Buttterflies in the garden today: two large white, one gatekeeper or hedge brown, and one that I took to be a speckled wood. The last two both settled on the bamboo at the end of the garden long enough for me to look at them properly. And one enormous, beautiful dragonfly: of course, I don’t know what that was. The picture above is of a painted lady taken on the canal towpath at Woking last month.
Good to see a narrow boat passing through the Woodham flight of locks this morning. The Basingstoke canal was only reopened to navigation earlier this year, after a three-year closure. The boat was moving along quite gingerly, as the water levels were quite low, and a canal authority van was hard on its heels. Passing through the locks has always had to be regulated and monitored for this reason. Yesterday I saw a pretty large fish staying at the surface along a low section of the canal, it may have been struggling for air. Meanwhile new sets of mooring bollards have been installed at the locks along the Woodham flight, so it would seem navigation is being encouraged. They just have to make sure the back-pumping system keeps the water levels up
