Category: Habitats

Creature Count

Peppered moth
Peppered moth
Skipper (large skipper?)
Common Swift
Elephant Hawk Moth
The Flame
Caddis fly
Heart and Dart
Magpie, 6.16 a.m.
Woodpigeon
Robin
Goldfinch
House sparrow
Great tit
Blue tit
Starling
Greenfinch
Male smooth newt

Our first attempt at the Great Yorkshire Creature Count got off to a good start with four elephant hawkmoths in the moth trap this morning, along with peppered moth, flame and heart and dart. I left the box wedged right up against the hedge under the crab apple so that they don’t get picked off by the birds.

I set up the trail cam on the bird table this morning but caught only the regular visitors.

Smooth newts are on the list of creatures that the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust would like us to count, so I did a bit of pond dipping. While I was at it, I skimmed off the duckweed and started taking out the slimy algae that has built up and sunk down into the pond, but this was where most of the newts were hunkered down, so I’ll leave that for another day.

Results

Woodpigeon, dunnock, starling, bullfinch, chaffinch, magpie, greenfinch
Butterfly: Large skipper
Moths (UV trap): peppered moth, common swift, elephant hawkmoth, the flame, heart and dart

I know a lot of the species that the YWT Creature Count is asking use monitor are present but they didn’t show up on the day and I didn’t go digging about to find them.

I tried an overnight trail cam but whatever triggered it once in the middle of the night didn’t show up in the video clip.

Link

Yorkshire Wildlife Trust

Air Bee & Bee

A swarm of several hundred honey bees arrived late afternoon yesterday and found a cavity by the bathroom sink waste pipe. A few found their way into the bathroom.

We phoned a beekeeper who offered to come and remove them, using a one-way trap that would lead them out into a hive where eventually the queen would follow them, always the last one out. If we covered every bee-sized hole in the bathroom, we’d be safe using it. As honey bees can squeeze through a 6mm hole that involved a lot of masking tapes, scrunched up newspaper and one strip of cardboard under the sink.

A few workers found their way into the back bedroom yesterday but unfortunately most of them didn’t survive until this morning, when I released them.

Today though they’ve moved on. There was a bit of activity at breakfast time but nothing like when they arrived and we saw nothing all day. In the afternoon I kept watch for a full fifteen minutes, just to check we hadn’t missed them.

The beekeeper advised us to fill the cavity as soon as possible, using steel wool or aluminium foil and also to block any alternative holes they might use. Our group might have been the scouts and the main swarm might arrive later. It’s amazing how many drilled holes for aerial cables and former pipe fittings we spotted.

Yorkshire Fog

Yorkshire fog sketchbook page

Yorkshire fog and cat’s ear growing around the pond.

Barbara spotted the remains of a kill by the hedge amongst the border plants: the remains of a juvenile goldfinch, only the wings and legs and a scattering of breast feathers remained. A brown long-haired cat that visits our garden and sits in wait by the bird table is the number one suspect as we haven’t spotted sparrowhawks swooping into the garden for a few months.

sketching by the pond

Hoverflies in the Herbage

herbage

Hemlock water-dropwort grows amongst curled dock and nettle alongside the car park at Newmillerdam. A holly blue butterfly rests on the hemlock while hoverflies visit the flowers of creeping buttercup, occasionally chasing each other around. A micro moth resting on a buttercup looks, at first glance, like a tiny fragment of plant debris.

High Batts

Sawfly, bee-fly and hoverfly, dame’s violet, orchid, crosswort, briar rose and goutweed, orange rust and King Alfred’s Cakes fungus, on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society field meeting at High Batts nature reserve this morning.

High Batts isn’t far from Lightwater Valley, north of Ripon. Visiting this reserve adjacent to a working quarry is normally by arrangement only but next month they’re holding an open day.

Spider

spider

I wonder if this spider, photographed on our bedroom window yesterday, is one of the spiderlings, now grown up, that we spotted in a cluster by the front door recently.

Published
Categorized as Urban Tagged

Buff Ermine

garden wildlife

When I’m gardening I keep my Olympus Tough in my pocket, with LED macro diffuser fitted. These were drawn from some recent photographs.

Bumblebees

bumblebee sketches

Three approaches to foraging on the herb bed this afternoon: the small double ochre-striped ones tackle the thyme on fast forward, the larger all-ochre thorax bumblebee makes a more thorough job of the chives flowers while the small red-tailed bumblebee – possibly a drone – seems to be settling down for the night on its chive flower.

sketching bumblebees

Down in the Meadow

meadow

My small patch of plants for pollinators now looks a bit more like my idea of a wild flower meadow since we cut back the grasses and chicory and dug out their creeping rhizomes.

The chicory used to swamp everything else but now we’ve got creeping buttercup and dog daisy plus a few flowerheads of red clove, with teasel, foxglove and marjoram yet to come into flower. False oat and cocksfoot grass are so far the tallest plants but they’ll soon be overtaken by the teasels.