On a sorry note, Netty spotted a small tuft of feathers, still attached to a bit of skin. The scrap was whitish, spotted brown, like a Song Thrush’s breast, torn off by a Sparrowhawk: probably one of the pair that nested here until last year, but must now be nesting somewhere nearby. I reflected that I hadn’t heard the male Song Thrush singing for a fortnight. What a sad bit of fluff to pick up.
The day looked unpromising for a nature walk, let alone a butterfly transect, but it was time to do one, so after a cursory tour to clip the worst of the brambles from the paths, we set off with clipboard and cameras to see what we could find.
The hogweed, still in flower despite weeks of rainy weather that has caused many stalks to topple, was alive with flower beetles, bees large and small, and this magnificent Ichneumon wasp with its incredible ovipositor.
At first we saw only white butterflies, but a Comma was sunning itself, and a Speckled Wood had somehow survived the wet weather.
We saw two Strangalia maculata longhorn beetles taking nectar. They are Batesian mimics of wasps, looking in all truth only very slightly waspish, but perhaps young birds are put off. Or perhaps they do in fact taste foul.
We were just discussing the Sparrowhawks as we approached their nest tree when a commotion broke out along a branch, and a Sparrowhawk flew rapidly with its claws forward: a Squirrel raced away from the nest, hotly pursued by the angry bird; they leaped to the neighbouring tree and scurried up the matching branch out of sight. The Sparrowhawk broke into a loud excited chittering trill. We were all excited, laughing at the speed, the impossibility of reaching for a camera.
A Holly Blue flew over the pond, above several pairs of mating Azure Damselflies and a Yellow Iris now chewed right down to a semi-leafless state by the Iris Sawfly larvae.
Down at the Anthill Meadow, a single Small Skipper perched on an ear of Yorkshire Fog.
On the next ear was a male Bluetail Damselfly: they have emerged from the pond in the past week.
The wooden rail was sticky with snail pulp: a Song Thrush had hammered three snails open on the exposed woodwork, leaving shells and sticky patches behind.
Two days ago I saw a Cinnabar moth in the Small Meadow. There is plenty of Ragwort coming up, so with any luck there will be plenty of caterpillars soon.
OK, and to end, one insect NOT on Hogweed, the Small China-Mark Moth, on a Reed. It and many others of its species were fluttering about the pond, where they mate and lay eggs in waterside vegetation. I was really pleased to get the camera so close to this attractive little insect.
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.
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.
I wasn’t really birding but it was nice to see a little cloud of House Martins flycatching, and a richly dressed Dabchick diving for food.
Foamy wisps of scented Meadowsweet flowers were visited by honeybees; a Strangalia maculata longhorn beetle (it doesn’t have an English name, but it’s not the one usually called Wasp Beetle) clambered slowly over the flowerheads. It looks reasonably wasplike, if not terribly convincingly; it would be interesting to know if it is itself foul-tasting and hence actually aposematic, or just hitching a free ride through Batesian mimicry.
The Wetland Centre was very sunny, a little windy for butterflies (only Small Skipper, Red Admiral and Green-Veined White) but with the bees buzzing around the many flowers, very attractive. Several Orchids were in bloom, including purple and pyramidal. Even the different bindweeds looked wonderful. A pair of Mute Swans rested calmly with a cygnet or two at the bronze feet of Sir Peter Scott.
The dragonflies included one Black-tailed Skimmer, sunning itself on a “wildside” path; several blue hawkers, probably Hairy Dragonflies; an Emperor; a teneral darter, probably Common Darter; masses of blue damselflies – all the ones I managed to check were Azure Damselfly; and a few Common Bluetail damselflies.
Immature male Common Bluetail damselfly
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!
Today the morning sun blazed from a clear blue sky and the air around the tall handsome Fennel outside the kitchen swarmed with insects of all shapes and sizes, hastening to benefit from the plant’s abundant nectar. Among the visitors were the large black-and-yellow potter wasp, a small sand-wasp (Ammophila pubescens) – still a largish wasp, and a handsome species with its red and black abdomen – and an all-black spider-hunting wasp, like an Anoplius (and maybe of that genus) but without the red bands on the abdomen. Also enjoying the feast were many tiny solitary bees and a good number of flies of different species, including one with a long bristly red cylindrical abdomen, as well as what look very much like ordinary social wasps. A single red-and-black striped Trichodes alvearius beetle joined in.
The garden Mint, now coming into full bloom, had an almost entirely different set of insects on and around it, including large flies (preyed on by Crab Spiders), a Strangalia maculata longhorn beetle, and a Sooty Copper. Half a dozen Gatekeeper butterflies chased about; a Wall Lizard scurried down the wall on the lookout for insect prey. A Large Skipper perched for nectar.
In the evening, two dragonflies hunted over the lawn. A Small Pincertail hawked up and down, its abdomen showing a roughly striped yellow and black appearance as it flashed past, wheeling up and turning aerobatically like a military helicopter over the box hedge. A Common Darter chose a perch at the end of any of three bare twigs on the Cherry, darting up like a Flycatcher, hovering, and landing again, often on the same perch. It was hard to see its markings against the light, even with binoculars, but by stalking it with the camera and adjusting the brightness and contrast it was possible to see its orange coloration and rather plain markings, as well as clear wings, excluding Yellow-Winged and Ruddy Darters, both of which I’ve seen here.
