Bugs

21st June 2019
We heard our first cicada today.  
From now on there will be an increasingly deafening chorus from sun-up to sun-down.




This year was the Spring of the Daddy Longlegs.  They've all disappeared now but for a month or so they were all over the place.  To my huge amusement some people complained about our huge mosquitoes when they saw them.  Daddy Longlegs eat mosquitoes but are themselves harmless, just long legged

For a few weeks a couple of these would fly through the window as soon as I opened the shutters in the morning  and I'd have to rescue them from an upside position, balance them the right way up on the windowsill and disuade them from returning.  One crawled along the floor and disappeared under the couch before I could grab it.  I couldn't be bothered tipping up the heavy couch and left it to its fate.  2 days later it crawled out again, quite healthy but not too happy I'm sure.

Greeks call them 'golden beetles' and if you watched 'The Durrells' you would have seen the rose beetle man with a dozen of these tied on to his hat with a long piece of cotton.  Louisa paid him to set them free.

This year is also the year of the snail.   Dozens, nay hundreds of them in everyone's garden.  We'll be eating them on 26th July.

Last year we had an over abundance of grasshoppers and wasps but this summer, so far, touch wood, there are very few of either.  

We have seen a couple of huge spiders, inside the house.  One is somewhere behind the desk I'm sitting at now.  Sometimes I startle him and he scutles into hiding.  I don't mind as long he stays out of sight.  I've never seen such a huge spider, about the size of a walnut.  And there's another out on the verandah.  He spends his time weaving webs to catch flies and such so I don't mind him either.

In the cool of the evenings we watch the chameleons darting up and down the walls and watch the frogs jumping from one piece of  garden to the other.  They jump out of the way when I water in late afternoon, hiding behind pots and under denser foliage.

So far we are mosquito free as well.  K sprayed for mosquitoes a couple of times, some bio friendly spray he said.  It seems to have done the trick.  We can enjoy an evening drink without slapping ourselves or slapping on a layer of  'autun'.

Gerald Durrell would be in paradise here.