Monthly Archives: May 2014

Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wetlands, Wildlife

Mayflies, May Blossom… yes, it’s May at Wraysbury Lakes

Mayfly cf Ephemera vulgata
Mayfly cf Ephemera vulgata

The sun is shining … in between the showers. Mayflies are resting all over the plants near the river. May blossom makes a bright show on every hawthorn bush. Yes, it’s May down at Wraysbury Lakes. The energetic breeze gives a cool feel, but out of the wind it’s very pleasant. Enjoying the brisk airflow are at least four Common Terns over the lakes and overhead; a few Swallows; and a small number of Swifts, newly arrived in the last few days, racing down to the water surface to catch flies — not the mayflies, which are active mainly at night. The warblers which are definitely about are hard to hear for the wind in the trees, but I caught snatches of Chiffchaff, Blackcap, many Whitethroats, plenty of Garden Warbler, a Willow Warbler, three Song Thrushes and a Blackbird, not to mention Robins and Wrens.  A Cormorant lumbered past, climbing with effort, its jizz very much like that of the Boeing 747s lumbering heavily into the air.

Mayfly look, but no tails. Hmm
Mayfly look, but no tails. Hmm

There are some pale mayflies, with neither antennae nor the 3 tails: maybe these have broken off in the vegetation.

Beautifully iridescent green-bronze female Banded Demoiselle
Beautifully iridescent green-bronze: a female Banded Demoiselle

Also new today are quantities of damselflies: there are many brilliant iridescent blue male Banded Demoiselles, with their beautifully clear green-bronze females. This one seemed definitely to be watching me attentively. Two small blue species have also emerged, Blue-Tailed Damselfly and Common Blue Damselfly.

Over the lake, a long-winged falcon swooped at speed: I wondered for a moment if I had a Cuckoo, but the moustache and white face markings showed it was a Hobby, arrived from Africa in pursuit of the Swifts, and perhaps hunting damselflies as easier prey in this place. The low number of Swifts is worrying; they have been declining for years, as building renovation removes their old nest-holes, and increased human population pressure in Africa threatens them there too.

A small Grasshopper on Comfrey
A small Grasshopper on Comfrey

This small grasshopper, missing an antenna, is my first of the year.

Further along, the bare damp area that often has teasels is bright yellow with clumps of a yellow Brassica that has clasping leaves like wild turnip (or cultivated swede). There’s a definite cabbagey smell. A Whitethroat, caught out in the open, makes a dash for a bush.

Conservation

RSPB Central London Local Group: Hope Farm (and Buffet)

Yesterday I went along to the RSBP’s Central London Local Group. They meet in the Scottish church hall behind Harrods in Knightsbridge: on the short walk from the tube I passed some amazingly expensive-looking people, associated with a lot of taxis and a green-coated commissionaire. Inside, I nibbled a biscuit and was offered a raffle ticket.

The group’s AGM was billed to last 30 minutes: it did, and was presented efficiently and interestingly by the members of the organizing committee. They regularly run 10 coach trips each year to out-of-town reserves as far away as Lymington and Slimbridge.  They hold a similar number of indoor meetings, with at least one scientific talk, a non-birding talk, one on a specific bird, and some on good birding places in Britain or overseas. Audiences are increasing; the group is more than breaking even, and makes an annual donation to RSPB projects.

The main talk was by Ian Dillon who manages the RSPB’s Hope Farm in Cambridgeshire. It’s not exactly a nature reserve: it’s a working farm, bought after a successful fundraising campaign in 1999, and run “for Food, Profit and Wildlife”. Dillon used to be warden of a nature reserve up in Orkney caring for Corncrakes, once a familiar farmland bird (I actually remember our music master at school berating the congregation during a singing practice for sounding like Corncrakes (they go Crek, Crek not terribly musically), which tells you how long ago it was) but now almost extinct except in the Outer Hebrides where the shy birds don’t have to try to outrun giant modern tractors that can harvest a field at 25mph.

Dillon gave a practised and lively talk about Hope Farm, covering the 90% decline in some farmland birds since 1970 (Grey Partridge, Corn Bunting, Turtle Dove among them) as farmers have, from their point of view, improved their farming. They grow twice as much wheat per hectare, up to around 8 tons. They have achieved this through intensification, using pesticides, fertilisers, mechanisation and drainage. The result is clean, healthy crops, free of weeds, pests, and diseases: but also largely free of wildlife. Specific issues for birds are the increase in winter wheat and barley, meaning there is no food-rich stubble for them to feed on in the winter, and the 1960s policy of grubbing out hedges to increase field size and hence efficiency, removing nesting sites, insects, and roosts. The speed of modern farm machinery is also fatal to wildlife such as Grey Partridges and hedgehogs. The overall effect is an average 50% decline in farmland birds since 1970; it has not quite run to completion, with numbers continuing to decline slowly in what is in the more arable parts of Britain such as East Anglia effectively a sterile countryside adapted to industrial food production.

