Painted Ladies

On 29 May I wrote about the arrival of a large number of painted lady butterflies (Cynthia cardui).

According to the July/August issue of the Bulletin of the Bristol Naturalists' Society the numbers arriving in the UK this year are the highest since 1996, largely due to a population explosion caused by heavy winter rains in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.

They started to arrive over the weekend of 23/24/25 May and at one stage wardens at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire counted 3,000 in 45 minutes.

Moths

There are six-spot burnets (Zygaena filipendulae) on the dunes at Sand Bay.

There are only a few of them at the moment and they seem to be somewhat preoccupied with each other.

Last year I first noticed them on 24 July; by that stage they were already present in large numbers, with most of them to be found on ragwort (Senecio jacobaea) flowers. Very few ragwort plants are in bloom yet, and it looks as if there will be eggs and caterpillars soon, so I hope to see the numbers of moths increase over the next few weeks.

Kodachrome

Kodak have announced that Kodachrome is to be discontinued.

I've been using Kodachrome in one form or another for nearly forty years. I first encountered Kodachrome 64 in 126 cartridges in the early 1970s, progressing to the wonderful fine-grained Kodachrome 25 when I bought my first 35mm camera, a Zorki 4K, in 1977. By the time that Kodachrome 200 was introduced, I'd got an SLR with some faster lenses, making year-round use possible. Finally, when I bought myself a medium-format camera, there was Kodachrome 64 in 120 rolls.

Now, only the 35mm version of Kodachrome 64 is left, and it looks as if it will only be in the shops for a few more months.

I'm not really surprised by this, since film use is declining rapidly as the quality of digital cameras rises, but...

Kodachrome first appeared in the 1930s. It's always been a difficult film to process, and there have only ever been a few labs that felt it was worthwhile to invest in the equipment needed to process it. Its colour rendering isn't the best available, but it's always been predictable and, more importantly, it's stable: Kodachrome colours stay the same as they were on the day the film was processed.

I've been looking through some old slides dating back to the 1950s. The Ilford has deteriorated badly; the Fujichrome which produced better colours than Kodachrome in the 1970s now has a strong purple cast; the colours of Adox and Perutz are still very good, but those films haven't been made for years. Only Kodachrome and Ektachrome are still the same, and I think that I prefer the colours of the former. I could get very sentimental about the imperfect colours of Orwochrom or the coarse grain of GAF 500, but I won't go into that now.

Kodak are recommending Professional Ektar 100 and Professional Ektachrome E100G as potential replacements. I'll try them both, as part of my strategy of shooting film backups of my digital work, but things will never be quite the same again.

Bristol Museum vs Banksy

Banksy used to be controversial, but since his mural in Park Street attracted the support of Bristolians in 2006, he seems to have become part of the local establishment. In fact, he's now such a part of the establishment that a major exhibition of his work at is being staged at Bristol City Museum.

I went to take a look at the exhibition today. I've never seen so many people in the museum. This is some of what I saw.

And one question for the museum staff: what have you done with Edward Lear's painting of Thermopylae? Please go and find it and put it back.

Blue Tits

This afternoon I spent rather more time than was probably sensible standing in the garden, in the rain, watching a family of young blue tits (Parus caeruleus) learning to fly. They've still got quite a lot to learn, as I had to duck to avoid one of them flying into my face.

Canada Geese

I haven't been able to visit UWE for over a month, so when I finally managed to get there today I was surprised to see that the Canada geese that built their nest in a flowerbed have actually managed to produce four very healthy (and by now rather large) goslings.

Slow Worm

Today I found a dead slow worm (Anguis fragilis) beside the road near my house. Slow worms are the only reptiles I've ever seen around here and unfortunately they always seem to be dead.