Fridge

It is not every day that you find a butterfly in your fridge.

I’d just made a cup of tea on returning from my walk. Placing my soya milk back in the fridge I did a double take, retrieved it and found myself looking at what seems to be a freshly emerged Large or Small White. So fresh that its wings hadn’t yet properly opened. How it came to be there I don’t know. Putting aside the likelihood of a caterpillar then pupa remaining unnoticed in my fridge for a couple of months, why would it emerge now? An alternative explanation is that it became attached to my hat on my walk, said hat was was not a million miles away from the carton while it was out of the fridge, so perhaps the butterfly walked across.

For the moment I’ve found a box for it to live in and soaked a piece of kitchen roll with sugar water for it to feed from (which it did), but I’m probably delaying the inevitable. 11yo has now taken it under her wing, but there’s still no sign of the butterfly’s wings unfurling.

Earlier, I walked down to the nature reserve where I watched five rats hoover up seed at one of the bird feeding stations. There were lots of small birds about. Heading back along the river I saw not one, but two kingfishers, giving me six sightings for the year, plus a dipper on the riffles and a heron in the fields. Heading  back up to Tong Park a sparrowhawk swooped across the lane in front of me.

It seems a little early to start my #butterflies2019 tag, but needs must.