Dog Days of Summer ...

Well, Oska fans - here's your boy in typical laid-back pose. The weather has been very warm now for a few weeks in this second half of summer, and Oska has been snoozing in the shade quite a lot (by the way, he's huge in Bilbao now, as our Spanish visitors to the Chambres d'Hotes fell in love with him and took many photographs ...). Meanwhile, the garden around him has been in good form, having benefited from the earlier periods of rain and now the prolonged warmth:

It has been a busy time with visitors to the Chambres d'Hotes and we have met some delightful people - with folks from the USA, Spain, France and Belgium and the UK. Most of them have stayed here to eat in the evening and that's given time for lively discussions and hearing all about people's very various lives. One feature has been considerable shock about BREXIT and the feeling that it was just the wrong decision at the wrong time and if  'BREXIT means BREXIT what does BREXIT mean ...?'. 

Right - more tangible things ....

Summer Wildlife (that's animals etc ...)
There has been some interesting wildlife making an appearance over the summer. In the past few weeks the garden has been full of butterflies - up to the start of July there were very few, but the prolonged hot weather seems to have spurred them on to make up for lost time ... here are just a few examples:  

And some of the tree and shrub blossom has held on in there and echoes the butterflies' colourful display: 

Just as the butterflies have appeared quite late, so have the swallows - but they are now dominating the skies, swooping and arching like fighter jets ... and if you are near the swimming pool you can see them turn from their flight and skim the surface of the water​​ to drink - they fly so fast that it's difficult to photograph - here are some attempts:

And the story of the bad frogs continues - no matter how many times we take them from the swimming pool and place them back in the pond, the next day they're back in the pool again. There's now a gang of five and while they're not exactly hogging the deckchairs they are getting bolder and they flaunt themselves around the pool, lounging on the cleaner hoses and the inflatable toys:

The 'bat life' around the garden and house has certainly livened up as well. There have been the usual pipistrelles, appearing in the twilight, taking over where the swallows have left off; but the other night we saw what was definitely a 'new bat' - we used the Bat Detector and picked up a frequency around 27kHz, which meant it might be a Leisler bat and certainly when we checked the details of the Leisler it was of the right appearance. Not knowing very much about bats, we thought that perhaps this was a rare one, but we understand it is pretty common and under no threat of
extinction. He went to hang in our 'Nook' for the evening, but at the end of the evening, after our Bed and Breakfast guests had gone to bed at about 2.00am (yes ..!) it had disappeared, so I could not take a photograph - so, here's one we pinched (the photo, not the bat): 

On sadder note, you may recall our mentioning we have a Scops Owl(s) that nests in one of the barns just over the green from our house. We hear the distinctive call a lot, but have only seen the owl twice and have not been sure there's more than one. Last week we were walking on the far side of the garden when we saw a bundle of fluffy feathers on the ground and found it was a baby owl, quite dead I'm afraid, but with no signs of damage at all. We can only think it was attempting flight and hit something and was stunned. We put the baby owl in a box and buried it by the hedge. Again, we're too inexpert to know if it was a baby Scops, but believe it was from the identifications we've researched. If it was, then in one sense it is a hopeful sign in that there must be a pair, nesting nearby. We hoped this was not the only baby, but we've read that Scops owls only rear one baby - so, all we can hope is that there is a nesting pair and they produce another, less accident prone, baby.

Finally, we can't let a Blog Post go without talking about something we've constructed! Not 'large-scale' this one, but quite interesting ..... in the upper barn we found a very old and very heavy ladder - made of a narrow tree cut in half and then joined by carefully-crafted rungs. It was about five metres long and had some worm and damage in places, but remarkably little really. Along the back of the house, with the wide pathway leading to the 'Nook', a second wisteria has been growing very powerfully this year (we've mentioned it previously), and there is a large honeysuckle that is getting very tangled with new growth. As we've built the walkway from the pergola and planted this with climbing roses, the overall amount of climbing plants is considerable and is now providing wonderful shade for sitting out, eating outside etc:

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But it needed a bit of sorting out to take the various new growth 'out and along'. Also, the back door needed some 'framing', with its view out over the garden and beyond. So, we have cut out the damaged parts of the old ladder, treated all the remaining wood with anti-rot and hardener, and then concreted the two halves into the ground at the edge of the pathway adjacent to the honeysuckle and wisteria, and found two smaller old chestnut beams and placed these to make an archway - so now we can take the growth over this and it will form what we hope will be pleasing new structure, blending into what is already there:

So, on that integrative note - have a very good rest of the summer and there'll be another Post in a few weeks.