Clettin'

When my elder son was very small he used to say, whenever I reached to pick, or bent to gather, some kind of forage: 'What you clettin' Mummy?' - because very often I would be collecting something. Even on the way to a suburban nursery school there were blackberries or windfall apples, and rubbish bins too could yield treasure, like the time we found four discarded hockey sticks.

Today's balmy afternoon was the perfect opportunity to gather mussels at low tide. On the way home we found fairy rings of mushrooms in all the coastal fields, more than enough to fill my cap.

We also found:
- a bird of prey's regurgitated pellet mostly composed of insect chitin;
- a ragwort plant with at least a dozen small tortoiseshell butterflies sucking nectar from the remaining flowers;
- part of a cow's skull with bony plates of the forehead fused like a shield;
- and, a sexton beetle at work on a dead shrew. These insects have an extraordinary, and very valuable, lifestyle. They are attracted to small dead animals, scenting them from great distances. They exude anti-microbial fluids to prevent decomposition and then they burrow underneath the corpse to dig out a chamber into which the carcase sinks. It then becomes both a nursery and a larder for the beetle's larvae. There's a short clip of the process here (perhaps not for the squeamish.) Without these beetles we would be confronted with many more little rotting bodies.

So we also cletted some interesting images including:
The butterflies
The sexton beetle