Hope Farm runs a conventional wheat-oilseed rape – wheat – beans/peas rotation. With the EU farm subsidy, and farmed by an efficient large contractor – each big machine only visits the farm for a few days per year: it would be silly for Hope Farm to buy its own – the farm makes a profit and achieves good yields, so in theory farmers should be happy to listen to what the farm has to say about its practices, however much of a turn-off they find the name ‘RSPB’.

For as well as farming, Hope Farm aims to increase wildlife, at least its farmland birds. It has been successful so far: since 2000 the number of Skylark territories has increased fourfold, while Yellowhammers have recovered to more than their 1960s levels – luckily an early BTO survey covered the farm. Wintering bird numbers are well up, too – 200 Yellowhammers, 37 Grey Partridges, 172 Skylarks, exceeding expectations. This has been achieved with two main changes: some small inconvenient-to-plough areas have been sown with mixed crop seeds so different birds each get winter food; and five metre square patches, dotted around the arable fields, have been left bare, enabling Skylarks to feed in summertime. Curiously the Skylarks actually continue to nest in the dense crops (of wheat, etc), but once these become tall they find it hard to land there, so without bare patches they tend to nest close to the ‘tramlines’ made by the tractor when spraying. The nests don’t get run over, nor are the birds destroyed by harvesting (they’ve flown by then), but nesting near the tramlines so they can readily take off and land makes them vulnerable to passing predators – foxes, badgers, hedgehogs – all of which use the tramlines. Very careful survey work, with remote cameras, proved that this was the problem. So the lark patches help, but in rather an indirect and surprising way.

Hope Farm has to date been less successful at persuading farmers to follow suit. The RSPB set out confident that with solid evidence of effectiveness and profit, the world would do what they said. Ah, they reckoned without the slow, cautious, individualistic, calculating ways of the farmer. After all, why do anything that doesn’t pay? One answer is that it does: you qualify for an agro-environment scheme, which increases your subsidy. Another is, that trying to farm those small awkward corners doesn’t pay, either: you spend more time and money trying to work those bits of land, which slope, or are shaded, or have poor drainage, or are more susceptible to disease, and the effort, diesel, seed, pesticides and fertiliser you use are not justified by the small extra returns. This is for the farmer a practical matter; for us and the RSPB and our children, a matter of whether there will be wildlife in farmland, or not.

The evening ended with a delicious finger buffet and a glass of Cava. The group is active, enthusiastic, and runs a varied programme. I shall go along. Why don’t you?

Book Review, Conservation

Classic Book Review: The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis

The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis (Vintage Classics edition)
The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis (Vintage Classics edition). The fine linocut of teasels is by Angie Lewin.

I promised myself I would only review books I really loved, that I would urge a close friend to read, sure they wouldn’t be disappointed. Few books pass this test.

John Stewart Collis was an educated man, born in  Ireland in 1900, living and working in England. He wrote some biographies and pottered along quietly in the literary life. Then the Second World War came along. Wanting to work for his country, but too old to fight and not fancying a dull desk job, he volunteered for the Land Army. It consisted mainly of women, “Land Girls”, as thousands of farm labourers joined the armed forces.

"We could do with thousands more like you: Join the WOMEN'S Land Army". Second World War recruitment poster
“We could do with thousands more like you: Join the WOMEN’S Land Army”. Second World War recruitment poster

Collis makes the long-gone era of scythes and horses immediately accessible. As a professional writer, he is from our modern urban world, familiar with politics, technology, change,  middle-class angst. As a man experiencing the daily toil of following the plough or harrow, hoeing by hand, harvesting, pacing oneself while looking out for the owner’s car (a good moment to appear busy), he is in that rural world painted in such a golden light by the wartime posters.

And he’s funny. He notes that farm work is not an exhilarating form of exercise — he recommends a game of tennis for that; instead, you go at it steadily, never hurrying, whatever the weather. He is perfectly capable of writing wide-eyed descriptions, as when he kneels down beside an ancient tree-trunk and admires the insects hidden under the bark “building their Jerusalem in these countries of decay which must represent for them the acme of perfection”, the strange world of the fungi. But much more often he is direct, matter-of-fact: he likes to test the rotten wood with his boots.

