The last of this years’ butterflies.
Most of the native shrubs and trees stopped flowering about a month ago, but late flowering garden plants like our African daisy are prolonging the season for a few of our local butterflies.
I’m pretty sure this Meadow argus is male, given its slightly smaller size and the fact that it kept trying to land on the bigger of the two (who I also photographed).
I took this ragged specimen to be the female.
This is a female, doing what she does best – hide.
This butterfly is one of the most difficult to photograph. Common browns don’t let you get closer than about ten feet before flying off. And the second they light on something, they fold their wings and are nearly impossible to find until flushed again.
For what seems like most of a year now, we’ve been building a fence that would go around the back of the house and down the slope to one of the sheds. It’s stock fence with a hotwire on the top and at nose height (to discourage climbing over or digging under. Along the sides of the house, I built a taller and more substantial fence out of treated poles, 2.75mm wire, and approximately seventy silver wattle saplings (they needed thinning).
Luna’s been living back there for almost a month. It still needs a few more bits and pieces (yes, that gate near the house is still tied on with baling twine), but it is otherwise functional. There’s still the cable out the front, for when she wants to watch the road.
There’s lots more room for playing catch.
Of course, some things never change (like Luna’s complete acceptance of human folly).
Around here, it’s yet another edition of dogs doing nothing very photogenically.
click for larger
And they do it with such aplomb.
Today’s another de-construction day. We’ve started pulling apart that section of the north wall where we’re going to install the sliding-glass door.
Hope it all goes well, with a minimum of teeth gnashing and tool-cursing — at least at our house, whatever goes wrong is always the fault of the tool (my convenient that double meaning is).
Except for the lack of a “Saws-all” (reciprocating-saw aka “finger remover”), which would make cutting through the giant studs easier, the tools have been doing their part pretty well. The fly in our renovation’s ointment continues to be the complete lack of building skills/methods employed by its original builders and subsequent inhabitants.
a belated, and somewhat lazily lurking, greeting from the Bu:
life is hard, eh.
Sometimes it hard to be a puppy.