This hairy little guy had crawled in under the sill of the front door, presumably looking for a warm dry place to pass the winter. I reckon it’s a the caterpillar of Ruby Tiger Moth (Phragmatobia fuliginosa) rather than that of an Ermine Moth, based on the lack of visible pale stripes and the dark colouration with tufts of paler hairs. I relocated him to a safer spot, so hopefully he makes it through the winter.
#546 Ruby Tiger Moth (Phragmatobia fuliginosa) caterpillar
I don’t get many dragonflies in the garden, and so late in the season I wasn’t expecting any today; however this female Common Darter (Sympetrum striolatum) arrived for a while to soak up some October sunshine on the garden chairs. A very welcome new species for the list (#545); my 5th dragonfly species. Other than that there was still a single Red Admiral butterfly basking in the sun, and a good mixed flock of blue, great and long-tailed tits on the bird feeders.
#545 Common Darter (Sympetrum striolatum)
The Birch Catkin Bugs (Kleidocerys resedae) have moved down in numbers from the surrounding birch trees to enjoy the last of the ripening raspberries. These small “stink bugs” release an unpleasant smelling secretion from their abdomens to make them less palatable to birds and other predators. Unfortunately this adds an unpleasant taste and smell to any raspberry that they come into contact with, so that is game over for my raspberries until next year.
I disturbed this plume moth while pulling out some past-their-best plants from the chaos of my overgrown flower bed. It’s a Beautiful Plume Moth (Amblyptilia acanthadactyla), a species which has a second generation flying from September onwards, and is one species bucking the overall trend by becoming more common in gardens.
Aside from this, while not being a VisMig hot spot, there’s some signs of birds migrating overhead. Skylarks and a first Meadow Pipit yesterday morning, and some mistle thrushes around the village; the first redwings and fieldfares cannot be far behind.
#222 Beautiful Plume Moth (Amblyptilia acanthadactyla)
While the sun of last weekend did bring butterflies, insects and (maybe) a last barbecue of the summer, the weather is now turned wet and windy, and the leaves are starting to turn. Bird-wise the last 2 house martins were still over the house this morning, but Chiffchaffs joining the tit flock and the first Lesser Redpoll mean Autumn has arrived. On my Garden Birdwatch, which I’ve been doing for a couple of years now, I’ve had my first ever sparrow-less weeks, as the usually-resident House Sparrows have gone - presumably they will be back though, after a short stay-cation out in the hedgerows.
Other signs of Autumn moving on are the craneflies appearing in the house most evenings and spiders, like the European Garden Spider (or Cross Spider) and this this lovely False Widow found in my sons Wellington boot. Pruning back shrubs in the garden, this pair of earwigs needed re-housing, but in general, apart from spiders, insects are few; though there are still plenty of snails & slugs..
As a final drop of photos from my August trip to France: this time some of the alpine flowers from the Vanoise National Park, mostly from high up in the French Alps above Courchevel. Supporting the profusion of butterflies & insects and the nibbling of the local marmots, there is an even greater profusion of wild-flowers, especially on the upper pastures. Most of these examples are alpine plants taken on a hike up to the Lacs Merlet, though the Helleborine and Willow Gentian were photographed on the wild-flower trail at Lac de la Rosière just outside Courchevel.
More photos from our French trip. It’s always amazes me to see the number of grasshoppers and crickets that you get in the South of France. Here are some really of the larger and more impressive ones I managed to photograph in the French Alps. There’s a lot of species and I didn’t identify them all yet, but they are all beautiful - especially the Small Alpine Bush Cricket on the left.
This beautifully marked Wasp Spider is also amazing; apparently you do get them in the South of England, but I’ve never seen one in UK myself. The dragonfly is a Continental species as well - a Small Pincertail - not sure what the pincers on the tail are for, but this one was easy to photograph sunning itself by the riverside. Finally, with its iridescent blue wings, a not-very-healthy-looking Carpenter Bee found in the Cevennes. These exotic looking solitary bees, one of two similar-looking species found in France, make their nest cavities by boring into dead wood,
Rather “off-patch”, but here are some of many butterflies I saw during our August road-trip around France.
Fritillaries were very plentiful, especially Silver-washed Fritillaries, which were present in numbers right through the Auvergne. I took nice pictures of these Knapweed Fritillaries in the Gorges du Tarn in Southern France; also the Scotch Argus and Jersey Tiger Moths there in the riverside vegetation.