Collis has the gift — I’d say it was rare — of noticing that the ordinary aspects of life and work all around him are strange and temporary. Here he is on what it is like trying to harness a farm horse by yourself:

When I came to harnessing for the first time I was surprised at the weight of the harness. I found that the breeching and attendant straps were as heavy as a saddle. When I tried putting the collar on I found I had put the bridle on first. Having taken off the bridle, the collar still wouldn’t go on — for the simple reason that you must reverse it while negotiating the head, which I had not done, thus following the example of Wordsworth who also failed in this matter. I was no more successful with the hames; I got them the wrong way round, and when at last I got them the right way round, I failed to pin them under the collar in a sufficiently tight notch. This done, I was now ready to put the horse into the cart. But I was not prepared for the difficulty of backing it straight between the shafts nor for the weight of the cart when lifted up by one of the shafts, nor for the difficulties confronting me in continuing the good work. For, having thrown over the long chain that rests on the breeching, and dodged under the horse’s neck to catch it on the other side, I missed it and it rolled back so that I had to throw it over again, all the time holding up the shaft with one hand while I went to the other side. And after this came the fixing of the remaining chains, all of which I put into the wrong notches.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sweating and powdered with stable dust just reading about it.

With the arrival of the first combine harvesters, which Collis admires, he perceives that the old way of life is going to be utterly disrupted, even while he and the other farm labourers continue to work on the farm, while the village pubs were still full of countrymen. It would be nostalgic, only the writing is quite unsentimental, and we are right there alongside Collis, looking up from our work as we watch the new machine as it roars and rattles along doing the work of twenty men, and reflect on what it will mean. This is something special.  And I promise you’ll want to go out and buy a well-balanced axe and billhook, to try the pleasure for yourself.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Book Review, Conservation, Natural History

Book Review: Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin

I made a mental note a while ago only to review books that I really loved: books that were special, that I’d go back to, that I’d wholeheartedly recommend to close friends. Life is too short to review books that were merely so-so, acceptable, somewhat informative, useful as background. I read (parts of) many of those, “researching” subjects and places, and for the most part once I’ve done what I wanted the book goes on a shelf and stays there.

Books that stick in the mind, that quietly speak to me long after I last dipped into them, are a small proportion. It is only too easy to buy something that looks inviting, only to find after a chapter or two that it’s a bit overblown, poorly argued, limply presented. Books that are specially trumpeted are particularly at risk here. Amazon reviews tend, on average and given sufficient quantity, to be truthful: of course authors ask friends to review their books (we all do it) so you need a good sample to get a genuine impression from readers, and, caveat emptor, you should read between the lines to see if the reviewer is real and appreciating the book in the same way as you.

I mention all this because I took a look at my most recent shelf of books with an eye to writing a review. The internal dialogue went something like this. “Um. No. Gulp, not that. Reviewed that already. no. No. no. Ah.. no, did that back in 2007. No, no, no, no, no. Erm, not much here. Hold on, did I ever do Notes from Walnut Tree Farm? Time I did.”

Roger Deakin wrote two marvellous books, Wildwood and Waterlog. It isn’t accidental that they both have something to do with wood in their names: Deakin was very close to wood, and had carpenters and men named Wood in his family. He then died suddenly, leaving 45 notebooks full of daily observations of all kinds, written in the last six years of his life. Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker took on the task of selecting extracts and arranging them into a composite year.

Walnut Tree Farm was Deakin’s house in the Suffolk countryside. It was timber-framed, in other words made of local wood. He bought it in ruinous condition, and rebuilt it himself: a mediaeval house, with a moat that he liked to swim in. Every corner of his life was of a piece, intensely personal, fully and passionately experienced. His writing is cut from the same sturdy oak.

 Fire: nothing gives me more comfort or more anxiety than fire.

Look up Cobbett on the laying of fires — talk about bread ovens and faggotts of furze for bread-making.

The fireplace has been subsumed by the TV, pushed out of the nest as by a cuckoo. People now contemplate the TV, not the fire.

What is it about Deakin’s notes that is so compelling? Reading him on fire just now, I can hear the crackle of logs in the grate, smell the woodsmoke, feel the pleasure as the flames flicker red and yellow. I would call him a sensuous writer, at the risk of being misunderstood: he does not write purple prose. He feels  life directly and communicates his sensory experience in clear, straightforward words, the opposite of rambling, yet he conveys the impression of relaxed thought, of coming upon interesting things and reflecting on their possibilities. Reading him feels very private: it’s like being in his mind, a privileged position.

