Motorbikes and the Dordogne

Wildlife

This post is a request from my sister, Pam. She lives in the UK and is animal mad, and asked to see pictures of some wildlife over here.
The top picture is not an animal, if it was I would have run a mile. It is a mushroom of some sort. I came up the drive and thought there was an old football laying there, unusual as there is very little rubbish around here. We photographed it just in time as it only lasted a couple of days before it vanished.
This is one of the Paying Mantis that we get quite a few of around here. They are all called Maggie after Margaret Thatcher who was also a PM. Everything here in the garden gets a name!

A little dark, but these are a couple of deer in the field at the bottom of the drive. They are difficult to catch on camera as they are so timid. We often see them in our woods less that 10 meters away but if we were to try and take a picture they would be off too quickly. The same applied to the fox, who we have not been able to photograph yet.

Not sure what this skull is from, probably one of the deer, but it could be anything except a human.
Some of the spiders webs in the Winter Jasmin. There are hundreds of them around here, but we don't see the spiders.
Butterflies are plentiful as are Humming Bird Hawk moths. We have at least 50 differnt ones in the garden in the summer. They seem to be around till late November.

Just a caterpillar next to a lighter to show its size.

And last but not least a slug. This one is small as they seem to grow up to about 15 cm long. These are the most common ones but there are also darker ones with stripes on them.
If you double click some of the pictures they should enlarge.

posted by madman @ 5:07 pm