In the French Alps I was very happy to find this Apollo butterfly, seen above Courchevel in the Vanoise National Park. The flower-rich Alpine meadows were full of butterflies and moths, including also Mountain Fritillary.
Back after holidays, but due to lack of time there’s not too much to report from the garden.
The only new species I added lately was a very impressive, but too fast to photograph, Hornet Mimic Hoverfly (Volucella zonaria, #543). I did get a nice photo of this much slower-moving female Speckled Bush Cricket (Leptophyes punctatissima, #198) ambling through the Hazel trees. Birding wise I didn’t have too much time to check, but there were some migrant Chiffchaffs in the trees, the last House Martins overhead and a Barn Owl calling around the village the a few nights this week. All rather autumnal.
#198 Speckled Bush Cricket (Leptophyes punctatissima)
Apart from yellow Common Jelly Spot fungus (Dacrymyces stillatus; #542) sprouting out of my old garden furniture and a few flies there’s not much doing in the garden that last week or so. The swifts are gone and it feels like later summer. I finally added a fly-over Linnet (Linaria cannabina, #541) to the garden list and a party of a dozen or so Mistle Thrushes passing over was a sign of successful breeding season. There are plenty of flies about, even when the weather is poor. The fly with the khaki green hairy body is a cluster fly (Pollenia rudis, #540), also called the Attic or Loft Fly because of its habit to overwinter in lofts. While the adults feed on flowers, fruit and faeces, their larvae are parasites of earthworms, doing the usual of burrowing in and eating their host from the inside.
Continuing the succession of interesting beasts pulled out of the pool, I was very impressed on Saturday with this trio. The very boldly coloured rove beetle is Platydracus stercorarius. It is quite common and widespread, but I’m sure I’ve never come across it before. A couple of the smaller black rove beetles were in the pool; with their brownish mid-section (elytra), I believe they are Gyrohypnus angustatus - a common species in damp places and around gardens, The Oak Bush Cricket is a first for this year and always a welcome find.
This faded male bumblebee is, I believe, Barbut’s Cuckoo Bee. This species resembles its host, Garden Bumblebee (Bombus hortorum), but has an almost circular face, unlike the elongated face of Bombus hortorum. As a cuckoo bee, the female searches out a nest of its host bumblebee, entering the nest, usually killing the host queen, then laying its eggs in the nest. The cuckoo bees larvae are then fed and looked after by the host worker bees until they leave the nest in July - September.
The Yellow Shell Moth (Camptogramma bilineata) is one of the commoner ones in the garden, but it’s very prettily marked so why not post a photo. The larvae feed on chickweed and sorrel, that latter of which I have plenty in the garden.
Probably I overlooked it before, as it’s not rare, but this week I found two Lesser Yellow Underwing (Noctua comes). The first of them must have come into the bedroom overnight and was hiding out under one of the pictures. It’s smaller than the very common Large Yellow Underwing, of which there have been many during July, and the pattern of spots on the wings is a little different.
Too fast to photograph, I saw my first Hummingbird Hawkmoth of the summer last week, stopping briefly on the lavender, before zooming off next door. These are migrants from continental Europe. There also start to be a few grass moths around, including the Satin Grass Veneer (Crambus perlella), but at this point last summer I had seen many more.
Last summer I managed to go right through from June to the end of the year without seeing one, so it’s good that the Peacocks are back this year. After seeing one in the warm spell at the end of March, this week there have been a few about in the garden, including this one posing nicely on the garden fence.
Other butterflies right now include large, small and green-veined whites, red admiral and the odd ringlet,, On the other side of the balance sheet, speckled wood which I saw plenty of last year have been totally absent and I didn’t see a comma or a common blue yet either.
#437 Peacock Butterfly (Aglais io)
In the chaos of my flower beds it is still proving possible to find some new wild flowers. I’m also not so knowledgeable on plants, so I don’t always spot them until quite late when they flower.
Hedge Woundwort (Stachys sylvatica) is in flower in July, and now I know what it is I’m seeing plenty of it in other places too. It has pretty purple spike of flowers and soft leaves. As the name suggests, in days before elastoplasts and savlon, the leaves were made into a salve and applied to wounds as an apparently quite effective herbal remedy.
