Weekend Finds

This weekend there were a few new bugs about. This rather fine leaf mine on a Nasturtium leaf is from the larva of a fly, probably Pea Leaf-miner, Chromatomyia horticola (#616), though there is another species with an identical mine. Chromatomyia horticola mines leaves of different plants, which include Sow Thistle and Garden Peas, both of which I find in the garden with similar narrow white mines.

The smart-looking black & grey fly appears to be Anthomyia procellaris (#617), due to the placement of the block spots. It is not an uncommon fly, often found sunbathing - in this case on my potato plants. Its larval life-cycle is not really known.

The moth trap was fairly quiet on Sunday morning, with this rather burgundy-tinted Middle-barred Minor (Oligia fasciuncula, #615) the only new species caught. On Saturday night I noted several insects flying around the light turned which I thought were stripey micro moths, but it turns out hey were my fist species of caddisfly, the aptly named Long-horned Caddisfly (Mystacides longicornis, #618). Caddisflies are usually associated with water, where their larvae live in a case made from bits of sand and gravel. My garden is quite far from any stream, so either these insects roam further than you might expect, or maybe they are from one of my small garden ponds.

#616 Pea Leaf-miner (Chromatomyia horticola)

#617 Anthomyia procellaris

#615 Middle-barred Minor (Oligia fasciuncula)

#618 Long-horned Caddisfly (Mystacides longicornis)

Clown Beetle & Cockchafer

It’s Cockchafer season, and one of these big beetles dropped in over the weekend. It’s always good to see them. though this one seemed a bit injured.

The round and shiny black beetle is my first clown beetle, Hister unicolor (#614). This family of beetles are scavengers, with a preference for dead animals, animal dung and other rotting things. Hister unicolor is a little less specific than some and can be found in woodland and gardens attracted by compost and rotting vegetation. This individual, as is commonly the case apparently, had several brown mites clinging onto it.

#526 Common Cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha)

#614 Hister unicolor

Parasitic Wasps

It’s been all about moths lately, but there are other insects about. One great thing about moths is the wealth of information about them online. The same is not true for wasps and I can’t even get close to identifying these two that I photographed last month, despite getting some quite okay pictures. They are probably some type of parasitic wasp that lays eggs in other insects, but there’s just too many species - a huge diversity of around 6,500 species, just in the UK - so I’ve thrown in the towel on ever working out what they might be. These wasps typically synchronise their appearance with that of their hosts, usually with more appearing later in the summer. I’m hoping this will include some of the more spectacular big & brightly coloured ones which I might be able to identify.

More Marvelous Moths

After a couple of fruitful trapping evenings I had a bit of a backlog of photos and a few identification challenges I was still working on. I’m impressed how many moths I’ve caught, and the variety of species - I had no idea there were so many around. I particularly love the birch twig imitating Bull Tip and the pattern on the Grey Dagger, neither of which I’ve ever seen before. As the weather has turned a little wet and it looks like it will be windier too I’ll give it a rest until the weekend and see if there’s anything else around I should take notice of.

#612 Buff Tip (Phalera bucephala)

#603 Treble Lines (Charanyca trigrammica)

#611 Grey Dagger (Acronicta psi)

#607 Common Wainscot (Mythimna pallens)

#605 Mottled Rustic (Caradrina morpheus)

#602 Heart & Dart (Agrotis exclamationis)

#604 Vine's Rustic (Hoplodrina ambigua)

#601 Treble Brown Spot (Idaea trigeminata)

#219 Small Magpie Moth (Anania hortulata)

600 Species - Small Elephant Hawk Moth

Moth trapping is getting quite addictive, and I’m very happy to reach 600 species in style with this gorgeous Small Elephant Hawk-moth, found in the trap this morning. I’m still working on identifying some other of last night’s moths - but this ID was pretty straightforward. Nice!

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#600 Small Elephant Hawk-moth - Deilephila porcellus

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)