This Early Bumblebee, Bombus partorum, was making brisk work of checking out the chives flowers in the Horbury Library garden. It’s one of our most widespread and common bumblebees. The queens emerge in March.
Early Bumblebee
Month: June 2021
Dog Daisies
No Mow May is over but these dog daisies in the top corner of our back lawn have escaped the mower.
Tree Bumblebee
There’s a bit of a battle going on this morning at the tree bumblebee nest in the corner of our roof. A pair of bees drops to the ground, locked in combat.
I’m guessing that another species of bumblebee is raiding the nest but I don’t get enough of a look at it to identify it. My impression is that it is redder than the tree bumblebee and has just one band, so I’m wondering if it was a species of cuckoo bumblebee.
Must keep my mobile phone handy next time I’m working in the front garden.
Fallow Deer Slots
The Serpentine Lake at Wentworth Castle has silted up over the centuries and been colonised by willows. Last time we were here we met an 80-year old man who started work as a gardener here aged fourteen. A week after his retirement, he returned as a volunteer. He remembered when there was more open water on the Serpentine and, as a boy, he could paddle and swim his way down, taking the occasional egg from the nests of the waterbirds on his way.
A mallard duck leads her brood of young ducklings amongst the dense cover of the willows.
Alongside the tracks of the birds in the soft mud at the water’s edge, there are the slots of fallow deer. I can be sure of my identification: there are no sheep to confuse the issue in this section of the park.
Yellow Flag
11.15 a.m., 70℉, 21℃, storm cloud looking threatening to the west, but we escape the worst of it: The triple flower-heads of Yellow Flag Iris look complicated, but they work perfectly when a bumble bee lands on them. I assume that it would take one of the larger bees to trigger the mechanism and enter the flower, but a smaller bumble bee manages just as easily.
The coots’ nest near the war memorial has been neatly built up since last week and there are at least three chicks.
Back home, I draw some of the visitors to the bird feeders. In additions to the greenfinch, blackbird, starling, blue tit, robin, wood pigeon and house sparrow that I’ve sketched here, we had a male great spotted woodpecker coming to the feeders and a grey squirrel with a very undernourished tail.
Newt Survey
My thanks to Connie, Sofia and Annabelle for doing a bit of pond dipping in our back garden yesterday. They reported a single large water beetle and the odd damselfly larva but they made no mention of tadpoles or young frogs. That might be because of the numbers of newts in the pond.
Final Results
Smooth Newts 22, of which only 5 were female, so in this sample less than a quarter of the population is female. On the occasions that I’ve seen a newt caught by a blackbird I’ve often spotted the bright orange belly of the male.
Little Lost Chicks
The blue tit chicks left the nest box this afternoon while we were out but sadly not all of them made it. As I sat drawing the clover and wood avens, I noticed that one unfortunate chick had ended up in the pond but, better news, I heard, then saw another chick from the bottom of the hedge, right next to me. I packed up immediately and one of the parents soon came down to feed it.
Warbler
A warbler signs its scratchy song from the branches of a willow at the balancing ponds at Alverthorpe Meadows. I record it to check out the song later but on my recording its drowned out by a louder, more melodious blackbird.
The warbler is very plain, so we’re torn between garden warbler and whitethroat. We need to get a closer look . . . and a clearer recording
Foxglove
Of course I’ll draw them when they’re in flower, but I like foxgloves at this stage, with the cluster of flower buds beginning to unfurl.
My company as I draw this on my wild flower patch at the end of the garden includes a female sparrow picking over the wood chip path, a blackbird singing behind me over the hedge, a dunnock giving its hurried trill and a jumping spider checking out my legs. I’m wearing shorts so I can track its progress over my hairy legs without looking up from my drawing, so I miss its daring leap from knee to knee.
The rosette of leaves at the foot of the plant also makes an interesting subject. But I will draw those flowers as they appear over the next few weeks.
June
The first day of meteorological summer seems as good a time as any to try and get back to writing a regular nature diary and the day got off to a good start because we had a pair of bullfinches on the sunflower heart feeders. No sign of young yet, or of the female disappearing as she sits on the eggs.
It’s a different story for the blue tits in nestbox on our patio, they’re at the busiest phase of rearing chicks, the male has a routine of bringing in a small green caterpillar, feeding the young, then taking a break to nibble a sunflower heart from the bird feeder before flying off towards the wood again. During the whole process he and his mate are in a state of wing-quivering excitement, blue crests rising as they look around for any potential danger.