The other plant, which I might easily have taken to be cleavers and pulled out as a weed, is Field Madder (Sherardia arvensis). It has similar looking circles of leaves as cleavers, but the leaves are more pointed and the flowers on closer inspection are pale lilac colour rather than white. This one is growing in my veg plot where my peas should be if they had germinated properly, so it’s still a weed, but at least it’s a more unusual one and also not as fast growing as its sticky relative which gets tangled everywhere in my flower beds.
This pretty, iridescent green beetle is also called the False Oil Beetle, but either way IMO it really deserves a nicer name. Female beetles like this individual, don’t even have “swollen thighs”; it’s just the male who has enlarged rear legs. This beetle visits a variety of flowers for pollen, but in this case was yet another rescue from the paddling pool. Formerly the species had quite a restricted range in Southern England, but since the 1990’s it has been spreading to the Midlands and northwards.
The common wasps are back whenever we sit outside for a meal; but these two wasps are not the kind to bother you when you are eating.
The one on the left is a parasitoid wasp, rejoicing in the name Gasteruption jaculator. With its amazing long, white-tipped ovipositor it lays eggs into the nests of solitary bees, where its larvae will eat the bee larvae. According to the NBN atlas there’s not many records in Gloucestershire, so happy to snap it on my Goldenrod.
There’s a nice article here talking about the lifecycle (and name) of this pretty bizarre looking wasp https://www.gwct.org.uk/wildlife/species-of-the-month/2017/gasteruption-jaculator/.
The other wasp was fished out of the swimming pool, and with its smart black and yellow colour it looks like a potter wasp. These make their nests in hollow stems of plants like brambles, perhaps they might use a bee hotel as well. They hunt larvae from beetles and other insects, which they bring back to the nest for their own larvae. Species-wise I wondered about Gymnomerus laevipes (Box-header Potter Bee), but there are lots of similar-looking species, none of which seem especially well recorded and it’s hard to tell from the photos.
The boys fished this Common Cockchafer or Maybug (Melolontha melolontha) out of the paddling pool, where it had crashed overnight. It survived okay though by doing the backstroke, and when released scuttled away to bury itself in the leaves down under the Hazel trees. It’s getting to the end of the season for these big bugs, as they typically emerge in May then live for only six weeks.
The Maybug’s little brother is a Viburnum Beetle (Pyrrhalta viburni), which is a pest of Viburnum shrubs, but did not seem to be doing much damage where I found it on my runner beans. Even smaller, Derocrepis rufipes, is a tiny leaf beetle, which was on the Hollyhock flowers.
Finally, the Red Soldier Beetle (Rhagonycha fulva) that I had been hoping might turn up on the huge Ragwort I left to grow in the lawn arrived, but opted for the Goldenrod. These soldier beetles eat nectar & pollen on flowers, but also other visiting insects. This one was on its own, but otherwise they seem to spend most of their time mating (hence their nickname of “bonking beetles").
Not having much of a pond, only a couple of basins, I don’t attract many dragonflies or other aquatic insects, so it was good to see my second (first this year) Blue-tailed Damselfly and also a Beautiful Demoiselle in the garden on consecutive days last week. The blue-tailed damselfly is one of the commonest species and can tolerate quite polluted water, the demoiselle is normally more of a riverside species but I did also have a couple of them in the garden last summer. In addition to these two species the only dragonflies I’ve seen are an Azure Damselfly back in May and a Southern Hawker that was around for a few days last July.
#158 Blue-tailed Damselfly (Ischnura elegans)
When the sun shines the number of insects on the flowers goes up. The current batch of pollinating insects seem to like yellow and orange best; the Goldenrod (which is just opening up) being hands down the most popular with many species.
Long hoverflies are one of the commonest species at this time, along with marmalade and white-footed hoverflies. I’ve also seen a few Thick-legged Hoverflies (Syritta pipiens), a species that I didn’t record last year.
The small bee is I believe a collettes, Colletes daviesanus. These are plasterer bees and nest, sometimes in large colonies, in the mortar on old walls. I’m sure they will like the soft lime mortar on my walls and apparently a big colony can eventually damage the fabric of the wall. The bristly, orange-marked fly is Eriothrix rufomaculata. The adults of this species are attracted to flowers, while their larvae are parasites of moth larvae.
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 was 1000 species, which I eventually hit in June 2024. But there’s still plenty to see and learn about.
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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