Rowan Tree

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 The Rowan tress on our land are in berry. Rowan (pronunciation guide.... "row" as in a fight in Scotland and "row" as in row a boat in England). This tree is otherwise known as the 'mountain ash" and is native in the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Rowan is used by many species of larvae of Lepidoptera, and the berries are used as a food source by many birds (thrushes and blackbirds seem very keen on them here). Rowan fruit is used as a mordaunt in some dyes. and the fruit is sometimes made into a jam or jelly. The fruits can be poisonous unless cooked. There is a lot of mythology associated with rowans - they are good for keeping witches away apparently which must be true as it's ages since I have seen a witch.



Diary
Lots to report!
Lots of butterflies around the flowers at the kitchen door. I liked this photo of a red admiral butterfly.

I notice that the "cuckoo pint" flower which I featured on20th May  has come into fruit.
I was out with the bat detector last night and am pretty confident I detected a whiskered bat. These bats are not common but do occur in Cumbria. One needs to treat the id by the bat detector software with some caution but the sonograph looks right.

This means that I need to update my list of mammals seen from our land to a new total of 19.
A busy night at the moth trap. 50 daddy long legs and around 150 large yellow underwing and a new moth to me which I think is the August Thorn moth.






The farmer next door took his second cut of silage off the field and there was a flock of around 50 herring gull feeding in the stubble.
I had several fox on my three camera traps. I also had this footage which I am still trying to understand of a polecat apparently following a fox. I have posted this to a local mammal group and nobody has seen anything like this before. Any comments anybody? I am not sure what is going on - it looks like a deliberate following to me rather than a chance meeting. Is the polecat making use of the confusion that a fox would cause around a rabbit hole to improve its own hunting success?










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