The attractions of a teazel

I should have been at my desk upstairs early this morning.  I have a lot of odd bits of work that I have been procrastinating about and I'd hoped to start promptly and finish quickly.  Instead, after driving Helena to work on the last day of term, I grabbed some breakfast and made my usual strong cup of coffee. Whilst I was waiting for it to brew I stood outside the back door and heard the delightful song of a goldfinch.  I looked around and spotted it up high on the telephone wire behind our neighbour's house.

I love goldfinches and have been concerned because they don't seem to have produced many young this year.  In fact I have only seen two goldfinch at any one time, when normally there are small flocks of them flitting about the gardens and fields here.  Bomble brought a dead one into the house some months ago, which was very sad to see.

I got my camera and when I had returned I saw that a pigeon had perched on another telephone wire a few yards away, and I joked to myself that it had been lured by the sweet singing.  But then the pigeon flapped its wings and hopped onto a nearer wire to the goldfinch which looked at it rather nervously.  A few minutes later the pigeon shuffled its feet a few times towards the goldfinch which somewhat upset also shuffled its feet away from the pigeon.  The whole sequence then repeated twice more and in between there were glances and head truning by both birds.  I took a picture of the goldfinch singing which I have added to my 'Extras photos' just to record this rather sweet event.  Seconds later the goldfinch flew away.  I definitely think the pigeon was trying to 'contact' the goldfinch in some way which I think is very interesting behaviour.

After brewing the coffee I went to the front garden with a macro lens attached as I had spotted some bees on the array of volunteer flowers that have arrived in our front garden, mostly because I have let it run far too wild tis year.  But now I can't bring myself to weed out the foxgloves, evening primroses and this single teazel, which arrived this spring, as they are flowering profusely and their colour seems to be attracting so many insects.

Too many pictures later I have chosen this Syrphid fly,( or hoverfly), which is similar to the one dbifulco kindly identified for me a few days ago.  I like the little crystal like grains of pollen, I assume, which you might be able to see covering its body in many places.  It is attracted to the pollen of the teazel, which has a funny way of flowering in random patches on what will become its very distinctive seed head.

Funnily enough its seeds are one of the favourite winter foods of goldfinches, but I don't think we have enough yet to feed a flock.  This teazel is a wild one, but in our local valleys you still see remnants of the cultivation of the Fuller's Teazel, close to the old and former woollen mills that spread for miles up the Five Valleys around Stroud.

Fuller's teasel (the cultivar group Dipsacus fullonum Sativus Group; syn. D. sativus) was formerly widely used in textile processing, providing a natural comb for cleaning, aligning and raising the nap on fabrics, particularly wool. It differs from the wild type in having stouter, somewhat recurved spines on the seed heads. The dried flower heads were attached to spindles, wheels, or cylinders, sometimes called teasel frames, to raise the nap on fabrics (that is, to tease the fibres). By the 20th century, teasels had been largely replaced by metal cards, which can be made uniformly and do not require constant replacement as the teasel heads wear. However, some people who weave wool still prefer to use teasels for raising the nap, claiming that the result is better; in particular, if a teasel meets serious resistance in the fabric, it will break, whereas a metal tool will rip the cloth.