This rather beautiful small Mantis with a ‘millefiore bead’ pattern on its eye was resting on the kitchen shutters. I’ve never seen the species before: it is much shorter than the common green Praying Mantis of Europe that we get here (mainly on chalk, but also in sandy clay meadows), and it is probably well camouflaged in brownish grass or vegetation. The wings are surprisingly clear, so there is no startling ‘deimatic’ flash of bright colour available from the forewings. There seems no doubt, though, about the ‘praying’ front legs (I almost said ‘arms’).
Other insect visitors include Southern White Admiral and Scarce Swallowtail (actually commoner here than the ‘Common’ Swallowtail, a fast flier which we sometimes see).
When I first acquired a macro lens for my camera, I raced about the meadows, photographing every insect I could: and many of them were species new to me, though I must have seen them flying past (or away) many times. For the close-up lens and detailed images gave me something I had never had: the ability to study shy insects as if I had caught them and pinned them to a Victorian collector’s card. Suddenly those speckled orange butterflies resolved themselves into Spotted Fritillaries, or for that matter Glanville, Queen of Spain, Silver-Washed, Small Pearl-Bordered and High Brown Fritillaries. It was a revelation, and a delight.
It was also sobering: in all my journeys around the British Isles, the only Fritillary I ever saw was a Small Pearl-Bordered, and that was on the north coast of Cornwall, only a few miles from Land’s End, as if almost the whole of Britain had been scrubbed clean of butterflies, but a few remote corners with the last few surviving individuals had somehow been overlooked.
But as far as rural France was concerned, once up in the wooded hills with their mosaic of old coppiced woodland, little meadows, fruit trees and ponds around old tumbledown farms and barns, or out on such steep chalk grassland hillsides as remain, the butterflies, beetles and wild flowers remained much as they must have been a century ago. I clicked away and framed a postcard-sized print of each species, 8 to a clipframe, and returned each day to the meadows to photograph more.
It was the same with the flowers, especially on the chalk, as soon as I finally managed to get down here in springtime to see the orchids, rather than in high summer to see dry brown grass (and perhaps burnt-out orchid seed-heads, the colour of well-cooked toast). Everywhere there were Pyramidal Orchids and Chalk Fragrant Orchids, so numerous as to have a wealth of variation in size, shape and height, evidently frequently hybridizing. In damper places were Early Purple Orchids; and here and there were species I had never seen in Britain – Lizard, Military, Lady, Green-Winged, Fly, and Butterfly Orchids. They all went on the wall, printed as close-ups.
As for the beetles, the only really large species that I’d seen at all frequently in England was the Stag Beetle. Here, I photographed at least 8 species of Longhorn, from the mighty Tanner to two kinds of wasp-coloured beetle (Clytus and Strangalia) and a magnificent green kind with black spots, Saperda punctata. The Romanian Longhorn Project kindly identified it from the photo, saying that it is protected in Central Europe: such splendid insects are becoming rare, and not only in England.
Yet perhaps it was really the wasps that caught my eye and stole my heart. Yes, wasps. As well as ordinary-sized social wasps, the area was home to great spherical nests of the European (Red) Hornet and the new, darker, slimmer and far more aggressive Asiatic Hornet. And besides those were Sphecid or Digger Wasps of many kinds, all solitary and often handsome; Ichneumons with narrow waists and enormously long ovipositors like overgrown stings (though wasp stings are actually modified ovipositors, so only females have them); and marvellously beautiful and imposing Potter Wasps with black and yellow legs and long slender yellow waists. These are shy and wary of large animals, so photographing them was always a challenge: but eventually I managed it.
Now, as the years go by, I find I recognize these insects not only by their size and shape and patterns, but by their habits of flight, the kind of weather that brings them out, which plants they like to visit, where they nest. In short, they have become familiar: and with familiarity has come a comfortable feeling of friendship and of being at home, of things being in their right places. The excitement of the new has been replaced by the appreciation of this particular ecosystem, where ‘eco’ means what its Greek etymology implies: οικος (oikos), house: this is my and their home, the place where we live together.
It was a pleasure to do the butterfly transect today. Even before I reached the Gunnersbury Triangle, I saw a Red Admiral in the street.
Once inside, I was rewarded with several very small, very active Skippers with their jittery, chaotic, jinking flight. It is hard enough to follow with the naked eye, close to impossible with binoculars, and presumably difficult for bird predators (as well as the reason for the name Skipper). When one finally did perch, it was clear it was a Small Skipper, as the Essex Skipper (not limited to that county) has more black on its antenna tips.
Down at the pond, a primary school class and a group of enthusiastic teachers were catching Ramshorn Pond Snails, Newts, Dragonfly larvae and this fine Water Scorpion.
This small newt has nearly completed its metamorphosis from a tadpole. It has four legs, the hindlegs so thin they were nearly invisible to the naked eye, but its gills are still large, feathery and projecting from the sides of the head.
One of the large handsome hoverflies that frequents woodland glades came into the hut. This species has the front of the abdomen pale yellowish but no other stripes; the pale area seems to glow when the fly is hovering, presumably making it look sufficiently black and yellow to warn off predators (of course, many bees are black).
Finally, here’s a Strangalia maculata, one of our most handsome longhorn beetles. Nearby was another Red Admiral.
