As well as the handsome insects, a migrating Tree Pipit called from the wood near the Picnic Meadow. These once common birds are now scarce on farmland and have disappeared from London as breeding birds, but still drop in occasionally in spring and autumn migrations, and breed on larger commons such as at Thursley.
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.
I had a go at the ‘regular’ butterfly transect down at the reserve. It was warm and humid but overcast and it didn’t look promising. A large willow covered in Gypsy Moth caterpillars had been loosened by all the rain, and had fallen across the path. I lopped off the crown branches and carted them down to a dead hedge to fill in a gap someone had been climbing through.
The sun peeped out and the cloud cover reduced to maybe 60%, making it warm and pleasant. A single Small White appeared over the ramp and made it onto the transect. I wandered around the reserve, but there was nothing until I found a solitary Speckled Wood in the large meadow.
However, there was plenty to notice all around. The building site looks a lot better now the ‘Costa Concordia’ white horizontal balcony cladding on ‘Chiswick Point’ (well, it’s in Acton Green and on Bollo Lane, but I guess Bollo Block didn’t quite have the same cachet) has been completed: it will be nice when the noise of cranes and drilling stops.
Many ichneumon flies were out on the Hogweed, some mating; almost every Catsear flowerhead had one or two handsomely iridescent green Oedemera nobilis, the “thick-kneed flower beetle” – only the males have the swollen hind femurs, but both sexes have a gap between the slender wing-cases. The males were of noticeably varying sizes, presumably the large ones having the best chances of mating.
A fine bustling mass of hairy black early-instar caterpillars of the Peacock butterfly, wriggled on their silk tent atop a Stinging Nettle.
The Laburnum by the main path is being eaten full of holes, probably a good thing for a non-native shrub in the reserve, by spotted and striped larvae of the Laburnum Leaf Beetle. Never seen it before.
The wild rose in the car park hedge was host to a mating pair of Rose Sawfly, a serious pest for gardeners but an attractive insect with a bright yellow abdomen.
As if all these treats weren’t enough, there were Large Red Damselflies mating and egg-laying on the pond, Common Blue Damselflies, lots of Hoverflies, Click Beetles (seemingly Athous haemorrhoidalis), large brown frog tadpoles and small black toadpoles, singing Blackcaps, a Song Thrush, a Jay, and plenty more. Maybe it’s not just Bugs Day on Saturday, but Bugs Week.