Finally a nice picture of a Speckled Wood butterfly (#151) which perched up on our lovely bright yellow front door. As the flowers fade away in the late summer, maybe a passing butterfly has to be grateful for any patch of sunshine yellow it can find.
My first new moth for a while, a Light Brown Apple Moth (#317), is originally a native of Australia. First found in UK in the 1930s it's now spread across much of England making a pest of itself in orchards and gardens. Similarly, it's been accidentally introduced to New Zealand, New Caledonia, Hawaii and California. In Australia the population is kept under control naturally by insect predators, especially parasitic wasps and flies, that eat the larvae. However in other countries these predators are not present, so the moths can become a significant pest in orchards. It's an interesting reversal of all the non-native plants and animals introduced (often deliberately) to Australia and New Zealand by European colonists, which now have to be controlled at great cost by local farmers and conservationists.
#317 Light Brown Apple Moth
Found this insect back on 30 June, and thinking it was a moth spent ages trying to find it on www.ukmoths.org.uk and other websites. All no avail. until a I was checking something else and realised it was not a moth at all, but a caddisfly. The problem with caddisflies is that there seems to be very little information on the internet covering the 200 or so species found in the UK. Normally caddisflies live near running water, but this one was resting up in shrubs in the garden during the daytime. Plus, this one doesn't really have much in the way of distinguishing features. Ironically the only one looking similar that I could find on the web was on another blog (http://northdownsandbeyond.blogspot.com/2010/09/stumped-by-caddis-fly.html), and the blogger there couldn't identify it either, but hopefully one of us will work it out one day...
A MicroEden mystery - caddisfly
A busy morning for the local spiders. The European Garden Spider (aka Cross Spider) in the tomato plants was having Marmalade Hoverfly for breakfast. Meanwhile a Noble False Widow spider living in a gap in the wall was immobilising a Common Wasp that had got snared in its web. The diversity of insects seems to be declining as summer progresses, but spiders and wasps are more and more apparent. We even had a visit from a very impressive European Hornet yesterday - a first this summer - too much of a wimp to get a decent photo, I’m afraid.
I'm finding bees pretty hard to identify, despite having a Falk's field guide to the Bees of GB & Ireland on loan. Anyhow taking advantage of a wet Sunday, I think I made some progress with old photos from June & July.
In June the Wall Daisies had a lot of these small, orange-bellied solitary bees. Looking at photos and the guide, I think they can be identified as Patchwork Leaf-cutter Bee (#181), thanks to the extent of orange towards the tail segments.
The other bee also from June on White Bryony flowers also seems to be a solitary bee. Based on the amount of hair on the body and leg colour I reckon it's Yellow-legged Mining Bee (#309).
There's a few other microEden mysteries I need to solve, I'm glad to have worked at least some of them out.
It's colder today and the lavender is coming to an end, but here's a few snaps of butterflies that have been in the garden over the last couple of weeks. One or two of Common Blue, Gatekeeper and Meadow Brown butterflies have been through on a more or less daily basis during early August. Though there have been plenty of Large and Small Whites, often they've not stopped for the flowers, and I've had Comma and Red Admiral visiting a few times. Other species which I might have expected, like Small Tortoiseshell, which I remember as being so common when I was a kid, seem very scarce - only seen 2-3 times this year. And so far I didn't see a single Peacock or Painted Lady in the garden despite it seemingly being a good year for butterflies. It's thought the decline of some of these butterfly species might be due to a parasitic fly (Sturmia bella) that has spread from the Continent in recent years. We sent in some counts to Butterfly Conservation's Big Butterfly Count - be interested to see the outcome from their UK survey when it comes out.
Once again the brown wheelie bin for garden waste came up trumps with a new species for the backyard - this time my first mayfly, a Pond Olive (#301) with its lovely long tail streamers. Mayflies are usually found by ponds and streams, so God knows how it got in my compost bin, as I'd only been pulling up some potato plants and a few weeds; certainly nothing from any pond. Apparently it's a myth that mayflies only live for a day - even so, spending a large proportion of your life shut in a dark wheelie bin is a bit tragic. I was happy to liberate it.
