Skip The Lemon
Skipper butterfly sitting on an old lemon still standing after a long winter, gone well past mouldy, and still serving the garden’s mobile inhabitants.
*Click on the pictures for a proper look … and click again
I am lucky to find anything at all in the garden, it seems. There seems so little of the small life forms about these days. Life is retreating with significance.
So when one alights in accessible location it is prudent to take advantage. Don’t know when the next opportunity will come. Acknowledging the good.
Skip, for skipper, on an old lemon turned to something else.
The old lemon has served various forms of life through the winter, at first as food and then as shelter, now as a platform for what may pass this way or rest in the sun.
Now it is spring proper and in spite of the worldwide failure of insect populations some, not many at all, are still showing up in the garden for respite from the surrounding desert.
A sign of the times, some forms of life are retreating as other forms advance. A global phenomenon now. Which is which not so important as the effect of either on the other forms, to some forms.
And then there is the space it all happens in. That sense of space in which everything settles into perspective, or disappears into nothing, whatever it may be or represent.
Time to skip the bitters. And listen to the silence.
© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look … and click again.
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Nature's Place 
Sadly, this is so, Mark. We have so far had no aphids this year. Having said that, they will probably all rush in now that I’ve brought this to their attention. The bees are scarce too.
Yes, careful what you call in. Where there’s space something comes along.
A sign of the times all right.
Thanks Tracy.
It is very cool to discover that the eye is not round, but faceted. Thank you for sharing! :)
Thanks Laura. It’s a compound eye – see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_eye
It seems to be the “Rostbrauner Dickkopffalter”, Ochlodes sylvanus.
The antenna is really great.
Today I finished my first photo book about insects, 110 pages. My wife wanted that.
Hopefully everything goes well.
My feeling is that only the more robust species survive. They are still there in large numbers. But the niche creatures are gradually disappearing.
Good luck with the book.
We’ll see how things unfold. It could be time for a reaping.
What does reaping mean here?
The little creatures tell us secretely: No way the tall ones change their mind.
As in you reap what you sow. We have sown the seeds of the wholescale destruction of nature and they are coming to bloom in a location near you, or me, or …
ah, got it