The burnished brass, Diachhrysia chrysitis, is a moth found ‘almost everywhere’ but typically in gardens and in hedges and on rough ground. One of its foodplants is nettle, so it should feel at home in our garden.
I’d describe its background colour as pale straw with perhaps the slightest tint of lime. The front of the head is ginger in contrast to the mottled brown of its other markings. By breaking up the colour like this and breaking up its shape with tufts and a small cockscomb this moth could pass itself off as a broken off piece of plant debris.
Playing dead, as it helpfully remained while I drew this, it would be perfectly disguised amongst summer leaf litter.
Small Magpie
Like the burnished brass, the small magpie, Eurrhypara hortulata, a micro-moth that is 12mm long with a 2cm wingspan, is found in hedges and in gardens. Its larvae will also feed on nettles.
Any Suggestions?
As usual there were a couple of less distinctive moths in the moth-trap that I’ve been unable to identify. Knowing how variable moths can be in size and colour left me struggling to match this moth with any particular species in the book. It’s tempting to lump puzzlers this as all being variations of that most typical of little brown moths, the uncertain.
But having said that it could in fact be the architypical little grey moth, the imaginatively named grey.
Just because I think I won’t be able to identify a moth doesn’t mean that I have to ignore it. This dark little moth with a thin white crescent was about 1cm long.
ALONG WITH TWO white ermines in the moth-trap this morning (and the usual one that got away) I found this unfamiliar species. It wasn’t too difficult to track down in the book thanks to those straw-coloured bands along the edges of its wings, made more conspicuous by a flash of black alongside. There are also two oval or kidney-shaped markings outlined in white and its underwings are conspicuously off white.
It’s the flame shoulder,Ochropleuraplecta,a common resident. In a good year in Yorkshire there will be two generations, although the second will not be so numerous. Further north in Scotland there would be one generation, in southern Britain two.
The Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland warns that it ‘comes to light, when it flies wildly and has the unfortunate habit of occasionally entering the ears of moth recorders near the light!’
This one was flying wildly around its bug box so I released it as soon as I’d sketched and photographed it as best I could.
The little moth in the top left corner of my sketch is a small dusty wave, Idea seriata, which is often found near houses, sometimes on window boxes and potted plants. I think that I’ve seen this indistinct little moth before, resting on the wall by the back door. Some pug moths look very similar.
PEOPLE HAVE said to me that the season is running about a month behind average but this weekend we suddenly caught up by buying some vegetable plants from the garden centre and getting another bed and a half planted out. This is half the available space and as we had previously planted a bed with onion sets and potatoes so we’re now almost there. All we need to do now is watch it grow. And a bit of weeding.
As often happens, only one of our two espalier apples has blossomed. This year it’s the single espalier Golden Spire cooking applewhich has been covered in blossomwhile the double espalier (imagine a capital Y but the the two arms curving out to rise vertically) is either late or it’s taking a year off. My quick watercolour sketch is of the Golden Hornet crab apple (left) which always has plenty of blossom.
After all that work at the weekend I deserved to put my feet up this evening . . . and I owed it to myself to do a drawing just for the fun of doing a drawing.
I’ve been rummaging through old sketchbooks to track down some illustrations for a magazine article which reminded me how much I enjoyed drawing such mundane subjects.
WE’RE A BIT concerned about the great spotted woodpecker that we’ve seen a couple of times by the nestbox by the back door. The blue tits have been busy but as far as we know there are no chicks in the box so far.
This morning the woodpecker perched briefly on the front of the box. It’s not that I want it to go hungry but we did invite the blue tits to nest here by erecting the box so I feel as if we have a duty of care.
We can’t keep an eye on it from dawn to dusk but if we see peck marks appearing around the entrance hole I’ll try getting a strip of metal cut to protect it. Just hope it doesn’t succeed in breaking in at a first attempt.
IN DECEMBER I bought myself a copy of The Allotment Year, fully intending to read the summary of jobs for each month and to put as many as I could into practice. Here we are one quarter of the way into the year and I’ve yet to do that. Perhaps April will be the time to start in earnest.
Thanks to the impetus given by having Paul the gardener coming for several morning sessions we did manage to do some of the structural tasks such as replacing the shed but it’s hard to see what I could have done to advance the planting of the vegetable patch when you look out on today’s blanket of snow.
