Comma, Red Admiral, Small White, Meadow Brown, Holly Blue, Speckled Wood butterflies this week. A Cinnabar Moth, the first of the year, flew over the bank near a patch of Ragwort, the food plant of its caterpillars. Let’s hope she laid some eggs.
The first Bluetail Damselfly appeared today; Azure and Large Red Damselflies still about.
We had a lovely day down the reserve in the warm sunshine with a gentle breeze. We dug out an unwanted post with extreme use of pickaxe, crowbar and shovel, and thus refreshed did the butterfly transect. It found a Red Admiral, some Speckled Woods, wonder of wonders a Small Skipper (the second Skipper species this week), a Meadow Brown (not common here), and a Green-Veined White. Not a bad haul. And a lot of Peacock caterpillars, if those count!
This handsome potter wasp (Eumeninae) appeared in the kitchen window. She has 4 spots on the thorax, not the usual two, so I’m not certain she’s Ancistrocerus nigricornis, but if not she’s definitely a similar species.
Down at the reserve today, the first Skipper of the year, basking on a reed by the pond (with Azure and Large Red Damselflies too). It must be a Large Skipper from its size and pattern: uncommon in the reserve.
Up on the ramp, a Red Admiral; and this Ichneumon wasp, which looks very much like Gasteruption jaculator, a fine parasitoid with an ovipositor as long as her head, thorax and abdomen together. She was inside the hut trying to escape through the window; she is black all over, except for the front of her abdomen which is red, and the tip of her ovipositor, which is white. Her wings are nearly transparent with a hint of brown.
We spent the morning fixing path edgings – poles of elm, with handmade wooden pegs, sharpened to stakes. A foreign couple came along and asked if we were preparing for Vampires: perhaps they were from Transylvania, who knows.
In the afternoon we repaired the gaps in the fence where vandals have started jumping over and running down the bank. We hammered in an enormous metpost with a tall square oak post – we had to bring the stepladder to reach the top to drive it in with the round post-hammer – and we had to shave off the edges so the hammer fitted over the post! Then we twisted wire supports and barbed wire to repair the gaps, and hammered extra-large staples into the posts to fix the wire. It was hot and hard work but we’ve fixed a definite problem. Happily the rest of the fence has become totally overgrown with brambles and bindweed, with leafy branches reaching down to it, so it seems unlikely anyone will climb over it there.
On this lovely hot day, we tried to work, hammering in pegs to fix path edging poles. When we were all a bit dizzy from the heat and effort, we gave up swinging the sledgehammer and had a tea in the hut. Then we did a butterfly transect, which in the absence of anything but Speckled Woods, turned into a nature walk as we photographed all the other interesting insects. The Rose Chafer (on hogweed) is worth looking at full-screen as it’s very pretty.
These aphids looked amazing with the sunlight streaming through the leaves; the leaves below were spattered with sticky sugar dropped by the aphids.
There was a beautiful Click Beetle too (like Athous haemorrhoidalis) but I didn’t photograph it as we were having too much fun making it go click and jump out of our hands.
See the Red damselfly? Look up: there’s a pair of Azure damselflies hovering above. Well worth viewing full screen.
We were pleased (and somewhat surprised) to find a family of Great Tits in box 10, right beside the path, and not terribly high up either, but it was an old and presumably proven nest-site, and so it has proven again this year. I got a blurry photo of one of the proud parents entering the hole, which I had repaired with some aluminium sheet this winter.
I was very pleased with this photo, with its surreal light and bubbles. I’ve not remarked the green female morph before: most Azure females seem to be a paler, more lime-green form.
This last photo (taken at quite a distance) shows something very curious: the Brown China Mark, a micro moth that lays its eggs on pondweeds, scurrying over the surface of the water searching for suitable ovipositing sites. In the dazzling light, she was far more reflective than anything else, and I had to turn the exposure down two whole stops to get her about right. The larva is aquatic, feeding on pondweeds.
Not pictured: sawflies; a swift Ichneumon beside the pond (without a long ovipositor, but with a clearly clubbed abdomen); many bumblebees and striped hoverflies. Nests of Peacock butterfly caterpillars too.
Today I “manned the pond”, resplendent in my The Wildlife Trusts T-shirt complete with badger logo on a black background. I didn’t so much as “stand up for nature” as lie down, hoping that the rather lively toddlers waving pond-nets wouldn’t fall in. Their fortunately very quick mother asked me if any children had in fact fallen into the pond, and I replied truthfully that none had done so, so far. And somehow, they didn’t.
In the warm sunshine, the air above the pond was buzzing with Azure and Large Red Damselflies, some paired up and laying eggs, some males patrolling anxiously, chasing off rivals and presumably hoping for some more females to turn up.
The eager dippers caught lots of Greater Ramshorn Snails, and some smaller ramshorns too. Among the haul were some very small Water Boatmen, midge larvae in reds and yellows, water fleas, a tadpole or two, some mayfly larvae (very zippy) with 7 pairs of gills, and some little damselfly larvae (more placid).
Two Sunday volunteers, relaxed and jolly, joined in the pond-dipping: it turned out that the Conservation Officer was out on a flat roof trying to catch a mallard duck and her six ducklings. Unfortunately the duck escaped while they were trying to scoop up the ducklings, so the rescue was abandoned. If the ducklings can’t be got to a pond soon, they’ll starve as the duck has no other way of feeding them.
We did carry out another rescue, however: a very large Queen Buff-Tailed Bumblebee was sitting exhausted on the boardwalk. We looked about for flowers, and tried her on a Yellow Iris, with some success; but she soon used up the energy its nectar provided. I suggested some sugar-water. This was fetched, and it seemed to have the right effect, as she perked up considerably.
Then, in between telling people about the ridiculously complex fertilisation system in damselflies and dragonflies (indirect fertilisation, sperm storage, yeah) and identifying pond animals, I tried to photograph a mayfly nymph with the absurdly limited depth-of-field of my macro lens. What with the white glare from the pond tray, the sun going into clouds, and toddlers leaning into the light to get a better look, it was somewhat difficult. Here’s what I got.
Suddenly it’s actually hot in the nature reserve.
The wildflower meadow in front of the hut shimmered in the sunshine, with bumblebees buzzing around the many Red Campion flowers. A Brimstone visited, for once perching quietly to drink nectar from the flowers. A large brown Shield Bug flew in and clambered up a twig in the hedge. A Red Admiral flew over too. We spent the morning making pegs – like overgrown foot-long sharpened pencils – to fix down the long thin logs we’re using as path edgings. It was pleasant working as a team, with cutting to length and then sharpening with the billhook going on simultaneously.
In the woodland where little shafts of sunlight reached the understory, Speckled Woods danced about or perched.
Down at the pond, Azure Blues (the ones with the little drinking-cup mark at the base of their abdomens) darted about, chasing each other off perches and flying in cop with what seemed to be rather few females compared to the number of eager males. A smaller number of Large Red Damselflies similarly chased and mated.
The “Mangrove Swamp” has lost almost all its standing water now: last week it had risen after being very low, but it only takes a few days for the level to fall dramatically. The frog tadpoles in the last pool were wriggling in a few centimetres of muddy water. I scooped them up in a bucket and popped them into the pond, where they’ll have to take their chances with the ducks alongside the toad tadpoles. The toad-poles may be somewhat distasteful like the adults, so perhaps the frog tadpoles are more palatable?
The Yellow Irises on the pond are starting to suffer from Iris Sawfly, a few of the leaves showing many small bite-marks along their margins.
A small diving beetle obligingly came to the surface to replenish its air supply, staying up there for a minute and then zooming down to the bottom when I came close.