Deakin takes us — me, you —to Suffolk; to walk in the woods, to reflect on a dead, trapped fox, to watch the carp in his front pond, to listen to a willow warbler which “sings in the spinney by the old goat sheds”, to join him scything his lawn by hand, cooking on a “little cast-iron stove” from Morocco, having “singing lessons with Mrs Gillard, who put her hands on my stomach as I sang”. It’s extraordinarily varied, authentic in every corner, always warm, always intelligent.

There is nothing else like Notes from Walnut Tree Farm: fresh, insightful, funny, stimulating, informative, peaceful, full of life and nature. Please read it.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Gardening, Natural History, Wildlife

Even more on a Blackcurrant Leaf … Welcome or Not

Further to the World on a Blackcurrant Leaf, today the Ichneumons and the Harlequins were joined by two more conspicuous flying visitors, some green Shield Bugs (true bugs, Hemiptera) and some swift yellow-abdomened Sawflies, most probably Gooseberry Sawfly. Both of these are held in definite disfavour by many gardeners, the bugs for sucking plant juices and possibly weakening plants or spreading disease, and the sawflies for making caterpillars which in a bad year can totally defoliate gooseberry bushes — it only happened to me once, and it was quite a shock: from seeing the first little green caterpillars to leafless plants only took a week or so.

Since then I have carefully checked the gooseberry every few days for signs of sawfly damage (and actual caterpillars). If there are just a few, I remove the affected leaves and squash any caterpillars I find; this usually does the trick. If there are many, which has only happened once or twice, I consider spraying, choosing a time without wind, after sunset so the bees aren’t flying, and work close to the bush to keep the stuff local. The approach seems to work well for bees and berries.

As for the bugs, well, I rather like their handsome appearance and their confident swagger. There always seem to be enough currants so I don’t mind if the yield is down a bit on what it might have been.

Natural History, Wildlife

Wood Wasp, Sprouting Loggeries

While doing the Butterfly Transect at the Gunnersbury Triangle, I came across a fairly large Wood Wasp (in the sawfly family), about 25mm long. It was a bit tricky getting a photo,  as these insects are distinctly skittish – they race about in the shadows, occasionally perching on a leaf’s upper surface. The breeze was wafting the branches gently, so patches of sunlight came and went. I shot several images with the miniature camera – it has two big advantages over my full-size SLR: one, it has a very short focal length, so it has a better depth of field than an expensive macro lens; two, it’s small and cheap, so I habitually carry it with me in my rucksack.

Wood Wasp, cf Sirex, on Ivy

The two images here show (left) the resting position with the wings over the body, the long antennae,  the alarming-looking ovipositor, and the orange-brown legs; and (right) the plump black abdomen with white spots. Perhaps the two images show that it’s rather hard to get a single image which is suitable for identification. This one looks like a Sirex so perhaps that’s what it is. The eggs are drilled into wood.

The butterfly transect yielded the first definite Green-Veined Whites, i.e. I was able to get close enough to be sure; until now they’ve all been “Small/Green-veined” worse luck. There were some Speckled Woods and an Orange Tip, too; a Brimstone turned up after I’d put the clipboard away.

Sprouting Loggery
Sprouting Loggery

But the most curious observation of the day was this sprouting loggery. We ‘planted’ (more literally than we knew) the sawn Willow logs in the winter. They seem very happy in their new setting and are growing vigorously. It will be interesting to see how they get on.

Conservation, Environment, Love of Nature, Quotation

An Innate Need to be in Contact with Nature

Quote

An Innate Need to be in Contact with Nature

Without wishing to question the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks, with their six kinds of love, I do think they missed out one of the most crucial varieties. And that is love for the natural world, for the wilds from which we sprung and of which we are still — though we may fight against the idea — a part.

I am drawn to the concept of ‘biophilia’, the idea that we have an innate need to be in contact with nature. It strikes me that the word could be used to express the seventh variety of love. Clearly we need those other varieties — erotic love, the love of friends, playful love, pragmatic love, self-love and universal love. But I believe we also need love of nature.

—Hugh Warwick, The Beauty in the Beast: Britain’s Favourite Creatures and the People Who Love Them.  Simon & Schuster, 2012. page 305.

Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Endless Forms Most Beautiful … Conifers in Kew

Looking Straight Up: Giant Sequoia at Kew
Looking Straight Up: Giant Sequoia at Kew

One of the unceasing delights of nature is the feeling, some days more clearly justified than on others, of coming into contact with Darwin’s ‘endless forms most beautiful‘. A marvellous botanic garden – it has to be a large one, like Kew – takes one perhaps more directly into that space of wonder and delight than anything else, if it is laid out taxonomically to show the variation and diversity within one group after another.

Today we wandered happily among the Conifer section of Kew Gardens, gazing straight up into the patches of sky between the radiating branches of the Giant Sequoia, feeling the soft fibrous red bark and wondering why everything is larger in America.

Chinese Hemlock Tsuga chinensis
The pattern of new spring growth in Chinese Hemlock, Tsuga chinensis

Then on to the Hemlocks and Spruces, delighting in the pattern of bright new bunches of needles scattered in diverse patterns among the older, darker growth: of course the new leaves are always at growing tips, so the patterns reveal the habit of growth of each species.

Quite a different pattern in Himalayan Spruce, Picea smithiana

Many of the spruces are adorned with new male cones; those of Picea orientalis ‘aurea’ are a surprisingly pretty pink.

Male Cones of Picea orientalis 'aurea'
Male Cones of Picea orientalis ‘aurea’

The male cones of the Bishop’s Pine, Pinus muricata, from California are, on the other hand, grouped into pineapple-like spirals and surrounded by the Pine genus’s characteristic pairs of long slender needles, forming a fine rosette.

Down at the end of the gardens, Queen Charlotte’s cottage ornée (just for picnics, never inhabited; the royal party could walk down the mile and a half from the red-brick Kew Palace, or came (often) by carriage to play a la Marie Antoinette at having a little cottage in the woods. The 37 acres of bluebell woods around the cottage form a nature reserve, complete with real badgers, inside the gardens. As well as the Bluebells, Alkanet and Ramsons made the woodland floor lovely, while around the margins skipped Orange Tips, Brimstones, Peacock butterflies and Small Coppers. Fit for a Queen.

Small Copper on daisy
Small Copper on daisy

Natural History, Wildlife

Lacock, Home of Fox Talbot, Pioneer of (Nature) Photography

Lacock Abbey
Lacock Abbey

Lacock Abbey: it sounds innocuous enough. Suffice it to say that it is one of the very few mediaeval abbeys whose buildings survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII. Many of our great abbeys were closed, stripped of all their portable assets, and allowed to fall down – Fountains, Rievaulx, Tintern among them. Lacock was slightly luckier: its Augustinian Canonesses – nuns to you and me – were sent away, the buildings sold by the king (not his to sell, really, but nobody felt like telling him so) to William Sharington, who knocked down the church (it would have been on the green lawn in front of the house), used it to build himself a brewery and other practical outbuildings, and converted the abbey itself into a comfortable house. One of his descendents, Olive, inherited the property and married a Talbot. Fox Talbot, centuries later, was lucky enough to have the time and space to play about, and one thing he played about with was photography.

Fox Talbot's window at Lacock, subject of his first photograph
Fox Talbot’s window at Lacock, subject of his first photograph

His first, famous, photograph was a postage-stamp-sized negative and positive of this window, looking out the front of the erstwhile Abbey. Many of his (not much) later photographs were of natural subjects, not least of the patterns of veins in leaves. In other words, as soon as people had the technology to photograph nature in detail, they did so, from the first man. Fox Talbot thus qualifies as ‘obsessed by nature’ (.com).

Ramsons at Lacock
Ramsons

In the beautiful grounds, under graceful beech trees is a springtime carpet of Ramsons, sometimes called ‘wild garlic’. It’s not exactly garlic but it is an Allium, and while the bulbs are much too far down to be worth trying to dig up (and it’s illegal anyway unless they’re on your land), the leaves are delicious. You just cook them like Spinach and add a little oil or butter; they are soft with just a hint of onion-family taste about them.

A Woodland Carpet of Ramsons at Lacock
A Woodland Carpet of Ramsons at Lacock

Outside the Abbey’s grounds is the hurly-burly of a touristy village. The first Swifts of the year wheeled around the church tower; Jackdaws nested in the belfry. Down by the ford with its little pack bridge, a Treecreeper zipped across the road and climbed up a small tree in the hedge.

 

Gardening, Natural History

To See the World on a … Blackcurrant Leaf

Apologies to William Blake and the world in a grain of sand and all that.