A beautiful sunny, still and cool morning, starting to feel even a bit autumnal. There were lots of birds around, especially in the neighbours' large birch trees at the foot of the garden. Family groups of blue tits, great tits, goldfinches, greenfinches, blackbirds and house sparrows were more apparent than usual. A singing willow warbler and a lesser whitethoat (new for the garden and species #313 for the microEden list) were not locals. They are migrant warblers slowly moving south & west, feeding up for the long migration to Africa as they go. Families of swallows, house martins and swifts were overhead - the swifts will be gone any day now, heading South. By 10.00 am the birds are almost silent - you'd never know they were there.
It seems a good time to mention the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and their Garden Birdwatch survey that collects data - weekly maximum counts - of the bird species in your garden. You can also optionally record other wildlife like mammals, butterflies, etc. This is great as everyone's records build up a very representative dataset of changes in bird populations in gardens across the UK. The website it interesting. Consider signing up - It's not too much of a commitment (https://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/gbw)
The MicroEden backyard on an August morning
These two common plants that crop up as garden weeds are both very poisonous.
The red berries of Lords & Ladies add some nice late-summer colour in shady areas of the garden, but there's a good reason why they don't get eaten by the birds - they're very poisonous. Thankfully they are so unpleasant tasting that nobody would ever get to eat enough of them to have a dangerous dose.
The white flowers, one of many different kinds of similar-looking umbellifer is called Fool's Parsley, as it looks superficially like parsley or chervil, but can be distinguished by the small spurs that hang down under the flowers and seed heads. Like many other umbelliferae, such as hemlock, it's pretty poisonous; though apparently it was also used in the past as a medicine for children's stomach aches - hopefully only in small doses!
More or less on the 2 month mark, I added a handful of species to achieve a total of 300 species in the microEden backyard. The fennel seems to be the most attractive pollen source for flies, hoverflies and wasps, The population of wasps is really taking off right now, with them all around us as soon as we sit outside for a meal.
The new species in the last couple of days include #297 common orange legionnaire fly, #298 pied hoverfly and #300 a solitary bee Ectemnius continuus. The solitary bee is a predator, digging a nest hole in wood and taking flies, etc back for its larvae - it has strong looking legs, perhaps for all that digging. On the fennel though it was more interested in the flowers than any of its fellow insects.
Nice to find this common toad; which are often around in the garden, but not so much this year. He/she goes well with the common frogs that we've had around the pond - the adult one is now joined by some of this year's froglets, who are keeping a low profile under the rocks surrounding the pond basin.
These two were the first shield bugs of the season. On the left the Birch Shieldbug (#282), several of which have been blown out of the trees around the garden by the strong winds of the last couple of days. On the right a Red-legged Shieldbug (#292), this one saved from drowning in the paddling pool. These shield shaped bugs are also often called stink bugs as the smell bad when you squash them, and presumably they taste bad to birds as well. They're pretty bugs, but not especially a gardeners friend as they live by sucking the sap from plants and hence can become a pest, but I don't mind them...
A whole run of interesting insects being fished out of the kids paddling pool. An adult Oak Bush Cricket with very impressive antennae - maybe it was the same one I rescued as a nymph from the brown wheelie bin earlier in the summer! We don't have much in the way of long grass, so this grasshopper was a first for the garden. Judging from its colour and wing length, I identified it as Lesser Marsh Grasshopper, a species which has been extending its range north in UK. It's nice to find interesting insects like this on my patch.
This looks like a shiny kind of wasp taking a rest in the veg plot, but after some book-work I reckon it's a Figwort Sawfly (#278). Working out the identification is quite difficult as there are several other parasitic wasps and wasp mimicking nomad bees and hoverflies that look pretty similar. This sawfly’s larvae live on the figwort plant, while the adults hunt smaller insects.
I had to clean out the guttering, so while I was making a rare trip up a ladder to check the roof, I thought I'd also check out the ecology of this so far unexplored place. I hadn't really tried to sort out the garden's mosses and lichens yet either, but the roof tiles are definitely the best place to go looking for them. There was quite an impressive collection of yellow and grey ones, all seemingly doing okay despite us hardly having had any rain for several weeks. Probably I'll need to go up again, but some of the species I did find included the yellow/orange Caloplaca aurantia (#274), flakey grey/green Physcia caesia (#275) and Aspicilia contorta (#276) with its grey/white circular pock-marks. Also plenty of Redshank Moss (#274); the main reason I needed to clean out the gutter in the first place.
