Mystery of the legless frogs is solved

THREE cheers for the farmer I saw pulling ragwort in a sloping field, just south-west of Bandon.

Three cheers, too, for the dozens of cinnabar moths and the hundred of their black-and-amber caterpillars I saw in the dunes at Inchydoney, stripping the ragwort to the bone. It looks nice now, with its bright yellow flowers, but in a month’s time it will look like a miniature forest after a nuclear bomb. It feeds bumble bees, and red soldier insects like to copulate on it, but it is lethal if inadvertently cut-and-dried with hay, and fed to horses.

A correspondent tells me that she and a colleague spend their lunchtime, cameras in hand, chasing damselflies near her Dublin workplace, in East Point Business Park.