Today, being a May Bank Holiday Weekend, it is very sunny and bright but the temperature has plummeted. I went shopping with my bicycle — wearing a thick fleece under a windproof jacket, and a ‘silk’ balaclava under my cycle helmet. So much for ‘Cast Ne’er a Clout / Till May be Out’. (I’ve never been sure whether ‘out’ means ‘May has come out’, i.e. it has begun, or ‘May has gone out’, i.e. it has ended. Whichever, it’s remarkably cold.)

After all the nature reserve visits lately, it’s time to look for wildlife closer to home. The blue tits have a lot of hungry little mouths to feed in the nest box above the kitchen door, and the adults flit in and out every minute or two. Sometimes one parent is still feeding when the other returns, whereupon the returner goes and perches in the Apple tree, calling softly, until the feeder flies out. There must be at least 40 feeding trips per hour, and it could easily be more. Remember that next time you’re wondering how much trouble kids are.

Ichneumon Fly on Currant leaf
Ichneumon Fly on Currant leaf

The Blackcurrants are in full leaf now, and suddenly today each leaf seems to have an insect crawling over or displaying upon its upper surface. Some are certainly brief visits: smallish Ichneumon flies, about 10mm long and very slender, walk or run hastily about, on the lookout for caterpillars to parasitise with their eggs, a way of life disgustingly cruel enough to put Charles Darwin off religion for ever – leaving all the intellectual arguments aside, he simply found it sickening to imagine a loving creator doing anything so cruel. It’s interesting for such a careful scientist, able to spend 20 years marshalling arguments and evidence, that on a personal level, it was a visceral reaction that settled matters.

Harlequin Ladybirds mating
Harlequin Ladybirds mating

Other insects are clearly more like residents. Half-a-dozen leaves have a boldly coloured Harlequin Ladybird (or two: mating) in full view. It has been well said that insects fall into two camps: those that take good care not to be seen, and those that make sure they can be seen. Ladybirds, with their bold warning colours – red+black, yellow+black, red+black+white – are certainly in the conspicuous camp. This means they are signalling their unsuitability as food; the great pioneering zoologist E. B. Poulton coined the term ‘Aposematism’ (Greek ‘apo’ = from, ‘sema’ = sign, i.e. ‘warning off’) for this kind of warning coloration. In the case of the ladybird, they have bitter, foul-tasting or toxic chemicals in their bodies sufficient to make any predator gag, spit them out, and remember not to eat them again. This doesn’t necessarily save the life of the one they learn on, but it’s good for all the others. Each foul-tasting animal gets a better chance of not being tried out as a meal if it looks as much like other foul-tasting animals that predators may have had a bad experience with already. The result is Müllerian Mimicry (yeah, another famous Victorian zoologist) in which the vile imitate the vile as closely as possible. This is why bees look like wasps which look like bees: they all do better if they have the same obvious ‘don’t mess with me’ look.

2-Spot Ladybird, on the same bush
A native 2-Spot Ladybird, on the same bush

The Harlequin Ladybird is big and bold, advertising itself fearlessly. It is spreading rapidly through Britain, having been unknown here not many years ago. It hasn’t totally displaced our native ladybirds: in fact, my Blackcurrant bush is also home to several 2-spot Ladybirds, much smaller and red all over but for one big black spot on each wingcase. The Harlequins are so called because they have many possible patterns, from much like a 12-spot Ladybird to almost entirely black (the odd red patch remaining), but they always have quite a lot of white on the head, which the natives generally don’t.

A nearly-black Harlequin ladybird
A nearly-black Harlequin ladybird… one species, whatever the pattern

As if that wasn’t enough, several small rather triangular true flies (Diptera) are displaying on the same bush; these are probably males waiting for a mate. They lack the ‘pictured’ wings of the Celery Fly – I’ve got those too, worse luck, though they are pretty little insects, and it’s curious to see them in a mating pile-up, as rival males fight to get the female. What she thinks of it, nature does not relate.

All you have to do to enjoy diverse insect life in your garden is … not to spray. In fact, the insects I’ve seen today are a good reason why spraying is a bad idea. The ladybird larvae are powerful predators of aphids, while the Ichneumon ‘flies’ (parasitic wasps) are valuable biological controls of many damaging species of moth, killing their caterpillar larvae. In short, they are the gardener’s friends.

That’s a lot of the world on a leaf. Or at least, a lot of evolutionary ecology for a May Bank Holiday weekend.