Back at the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust reserve at Greystones Farm, Bourton-on-the-Water today to pick up my cheese. I went on a cheese-making course last week with Simon Weaver Cotswold Organic Dairy. The course was a pilot for a series of courses to be run at the farm starting sometime in August, and it was really great. Learned so much about about different types of cheese and how to make them, and now I have a big Tomme de Savoie maturing in the kitchen, ready to eat in about a month. There's not many places where you can see the cows, visit the wildflower meadows that feed them, watch the milking and then make cheese from the fresh milk. Big thanks to Roger Crudge, the Simon Weaver Dairy team and GWT for a fantastic day.
Details of forthcoming courses are to be found at https://www.simonweaverorganic.co.uk/courses
Good weather continues, and the kids are off school, so I have some extra spotters in the garden. This Yellow Shell Moth was new; not a very yellow example, so I hope I got the ID right. Still plenty of butterflies coming through - this Gatekeeper was the first I've had in the garden this summer, as was a Common Blue I was too slow to photograph yesterday. There was also a rather impressive Southern Hawker around this morning, which I hope I will manage to snap sometime - my first large dragonfly. Finally a new garden pest, Bay Sucker bugs, messing up the leaves on my bay tree - so far the tree doesn't seem too badly affected...
It's been a bit slow lately, due to family and work commitments. Also the dry weather seems to have kept things somewhat quiet in the garden. However there's still been plenty to see, especially butterflies and hoverflies. Here's a few snaps of random visitors to the microEden garden. The slug appeared after our first rain in weeks, my first non-Asian ladybird, a new generation of beautiful mint moths are all over the lavender, a resting meadow brown butterfly in the bamboo and a variety of hoverflies on the Golden Rod. I still need to fully get to grips with the bees and hoverflies as there are several present that I didn't yet identify.
Insects abound, and the list of species found moves towards the 250 mark.
I liked this tiny, brightly coloured bug: #238 Calocoris stysi.
The caterpillar is not a moth or a butterfly, but from a #217 Large Rose Sawfly. It and a sibling were still very hungry though, making short work of several rose leaves in a couple of days.
Butterflies are plentiful; the star was a #238 Silver-washed Fritillary, but it was to fast to photograph. This Comma (#211) on the lavender was more obliging.
I never really looked too closely at the Daddy Long-legs, but this Tiger Cranefly (#205) is really nicely marked - one of a dozen or so UK species.
Flies, and especially for some reason the Dull Four-spined Legionnaire (#235), are very partial to drowning themselves in the kids swimming pool. This is one of several we've rescued. Eventually the wings dry out and they can fly away.
Finally a pair of #239 Poecilobothrus nobilitatus flies were getting romantic around the pond, the male jumping around to try to impress its potential mate.
Sunday morning found me doing a quick bird survey of a field on the edge of the village. Developers have been all around the village trying to get permission to build on almost every conceivable space. In this case I was checking what birds were present as the developers commissioned survey took place in November and not surprisingly didn't find much of any interest! In an hour we found 46 birds of 18 different species in and around the field, including three birds of red conservation status (yellowhammer, house sparrow & skylark). There were also many butterflies and insects around, including this rather lovely puss moth caterpillar in a mature hedge bordering the proposed site. Hopefully my input helps at least get a proper discussion of the wildlife value of this plot.
Passionate about nature, based in Gloucestershire UK; this site is about creating a wildlife friendly family garden and exploring the diversity of animal & plant species that share it with us.
As a nature lover and wildlife gardener I started wondering about the biodiversity in my backyard and just how many species from plants to insects to birds to mammals might live in or visit it.
Much of the wildlife in my small, village garden has been present right under my nose for years without my really appreciating it, so on the way I am learning a lot about different species and how to make a wildlife-friendly environment for them; also getting engaged more in conservation activities around Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and the Cotswolds.
My garden species tally started from zero on June 1st 2018, the target is 1000 species - let's see where it goes.
I'm very interested in your comments & advice: whether it's about the blog, some help with identification or just how to make my own little Eden better for wildlife. So please leave a comment or drop me a line if you feel like it!
Graham Tompsett
microedenproject@gmail.com
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