On orange

There was a deep orange stripe in the sky to the east as I walked down the hill at 7 o'clock this morning. Sitting on the bus a little later I noticed the perfectly and naturally arranged orange hair of a young man in front of me around his perfectly placed crown. I have a double crown so my hair is confused!

Later, while hedge hacking, I enjoyed the orange foliage of a large and large-leaved cotoneaster. It is springing up quite a lot here in the last few years, presumably spread by birds who eat the berries. Although I think the shrubs are invasive non-natives, they are also rather handsome at this time of year. The first one is on the lane below the cottage next door and the second is in next-door's garden. There is also one on the field side of our south fence. They cheer up dull days.

The twenty-plumed moth, or one of its relations, is still around. If it is the same one, which apparently it could be, it has now been in the house for over a month. I'm a little bit puzzled by the description in that link. It says the wings are each made up of six 'feathers', but if you actually count the quills there are ten for each wing which, given its name, Twenty-plumed moth, is what you'd expect. Hexadactyla refers to its six insect legs. I guess the fact that the scientific binomial and the English name do not actually 'match' has caused some confusion. Here it is on an orange bit of wall.

Apparently honeysuckle is this moth's foodplant. The BoggyBrae has masses of honeysuckle growing around and up various trees and over stumps. Now I need to find out what the caterpillars look like.

More drains and a new liverwort

This drain runs roughly north to south along the retaining wall back terrace and turns at a right angle round the corner below.

I've removed most of the ferns so I can clear the drain

Making the water that seeps almost continuously down the hill run round the terrace edge rather than straight across it and into the wash-house means we have a dry(ish) threshold. It also turns out that maintaining drains is fun because you find stuff. I found more Trailing St.John's-wort (Hypericum humifusum) and more Toad Rushes (Juncus bufonius). See left; a Toad Rush is 'bridging' the ditch at the right-hand side of the pic. Most importantly though, I found a new species of liverwort, one of the Riccia genus. I'm sending a sample off to be identified and recorded properly.

It's quite tricky, I found, to photograph a small liverwort in situ when its 'situ' is a more or less vertical piece of ditch bank on the ditch side farther from a retaining wall. The exercise requires an old camping mat to prevent one from getting soaked lying on wet ground for a start. I suppose I could have just got soaked, being so close to home but I probably would have given up sooner in that case.

I found an old stone painting of Toadlet's and used it to mark opposite the spot of my discovery. As it happens I found more of the same Riccia as I cleared out the ditch further.

Some animal wildlife kept me company: this tiny moth decided to flutter about in the wheelbarrow into which I was chucking ditch dirt.

A caterpillar on the wall was charging around (in caterpillar terms) for quite a while among the hornwort,

Caterpillar and hornwort

and a rather weary looking Angle-shades moth  decided to walk up my arm at one point. I repositioned him on a lungwort leaf where he stayed for the remainder of my ditch digging time.