Ah, a Comma butterfly on the path. Ew, but what’s it doing? Those are flies. Greenbottles. With red eyes. They’re buzzing around a sticky mess. Dog or Fox poo. And, yes, the Comma has its proboscis extended, it’s feeding. On the poo, by preference. No better than the flies!
Actually, quite a few species of butterfly are attracted to sticky messes on the ground; entomologists brew up their own concoctions with beer and treacle (and who knows what else) to attract Purple Emperors down from the tops of their Oak trees.
Somehow this all seems surprising, perhaps because we can’t quite believe that anything so beautifully dressed as a butterfly could have such dirty habits. But then again, being attractive and well-dressed doesn’t guarantee that humans are doing nice things, either.
Corona-virus is reaching every part of all our lives. Last week I made my final box of stobs like overgrown willow-pencils, along with a fine pile of woodchips, before Gunnersbury Triangle volunteering was shut down. It was a happy workday with relaxed chat about everything from knitting to frogspawn.
Today I went for a solitary walk around, keeping a good 2 metres from passers-by.
A Chiffchaff sweetly sang its simple song (its name, many times over), hopping about the still mainly-bare Willows and Birches, and feeding on the newly-leafed bushes of rose and hawthorn. Early spring is the best time to glimpse our warblers, which are small, slim, greeny-brown and very difficult to spot when all the trees are in full leaf. This one gave me a front seat in the stalls, singing in full view.
A brilliant yellow Brimstone butterfly, my first of the year, fluttered about the brambles, reflecting the warm spring sunshine, its wings slightly pointed in the middle (in the manner of Elf-ears, if you take my meaning).
A gloriously orange Comma butterfly, also the first for this year, shot past me and then landed near my feet to take the sun, its markings wonderfully fresh.
On the way home, my Dentist phoned to cancel the last remaining appointment in my diary. Let’s hope people will respect the rules so we can all continue to go out quietly and at least enjoy Nature.
The ‘March Winds’ part of the old proverb came startlingly true on the night of the 27th of March, when two fine big Birch trees blew down, leaving a sad gap. We will perhaps build a wicker dead-hedge and plant a live Hawthorn hedge (to be laid) at the edge of the area, and might even plant some saplings, we’ll see.
Meanwhile, there were branches to be cleared – this one snapped from a Willow just coming into leaf and catkins – and I popped it onto the pile blocking an unwanted path at the end of the picnic meadow. Laura was so surprised to see me “carrying a tree” that I had to pose for the photo.
Seven-Spot Ladybird
Spring is however arriving, the first Blackcap on the reserve starting to sing on 3 April.
Among the newly-visible insects are Brimstone and Comma butterflies, Seven-Spot Ladybirds, plenty of bumblebees and early hoverflies (that’s a species), and a few Bee-flies (bee mimics) hovering as they drink nectar.
The male Sparrowhawk, too, flew over as we worked.
Well, it only takes one still, warm sunny day and suddenly it’s SPRING! Sure enough, the frogs had gone crazy down the mangrove swamp, there was a great heap of spawn in the shallow water, and some excited children (and mothers). A pair of Comma butterflies wheeled and scurried about the sky in a long, intense dogfight, their whirling wings making it clear these were rival males of an orange species, if nothing else!
Hairy-Footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes) male
Mike expertly identified the Hairy-Footed Flower Bees around the Alkanets: they came out to warm up in the sun in some numbers. They have never been recorded before here, though we have surely had plenty of them, unrecognized.
Frogspawn in Mangrove Swamp
Spring! Broom in bloom
The brilliant yellow of the Broom, and the foamy white of the Blackthorn flowers, announced that spring had sprung in a Botanical way, too.
Blackthorn in Bloom
The completed Hedgehog House prototype
The team spent the afternoon designing and making a prototype Hedgehog house out of Correx sheets left over from the Vole Patrol. We worked out a way to make a house from just two sheets, 54 x 120 cm each: basically one big tube folded 4 times to give 4 sides and an overlap flap, and two half as wide, one for the entrance tube, one for the two ends (joined along the ceiling with flaps on each end of the floor). We fixed it together with just 5 cable ties ingeniously stitched through bradawl holes. A challenge was to get the last stitch in, as the box was then fully closed! The trick was to take out the entrance tube and put a hand inside: the cable tie had to be poked out through a hole that of course we could only see from the outside! The result looks enormous and luxurious, so being Londoners of course we made a lot of jokes about Hammersmith Hedgehog Penthouses and luxury granite kitchens, etc etc. Anyway, we hope the hedgehogs will like them.
