Mothing for the Weekend

My moth trap arrived, and even though the weather was not great - cold and quite windy - what the Hell, I had to give it a go. Not many species caught, but at least on the plus side I have to spend the whole day identifying moths! A single Heart & Club (Agrotis clavis) was the sole catch on Friday night, but it was a new species - one that is apparently very readily attracted to light. Saturday night was still and a little warmer after some rain, so I woke up to a moth trap with a dozen or so moths in it, including White and Buff Ermines, Setaceous Hebrew Character, an Uncertain, Willow Beauty, Riband Wave, Spectacle, Shoulder-striped Wainscot, Olive Pearl (Udea olivalis), Barred Marble (Celypha striana) and three more Heart & Club moths. Several of those caught were new species for my garden list, and I’m very happy with my new purchase.

#592 White Ermine (Spilosoma lubricipeda)

#593 Buff Ermine (Spilosoma lutea)

#596 Spectacle (Abrostola tripartita)

#594 Setaceous Hebrew Character (Xestia c-nigrum)

#597 Shoulder-striped Wainscot (Leucania comma)

#591 Heart & Club Moth (Agrotis clavis)

#622 Uncertain (Hoplodrina octogenaria)

#132 Riband Wave (Idaea aversata)

#595 Willow Beauty (Peribatodes rhomboidaria)

Belas Knapp

Belas Knapp above Winchcombe makes a great walk, listening to the skylarks and visiting the Bronze Age burial mound with its excavated burial chambers. Not that I really want it as a weed in the garden, but the candy coloured flowers of Field Bindweed really are sweet. Plants loving calcareous soil included Quaking Grass and Wild Thyme growing on the long barrow itself.

Field Bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis)

Bronze Age Burial Chamber

Quaking Grass (Briza maxima)

Wild Thyme (Thymus polytrichus)

Fat-balls for Two

The Blue Tit family recently fledged from next door’s tit box are round and about all day, sometimes up to five of them at the same time taking a break from eating aphids for some fat-ball. These two juvenile birds were pretty tame, so I was able to sit close to the feeder and get some nice photos.

Two Years of MicroEden

So we’re celebrating two years of this blog and the garden list. The list stands just short of 600 species and is still growing fairly fast, at least in the spring & summer seasons. As a result I’m still learning plenty about the nature in my garden, which after all was the driver for doing this blog in the first place. I’m not sure how many posts I’ve written as I can’t find that statistic on the Squarespace analytics, but it is quite a lot, and I hope the visitors from UK and 61 other countries who have been to the site have found some of it interesting/useful. It’s fun to think of people in places as different as Papua New Guinea, Bhutan, Moldova, Ethiopia and El Salvador reading about the wildlife in my Gloucestershire garden.

The Footballer

This striking hoverfly, Helophilus pendulus (#167), is a pond and sun lover, which was hanging around the “sunny” basin over the weekend. It’s also called the “Footballer” Hoverfly thanks to it’s neat soccer-strip colours. This species is common around ponds and dirty drains, as its larvae live as filter feeders in organic-rich water.

Catted!

The cat caught this just-fledged blackbird the other evening. I freed it pretty quickly, and put it on the shed roof, but the bird was couldn’t fly and after a while its parents gave up trying to encourage it to move. One wing was clearly damaged. After keeping it overnight the bird was still alive and quite perky, so I took it to Vale Wildlife Hospital, which is just up the road. At 10.00 AM on Saturday morning, the chick was the 7th “catted” bird to be brought in that day. It tuned out the wing was broken, and likely would not mend easily, so there’s probably not much that could be done. Young ground feeding birds, such as blackbirds, which can’t yet fly very well are easy prey for cats, so it’s a grim time of year for nature loving cat owners.

After being a bit quiet for birds lately, the garden is now full of families: blue tits, long-tailed tits, bullfinches one day, robins, noisy starlings, jackdaws and magpies. So far there are no other bird casualties, though the cat did catch and kill one of the grey squirrel pups. As well as cats there are a variety of avian predators the birds have to look out for, with sparrowhawk, red kites, buzzards, kestrel (a new species for the list) and even a wandering peregrine passing over in the last few days.

Shredded Hawk-moth

Presumably I have the cat to thank for my finding this Eyed Hawk-moth (Smerinthus ocellata, #590) by the back door, and unfortunately also for the state it was left in. The brown stripe on its head, and pink on the wings and even a small bit of remaining blue eye identify the remains as this species. The Herald Moth (Scoliopteryx libatrix) on the other hand was caught in the garden shed in a spider’s web.

