After the northern trek, a visit to the exotic east (Essex) and my brother and family (more of which in the next post).

Meanwhile, back in Wales, Paul [Gadsby] has been busy capturing butterflies on film:

[if you click on any of the images, it’ll open up the photos as a slide show]

The beautiful triptych of blue butterfly photos at the top is, it seems, significant; Paul writes:
… three photos of small blues – Britain’s smallest butterfly. They are rather rare but I counted up to 35 of them earlier this month – on Swansea sand dunes again near the observatory. Until this year, I’d never seen a small blue.
If any of you are interested in joining this butterfly census, says Paul, you…
can report your sightings of butterflies wherever you are in the UK (during a 15 minute lookout) to: http://www.bigbutterflycount.co.uk/ until August 11th. You will need to add the location postcode and a few other details about what the location is like etc.

Music for butterflies? There’s a fair amount of it around, and particularly if, as I have done, you cheat by also going over to the dark side (moths). Schubert, Schumann, Grieg, the ill-fated butterfly of Roussel’s Spider’s Banquet, children’s songs from Latin America, the sun-flecked forest clearings of The Cunning Little Vixen; then there’s the giant black moths of Pierrot Lunaire, Ravel’s Noctuelles and the two moths (piano and violin) of Ned Rorem’s Night Music. And, for the grand finale – the social butterflies!! The Foxtrot and Tango of the Butterflies from Karlovi Aho’s Insect Symphony.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as “fair use/dealing”, for the purpose of study, and critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of the copyright owner(s).