It was a day for signs: we worked all morning digging two deep post-holes for a new welcome signboard beside the ramp path, telling stories as we dug down through dry soil, pebbles and then soft clayey subsoil. Eventually we were deep enough and level enough to pop the sign in, and with nothing more than the spoil, pebbles, and a spirit level and a bit of tamping, we had a fine new signboard up. As if by magic, the TV camera team from ChiswickBuzz arrived to film us holding up spades, a Green Cross banner (some sort of quality of service award), and asking us to cheer improbably, so we shouted 1-2-3 Hooray! and waved spades like idiots, and the camera crew looked happy and wandered off.
Strangalia maculata on Hogweed
There were some bright black-and-yellow insects about pretending not very convincingly to be wasps, but their warning signs seem to work pretty well. After lunch we came back past the signboard to do a butterfly transect, and we nearly cheered as a visitor took a good look at the signboard. We joked that with an apostrophe missing, we’d have to dig the sign out and send it back for a refund.
On the transect we had good numbers of butterflies, but without so much sunshine it was without the masses of Gatekeepers of a fortnight ago. There were a pair of Commas, a Red Admiral, a Brimstone, and plenty of Small Whites, Speckled Woods, Holly Blues and Gatekeepers. A pair of (Migrant or Southern?) Hawkers scooted about from the hut to the ramp; down by the pond was an exuviae of something like a Broad-Bodied Chaser; a Common Darter sunbathed on the boardwalk, and a pair of Azure Blues wandered above the now happily full pond, laying eggs. The reserve echoed to the crash of demolition from the High Street.
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.
Tree Bumblebee Bombus hypnorum
Macrophya Sawflies mating on Hogweed
Bluetail Damselfly on Iris
The first Bluetail Damselfly appeared today; Azure and Large Red Damselflies still about.
An English Summer is, as the saying goes, three fine days and a thunderstorm. Or, going out with sunhat, suncream, sunglasses… and a pullover and raincoat, just in case. Today it started out cold with a chill north-north-easterly wind, but quietened down and became rather too hot to work comfortably.
A tree had fallen across the glade in the Gunnersbury Triangle where the beekeeper is going to station one of her hives. I soon threw off my pullover, and my rainproof jacket never left my rucksack. The soft willow wood was no trouble to saw up, and I dragged the branches to the dead-hedge without much effort. A lot of small holm oak, an invasive alien species from the Mediterranean (think Ligurian coast) has sprung up from old stumps, so they joined the pile. A Blackcap sang to me while I worked.
The butterfly transect revealed very little, though some Commas are encouragingly laying eggs. As for other insects, several species of hoverfly, from tiny and slender to large wasp mimics and a fine one largely black, perhaps a bee mimic, were active. They hover, perch and sunbathe, or dash and chase each other (specially the large black ones) aggressively. I had fun trying to photograph one actually in the air, you can see the atmospheric but not very useful result above. It does give something of an idea how much they whiz and dash about, hovering always on the qui vive.
Ragwort is getting more and more abundant on the reserve; today, Helen spotted some tiny (probably first instar) Cinnabar Moth caterpillars on one of the plants; an adult visited me while I worked.
The Peacock Butterfly caterpillars of last week seem all to have pupated in hiding somewhere; there are quite a few younger ones still on the stinging nettles, so there will be at least two lots of adults.
Knot Grass caterpillar on bramble
We found a Knot Grass moth caterpillar (a Noctuid moth) on a bramble. It is hairy and aposematic, with brown hair but without the four long brown ‘shaving brush’ tufts of the Vapourer moth caterpillar (a Lymantriid or Tussock moth), which we’ve also found here.
But perhaps the insect I was happiest to see was this young Bush Cricket, resting on a flower for no particular reason, and taking a risk as its fine spotted green camouflage was totally compromised by its white and yellow flowery background. It must be the first one I’ve seen this year.
Young Bush Cricket
I have always loved natural patterns. The bark of this Aspen tree looks almost as if it encodes symbols in some cuneiform notation.
Natural Pattern: Aspen bark, almost seeming like a form of writing
Today dawned foggy and cool, but the sun soon burnt its way through and it became a hot spring day. I spent most of it reroofing the tool shed at the Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve. It was in tatters after at least one hard winter, and it was an interesting exercise peeling off the layers hopefully tacked one on top of the leaky other. I then removed three full boards from the roof, complete with what I’m sure any mycologist would have found a fascinating colony of wet rot fungus, together with several wriggly centipedes and a lot of woodlice.
As it grew hotter on the roof, I was joined by at least two species of hoverfly, one large, dark, and almost unstriped. A brimstone butterfly chased around with a smaller white, perhaps a green-veined or an orange tip. A comma butterfly wandered about. Down below, the stinging nettles, hops, and garlic mustard (ideal for orange tips) are coming up nicely, but there’s too much cow parsley and some volunteers are pulling a lot of it out.
Newly-Hatched Tadpoles
At lunchtime I walked down to the pond. Chiffchaffs were singing all over; the pond was suddenly covered in pond skaters (Gerris) with one or two whirligig beetles. The tadpoles have hatched out into a wriggling mass.
Spring has sprung.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