Typically after snow there’ll be a degree of melting, followed by refreezing but this time the snow stayed powdery enough for the wind to blow it into drifts. Not the 15 feet deep drifts that they’ve had in Cumbria and elsewhere but when you tramp down our garden it’s obvious that in the shelter of our house the snow is shallower than it is further down and I think at least some of this reflects where the wind has scoured away and redeposited the powdery snow.
I can imagine that there would be turbulence in the lee of our house with more slack spots further down the garden, sheltered as it is by hawthorn hedges.
I’m glad I made the decision to start feeding the birds again. There are no small mammal tracks around the bird feeders. The largest footprints are those of the pheasants. Other than my size 13s that is.
MEANWHILE in the meadow all is harmony. Well, that’s not strictly true, it’s more like the tense calm in the build up to the big three-way shoot-out at the climax of a spaghetti western. Two new ponies appeared in the meadow yesterday and you wouldn’t expect Biscuit, the resident, to share and share alike.
They appeared to be grazing happily together but then when they got down to the bottom corner there was some kind of disagreement. Biscuit chased the smallest pony, trying to bite it on its hindquarters. The small pony kicked its hind legs as it galloped away.
This morning the small pony was grazing some distance away from the other two, although when something surprised it at the top end of the field it galloped back to join them.
Biscuit’s plan seems to be to control the water supply. The other newcomer, the pony with a white flash and white socks on its hind legs, had taken a short break from grazing to drink from the plastic bath (it’s turquoise) that serves as their water trough. The small pony also made a move towards the bath.
At this stage Biscuit appeared to notice what was happening and he swaggered towards the bath to take a drink. He’s a stocky horse, especially compared to the smaller pony.
It was rather like the saloon scene in a spaghetti western.
Mole Hills
Good news about those ‘rats’. It looks as though, although we might have the odd sign of rat activity further down the garden, the concentration of excavations around the bird table are the work of moles.
This morning Barbara spotted a pink thing wriggling near one of the little mounds. No, it wasn’t a rat’s tail; it was a large worm, risking its life by coming to the surface in the daylight.
There was soil movement a few inches away from it and something grabbed the worm and attempted to pull it underground.
Somehow the worm escaped and did the equivalent of an earthworm Olympic sprint. It headed off and, I guess in less than a couple of minutes, made off in a straight line to the edge of the patio, a distance of about five feet. It didn’t use the S-shaped wriggling motion that you might associate with an earthworm and instead stretched out in a straight line. A worm in a hurry.
There was more earth movement amongst the mounds but we never glimpsed the creature that was burrowing.
I’m not saying that the omnivorous rat wouldn’t occasionally hunt worms but I feel that it would have been willing to emerge at the surface momentarily to catch this prize specimen. What we saw was precisely the behaviour that you’d expect of a mole. I moved the bird feeders a week or more ago so spilt sunflower hearts are no longer the attraction. I think that the spilt husks and the droppings of birds such as the pheasants must have built up the fertility of the soil here, resulting in a growing population of earthworms, which would attract any mole that happened to be passing through our garden.
And if I saw a series of little mounds anywhere else I wouldn’t hesitate to identify them as mole hills. Rat burrows, I feel, would normally have an entrance somewhere but no holes have appeared in this part of the garden.
Barbara had watched earlier as the small grey cat that visits our garden closely observed the earth movements. Cats traditionally chase rodents but this one, which is young and playful, would equally take an interest in a mole.
A few days ago I watched this cat, which reminds me of Tom from Tom and Jerry, on our lawn having great fun stalking, pouncing and playing with a pigeons feather.
TWO WEEKS ago one or two small mounds of earth appeared near the bird table. I tried to persuade myself that they might be molehills but I realised that it was more likely that they were the work of brown rats attracted to the quantities of sunflower hearts spilt by the birds that use the feeders.
We’ve stopped feeding which is a shame as it’s been such a pleasure to see the regular goldfinches, greenfinches, blue tits, great tits, house sparrows and siskins, up to 20 of the latter at a time.
Am I making a mountain of a problem out of molehill? A hole has also appeared beneath the compost bin and that must be the work of a rodent. Our neighbours report that the rats have actually nibbled holes to get into their compost bins. They’ve put a couple of baiting boxes down.