I took the plunge and invested in a moth trap, which should arrive in a week or so. It looks like I’ll have to lock up the cat on trapping nights.

Beetles on Daisies

Back at the allotment the Ox-eye Daises are attracting some beetles that I don’t see in my not-so-sunny garden. I did fish a Swollen-thighed Beetle aka False Oil Beetle (Oedemera nobilis) out of the swimming pool the last summer. This is a pretty iridescent emerald green beetle with thickened back legs; more striking than it’s smaller relative Oedemera lurida, two of which were facing off over this daisy. The third beetle with it’s reddish coloured markings is Stenurella melanura,

Swollen-thighed Beetle (Oedemera nobilis)

Oedemera lurida

Stenurella melanura

Pondlife

In the dry weather a couple of frogs, plus their tadpoles, are keeping cool in the shady basin - seems like a pretty decent idea to me. My other basin was getting choked with blanket-weed so I moved it to a sunnier spot in the garden in the hope of keeping it clear and attracting a few pond insects. There was a damselfly around the last few days, but so far I didn’t catch it visiting either pond, or in fact landing anywhere at all. To deal with the blanket-weed I introduced a few Great Pond Snails, who seem to be thriving.

#1 Common Frog (Rana temporaria)

#588 Great Pond Snail (Lymnaea stagnalis)

Cinnabar Moth - Tyria jacobaeae (#587)

This strikingly-coloured Cinnabar Moth, with its amazing vivid red on the wings, was resting up on the leaves of the Pyracantha. This moth is usually associated with Ragwort, which is the food-plant for its yellow & black striped caterpillars. It’s a pretty widespread moth in Britain, but mostly seen in more open habitats than my garden.

#587 Cinnabar Moth (Tyria jacobaeae)

New Spider; New Bug

Doing a bit of gardening at the weekend, I disturbed a couple of new species. Harpactia homburgi is a ground-living, nocturnal spider that hunts insects such as woodlice. This one’s elongated body I think indicates it’s a male. The small mirid bug is a member of the genus Psallus, the first I’ve recorded. There are a few similar looking species. P. varians prefers oak trees, where it feeds on sap, but also eat smaller insects.

#585 Psallus varians

#586 Harpactia homburgi

Privet Hawk-moth (Sphinx ligustri)

Sadly not in my garden, I found this superb creature on the gatepost at my allotment, where it remained the whole day. The moth is a Privet Hawk-moth (Sphinx ligustri), Britain’s largest resident moth, and the first of these I’ve ever seen.

Privet Hawk-moth - Sphinx ligustri

Early Bees

It’s no longer at all “early”, but it was nice to see two early bees this week: Early Bumblebee (Bombus pratorum, #179) and Early Mining Bee (Andrena haemorrhoa, #445). There’s no longer many mining bees around, but these Early Mining Bees, with their rufus-red hair on the thorax (and somewhat on the tail), were showing well on Pyracantha blossom. While there are plenty of bumble bees enjoying the foxgloves, I don’t see Early Bumblebee very often so I was happy to get a snap of this one, with its lemon yellow front and orange-yellow bottom, taking a rest on the garden shed.

#179 Early Bumblebee (Bombus pratorum)

#445 Early Mining Bee (Andrena haemorrhoa)

American Willowherb (Epilobium ciliatum, #584)

Broad-leaved Willowherb (Epilobium montanum) is one of the commonest weeds all over the garden, but yesterday I noticed this willowherb growing up in one of my plant pots. With slender-leaves, its more cross-shaped petals and less cross-shaped pistil, it is an American Willowherb (Epilobium ciliatum). As the name suggests this plant is native to North and South America, and introduced to Europe. It was first recorded in UK in 1891 and is now found all over the country. It’s a pretty common plant, though the broad-leafed version is much more prolific in my garden.

#584 American Willowherb (Epilobium ciliatum)

#71 Broad-leaved Willowherb (Epilobium montanum)

Oncopsis Leafhopper

This small leaf-hopper dropped in through the window. It’s an Oncopsis species, either O. subangulata or O. flavicollis. Both are types of bug, small cousins of the cicadas you get in the Mediterranean and tropics; these two species both living off the sap in birch trees. The largest cicadas are 7 cm in length and some make enough noise that they can damage your hearing - luckily we have no such problem with this 0.5 cm UK version. Of the two species it might be, I lean towards O. subangulata due to its colouration, but as the species are very similar, very variable and often occur together it’s impossible for me to be certain.

