Evening

As predicted, I was a little under the weather this morning, but not so much so that I couldn't go for a walk with R, when the sky lifted and the sun emerged half way through the morning. We decided on Charlecote, which was pleasant, even though it let us down quite badly on the coffee and cake front: the larger café was closed, and the smaller one had a queue that looked as though it would probably clear sometime around Halloween, so we just had to stay unrefreshed throughout our visit. In better news, some of the fallow bucks were getting antsy enough, in the run-up to this year's rut, to be practising their combat skills on each other - which is always fun to watch, even though I was only equipped with a macro lens, which wasn't really up to the job of capturing the action.

I'd been hoping for dragons at Charlecote, but though we saw several Migrant Hawkers hunting, none of them provided a photo opportunity. The garden also let me down quite badly this afternoon, but a late walk around the village produced a good number of ivy bees, on a west-facing hedgerow that was picking up the last of the evening sunshine. I have images that would meet with more approval from the photographic powers that be than this one, because more of the bee is in focus, but I confess that I'm starting to find the current acceptability criteria for nature photography quite tiresome. This is the angle at which this bee was working, and having waited some while for him to emerge from behind the flower, I was more than happy that when he came over the top and saw me he didn't immediately flinch away, but carried on eating and allowed me this photo.