I’m going to move our compost bin to a more open position. Hope they’ll get the message and move on.
Lost Pond
More bad wildlife gardening news; our neighbours have filled in the pond in the corner by the hedge as their garden has to accomodate a growing number of young children. When our previous neighbours originally put in this pond almost 30 years ago I was convinced that this was too shady a site for a healthy pond. I was wrong because the pond was always more popular with the frogs than ours was, despite all my efforts to create the perfect habitat.
I’m really hoping that all the local frogs weren’t hibernating in the pond when it was removed. It’s the first day of spring today and I’m hoping that any returning frogs will hop along to my pond when they find their favourite spot has been destroyed.
THE END of summer; I think that the time’s right for cutting back the small meadow area at the end of the garden. There are a few scarlet poppies but most of the flowers are over now and should have set seed.
As I empty the trimmings on the compost heap, a Robin comes so close to me that I could reach out and touch it. There are two of them, equally tame, one hopping around where I’ve mown, the other near the shed. For the moment they seem to be sharing the garden in peace.
But inevitably cutting back this grassroot jungle has left one or two creatures homeless.
I try to mow the grass in sequence of swathes that will allow frogs and toads to gradually retreat towards the hedge as I progress. I get a brief glimpse of something hopping away near the log pile but I’m afraid that a couple of large slugs aren’t so lucky. I know they’re a traditional gardener’s ‘enemy’ but I’d have rescued them if I’d spotted them first.
I can see what appear to be vole runs in the turf and I notice two tiny newts, wriggling through the debris looking for cover in crevices in the damp earth. I manage to carefully rescue one and release it under the cover of the hedge, near next door’s pond.
Hope the Robin doesn’t spot it as it hops around under the hedge.
7.30 am; I SAW a Grey Heron flying unusually low over the roof tops and it was only 5 or 10 minutes later that I realised that it was flying so low because it was coming in to land at the edge of our garden pond; a juvenile, still in streaky grey plumage.
It soon flew off when it saw use looking at it. Hope it didn’t eat too many of our frogs and newts during its visit.
A minute later an equally infrequent visitor to our garden had taken its place by the pond; a Grey Wagtail bobbed and pecked around the pond edge.
I DON’T FEEL so bad about the lacklustre performance of the vegetables in our garden when I hear that farmers and growers are having exactly the same problems; cool, waterlogged soils and, even for those growing under glass, low levels of light. Supermarkets are having to order vegetables from abroad to make up for the lack of homegrown product.
But whatever the weather there’s going to be some vegetable that finds the weather suits it. Our leeks and onions which would have suffered in a drought are doing reasonably well but our beans and courgettes are taking their time to get established. Hopefully they’ll catch up as the season progresses.
Ironically this year I decided to try installing a watering system for the greenhouse so that when we go away our neighbour won’t need to come around to water. I didn’t manage to set it up, being short of a particular type of hose connector but, as it happened, I wouldn’t have needed it as when we were away in the Lake District last week the sun probably appeared for only a few hours during the whole 5 day period then the day after we returned their was a month’s worth of rain in a day.
The sunken path in the greenhouse filled up with water and the watering cans ended up floating around. Even the raised bed which the buckets of tomatoes stand on was an inch or two deep in water.
The burnished brass, Diachhrysia chrysitis, is a moth found ‘almost everywhere’ but typically in gardens and in hedges and on rough ground. One of its foodplants is nettle, so it should feel at home in our garden.
The front of the head is ginger in contrast to the mottled brown of its other markings. By breaking up the colour like this and breaking up its shape with tufts and a small cockscomb this moth could pass itself off as a broken off piece of plant debris.
Like the burnished brass, the small magpie, Eurrhypara hortulata, a micro-moth that is 12mm long with a 2cm wingspan, is found in hedges and in gardens. Its larvae will also feed on nettles.
As usual there were a couple of less distinctive moths in the moth-trap that I’ve been unable to identify. Knowing how variable moths can be in size and colour left me struggling to match this moth with any particular species in the book. It’s tempting to lump puzzlers this as all being variations of that most typical of little brown moths, the uncertain.
Just because I think I won’t be able to identify a moth doesn’t mean that I have to ignore it. This dark little moth with a thin white crescent was about 1cm long.
