The start of 2026 has been made; I wonder what will come next....in the meantime we are very busy in the garden with creating new flower beds and making plans for building a greenhouse. 

The 4th of June was the last time I saw them all together in front of the nest box. After that night the first chick left the nest box and the following days they were all leaving but still hanging around in the neighbourhood. One week later I saw mum with three young owls on my roof which gave me hope that they had survived the first week in which they could not fly. I do not remember the exact day but suddenly it was quiet around the nest box and for month no owl came to visit the box; time enough to clean the inside and to change the camera position a little bit.
Now that spring is in the air, I hope that they will breed again; during the breeding season dad is less shy and easier to spot; I feel privileged to have dinner on my terrace and to see a little owl sitting in my yard. 

As it was my last morning/day in this area I tried to catch them with open wings:

My plans for the dragonflies must wait for another time/visit...when I was ready with the Large Coppers, the dragonflies were flying too. 
As it is now the time of the year to make plans for next year, I'm considering to visit this area again.

In 2024 nothing happened (except mowing) in this part of the garden as a lot of other jobs needed to be done first. In 2025 I made plans for this garden and looked for garden boxes from steel (to keep snails away). As I needed a lot of boxes steel was no option for my budget so I decided to buy 40 used logistic boxes and to treat them with black stain (to protect them against moisture/rain).

For weeks I was busy staining them and once I was ready I started placing them in the larval butterfly garden, filled them a big layer of cardboard and protected the wood with plastic foil.

​The next 'problem' was the amount of soil to fill the boxes as for every box I need 0,3 m3 of soil. We drove to a kind of 'waste' point where everybody from the village can get 1m3 of free soil at a time.  The advantage is that it's free, the disadvantage is that the soil is made of collected garden waste and that it contains a lot of plastic and glass pieces.

The first boxes are filled with soil and planted with larval foodplants for some butterfly species alternated with flowering plants.

​Comparing to last year, this year I had more butterflies in my garden but a big part of the garden is still grass/wild and a lot of work needs to be done. At the moment I’m busy creating a ‘larval butterfly garden’ for a lot of species. In my next blog I will write more about this special part of my garden. 

The amount of butterflies was fascinating and near the path I discovered an ants nest...not that I have seen the nest but I found four freshly emerged butterflies (both species), hanging low in the gras above the ground. The last morning I found one Dusky Larg Blue which was not roosting on Great Burnet:

This autumn I will create a big clover bed to attract more blue butterflies like the Short-Tailed Blue, this rare species is found in a nature area nearby and it would be nice to have this species in my own garden :-).

​In the evening I returned to this spot again and between the grass/reed I found a mating couple again. From this couple I found no images on the internet so I assume that they were not noticed by the crowd and fortunately not trampled.