Don't cut the grass!

I was just taking a few shots of the shield bugs on the dandelions in the orchard, on the flowering thorn-less blackberries to be precise when I heard D shout that she had found something. This is what D and our art-student lawnmower had found. It was trickier than I thought to get a reasonable shot because the wind was picking up before the monsoon which hit later.

Compared with yesterday there were a lot of potential shots. Several varieties of shield bugs and many of yesterdays Cetonia aurata, rose chafer beetles. In my opinion no competition for D's find, perhaps you will agree.

I'm glad I halted the lawn mowing to capture the shield bugs before they lost their food source. This year we are only going to cut the grass in a small percentage of the orchard because simply it doesn't make sense to starve the butterflies as it doesn't make any difference to the trees whatsoever. In fact if it isn't cut at all it is better for the trees' survival since the hares can't find them!