Winter is a comin'

Summer moves quickly to winter up here - with a small slice of falling autumn leaves in between. This weekend the first snow fell on the Sigriswiller Rothorn...

...down to the village above the back of the house.

Probably the last chance to collect wild honey funghi...

 ..and make them into a tasty lunchtime soup.

And the snow brings the Alpine Choughs down from the mountain to the village.

Till the cows come home

End of summer means the cheeses are shared out and the cows come down from the alps to the farms. In the Justistal, the other side of the Sigriswiller Rothorn, people gather to celebrate with food, wine and music.

The cheeses are taken out of the storage huts, rolled from hand to hand along a line of men and stacked on planks.

Our next door neighbour Andreas Loosli was there, in traditional costume, with his daughter Stephanie (who takes my hay for her goats).

He joined in the passing of the cheese - and later claimed his share.

Outside this hut was stacked 5,000 kg of cheese. Six huts means 30,000 kg of cheese - over half a million Francs at 20 francs per kilo.

Then its time to collect your cheeses, have one last glass of wine, and follow the decorated cows down the valley to the village.

And here are the cows passing our house, at the end of the walk.

Summer is over

The scythe was taken out for the second and final cut of the year. Where there are patches of earth, I spread the Yellow Rattle seeds I collected from a field in the village - a parasite of grasses to help the flowers have more space to grow next summer...

...and scabious seeds I had collected from the embankment next to the house.

Grasshoppers

There are around 20 species of grasshoppers in Switzerland, and the most common is also the most common in my meadow - the aptly named Meadow Grasshopper, Chorthippus parallelus. It is flightless, but the male still has long wings...

...whilst the larger female's wings are shortened.

The only other grasshopper I've identifed to date is Mecostethus parapleurus or, as it's called in German, Grune Lauchshreke. It is more at home in lowland areas than alpine meadows.



This is not a grasshopper, it is a bush-cricket - the Grest Green Bush-Cricket, Tettigonia viridissima.

Of course, the joy of grasshoppers and crickets is their song - especially accompanying a glass of wine on a summer evening- and the song is the best way to identify them. Another project for next year.

Bumblebees

Bumblebees - Bombus in latin - the teddy bears of the meadow. You may think a bumblebee is a bumblebee, but there are 250 species in the world - many difficult to tell apart. The queens make a nest in the Spring, where they find a hole in the ground. Female workers hatch from their eggs, and forage to fill small thimble-like honey pots. Later the males hatch for mating, to continue the cycle. Meadows are perfect for bumblebees - flowering all year round to supply protein in pollen and energy in nectar (the bees help pollinate the plants) and lots of old vole holes in which to make nests.

The common bumblebee design you will see is two gold stripes and a white tail. But in Switzerland this could be any of three species: Bombus terrestris (the one used in greenhouses to pollinate vegetables), B. lucorum or B.soroeensis. Below are some stripey jumpers that gorged on our knapweed, marjoram and lavender this summer - there's a bumblebee identifiction link at the side if you're feeling adventurous.

If a bumblebee only has an orange-red tail, it can only bee B. lapidarius or B. ruderarius. The latter has a rounded abdomen and orange hairs on the tibia of the hid legs (where the pollen is gathered) - and I think the bumblebee below ticks these boxes.

 And I guess this is a male of one of these species, as it has some yellow at the front.

And the females below - B. lapidarius or B. ruderarius? Just to confuse matters, there is a cuckoo bumblebee - B. rupestris - whose queens kill the queens of B. lapidarius and take over the nest, using the workers there to feed their young. Of course the female cuckoo bumblebee needs to look like B.lapidarius to be accepted by the workers - and the male looks the same.

And there are bumblebees which are entirely pale ginger-brown. I think this is B. muscorum - but it could be B. pascuorum or B. humilis.

The only way to identify bumblebees with certainty is to kill them and look at the shapes of their genitalia! Maybe next year...

Magnificent moths

Butterflies are easy to see, as they flit over the summer flowers. Moths, on the other hand, mostly fly at night - and we do not appreciate the variety around us. I put a moth trap out over nights in the summer.



Here are some of the catches - I take full responsibility for any taxonomic errors!
They have such great names:

Spurge hawk moth.

Garden Tiger.

 Jersey Tiger

Ruby Tiger.

Brimstone.

Yellow Shell.

Peppered Moth.

Wormwood Pug.

Marbled Green.

Oak Hook-tip.

Flame Shoulder.

Light Emerald

Pretty Chalk Carpet.

Garden Carpet

Common Marbled Carpet

Brown-line Bright-eye.

Common Rustic.

Rustic.

Green Arches.

Blair's Shoulder-knot.

Setaceous Hebrew Character.

Knot Grass.

 Straw Underwing.



 Large Yellow Underwing.

Tree-lichen Beauty.

Mottled Beauty.

Riband Wave.

Purple Clay.

Purple Treble-bar.

Straw dot.

Early Thorn.

Burnished Brass

Orange Swift.

Gold Spangle.

Small chocolate-tip.

A species of Footman - I know not which one.

One of the microlepidoptera - too small to have a common name - Oncocera semirubella

Ancylis sp.?

Mother of Pearl

And to disprove the rule that moths only fly at night - The Silver Y - many feeding on my lavender during the day, as well as a common light trap catch.

And a more familiar day-flying moth, not found in the laight trap, the Burnet - in this case the Six-spot Burnet.