the basement today, this baby (~4cm long) and a much bigger adult who dropped out of the basement doorframe. The adult didn't make it unfortunately. Not sure what happened there, but the baby slithered into the undergrowth when I put it outside so hopefully they will be OK.

I've been hoping to take a video of a European Wool Carder Bee cardering our Lamb's Ear leaves as there are a lot of these bees around this year. I thought maybe I was too late, but I spotted this one hard at work today and managed to get her quite near the start of her work.

I found this beautiful moth in our cottage garden this evening. It is a Lace Border moth - extremely rare in the UK. The larval foodplant is thyme and other herbs, so it's in heaven up in the garden.

We had both small pearl bordered and pearl bordered fritillaries in the garden today. I only managed to get a photo of the small. It's been a really good year for butterflies and moths. We have lots of humming-bird hawk moths around too.

I managed to get a another photo of the Egyptian geese down at the Friedrichstal fish ponds. We actually saw 6 goslings a couple of days ago, but it looks like they've lost one.