#582 Oncopsis subangulata (Oncopsis subangulata)

#582 Oncopsis subangulata (Oncopsis subangulata)

Common Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna, #583)

This small Hawthorn sapling sprung up in the wilder corner of the garden, probably from a seed dropped in the winter by a passing thrush. It took me a while to work out what plant it was, sprouting up among the weeds. Common Hawthorn is a key species for a wildlife garden, not just for its blossom & berries, but also as nesting cover for birds and as a food-plant for 150+ species of insect. As such, I feel compelled to keep it. I have to move it from the place it has self-seeded, but as a tree that than can grow to up to 8m in height finding a space in my small garden is a bit of a challenge; however where there’s a will there’s a way, so I’m sure it will fit somewhere.

#583 Common Hawthorn ( Crataegus monogyna)

Flies in the Afternoon

Even when there’s not much to look at in the garden, there are always flies. Aside from the house flies, these are two of the commoner ones, the Common Greenbottle (Lucilia sericata) and the Common Flesh Fly (Sarcophaga carnaria). As the name indicates, the larvae of flesh flies mostly live on dead animals, while the green-bottle is less fussy and will also go for faeces and rotting fruit.

For both groups, identification at a species level is difficult and requires a microscope, as there are a few very similar species. However for the greenbottle this one has the right pattern of hairs on its thorax for Lucilia sericata, which is also the commonest species of greenbottle fly. Although both are flies, and their larvae feed on similar things, their lifecycles are quite different. The greenbottle lays eggs which then hatch into larvae; but the flesh fly is ovoviviparous, the eggs developing in the uterus of the female before they are deposited as larvae on a suitable food source.

#63 Common Greenbottle Fly (Lucilia sericata)

#511 Common Flesh Fly (Sarcophaga carnaria sp.)

Unidentified Euura sp. Sawfly

This sawfly found its way into our kitchen window, so I was able to get some decent photos, but I’m still unable to get to an identification. There are 500 species of sawfly in UK, and they are very much under-represented on the Web, despite many being quite large and well marked. Changes of the classification also make it harder to find references - but a good site is https://www.sawflies.org.uk, which shows a few examples from this Genus, Euura. This individual had a nice pastel green colour on the sides of it’s body and the wing spot (pterostigma), with a striped abdomen which in the middle part was translucent against the light. These sawflies are mostly associated with trees, such as willow, hazel and alder. Hopefully I’ll be able to get closer to an identification at some stage.

Trifurcula headleyella (#578)

Not a great photo, but this small moth, also called the Self-heal Pygmy, from the Nepticulinae family appears to be relatively unusual, so worth a post. Looking at UK Moths (https://ukmoths.org.uk/) and other web sites, this species is one of many similar looking small black & white moths, but with a broken white bar, black head with a white eye and black patch towards its rear, of the species pictured, it seems identifiable. This individual was hiding up in a rowan sapling in the garden, but normally the species is associated with chalk meadows in the South of England, where its larvae are leaf miners of Self-heal (Prunella vulgaris). On one hand the habitat may not be right, but the species is found in Gloucestershire, and (as my veg patch will attest) Self-heal quickly covers any bare patch of ground around here, so the moth’s food-plant is present in quantities.

Miners, Masons & Nomads

Last year seemed a bumper year for bees, but this year the apple tree didn’t blossom and thanks to the warm dry weather the flowering season for many of the plants in the garden seemed short. As a result there were less mining bees around than previous years. None the less, in the end I saw most of the same bee species as last year, and even added a couple new ones.

Star of the show was a Red-girdled Mining Bee (Andrena labiata, #571) which turned up one day on the yellow wallflowers. This is not such a common bee, but apparently it likes speedwells, of which I have four kinds in my lawn, so hopefully it’ll stick around. Ashy Mining Bee (Andrena cineraria) and Tawny Mining Bee (Andrena fulva) were also around during April. Lastly I added Red Mason Bee (Osmia bicornis, #575) to the garden list, investigating holes in the wall as potential nesting places.

Following the mining bees, there were some nomad bees. Marsham's Nomad Bee (Nomada marshamella, #481), with it’s broken yellow band seemed the commoner one this year, but this male Flavous Nomad Bee (Nomada flava, #463) obligingly flew in through the window.

#571 Red-girdled Mining Bee (Andrena labiata)

#61 Ashy Mining Bee (Andrena cineraria)

#442 Tawny Mining Bee (Andrena fulva) male

#575 Red Mason Bee (Osmia bicornis)

#481 Marsham's Nomad Bee (Nomada marshamella)

#463 Flavous Nomad Bee (Nomada flava)