What’s around in mid June

I will try to make this a monthly update, as much for my own interest as for anyone else’s, although this time there is actually not much change from mid-May in either the weather or activity on the garden.

Our weather has mostly been settled in its standard, gorgeous, cool dry-season pattern – 10C overnight dawning to blue skies and a top of 24 (each temperature only varying by 2C either way) with low humidity. That pattern has been interrupted occasionally by a few days of cloud and a little rain but we have been watering the garden quite regularly.

As for the wildlife, it’s easier to say what’s different from last month than to list it all again. Of the butterflies, the Eurema, Hesperidae and Orchard Swallowtail have gone but all the others are still here and we now have quite a lot of the Dingy Bush Browns, Mycalesis perseus, and a few resident Melanitis leda. Of the moths, we now have few or no Hawk Moths but that’s the only difference. Everything else is much the same; there’s no reason why not, really, since the weather is much the same.

Days are a little cooler and shorter (and I do mean a little: the shortest day of the year is next week but we will still get 11 hours between sunrise and sunset). That does make the butterflies sleepy earlier in the afternoon; I caught these two Chocolate Soldiers bedded down for the night in a tangle of Pentas at about 3.30 this afternoon.

Two butterflies on Pentas flowers
Chocolate Soldiers (Junonia hedonia)

 

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