The woodland walk at RHS Harlow Carr this afternoon.
Woodland Walk
Category: Habitats
Buff Ermine
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
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.
Down in the 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.
Moth
Prominent moths have tufts emerging from between the wings and there’s also a tail tuft, just visible in my drawing. This moth, caught in the moth trap a couple of nights ago (and released the next day) didn’t have feathery antennae so it’s most likely to be a female.
So far I haven’t narrowed it down to a particular species. To me it’s closest to the iron prominent.
It’s about 1.5 cm long.
Bee Orchid, Date Palm
Bee orchid, date palm and the laburnum arch at Brodsworth Hall this morning.
Thanks to the English Heritage garden staff for pointing out the bee orchid which were growing on a south-facing grassy bank, left un-mown, alongside the formal beds and lawns.
The date palm grows in the shelter of the sunken gardens, at the sunnier end.
Every Flower Counts
In this year’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ survey at the end of ‘No Mow May’ I’ve got double the amount of germander speedwell flowers that I counted last year.
During the time it took to count the 167 speedwell flowers, I saw one pollinator, a common summer migrant hoverfly, Eupeodes corollae. This is looks like the male.
Plant Life informs me:
Your nectar sugar could support…
14 honeybee workers for a day
Plant Life
4 hour-long foraging flight for an adult bumblebee
1 adult bumblebees to fly for a day
Bird Life
Middlestown, 10.20 am:Forty or more starlings wheel about overhead and a female blackbird with food in her beak calls in alarm. Possible dangers for her chicks include a black cat which has just walked into the hedgerow and a crow keeping watch from the roof of the health centre.
The shoppers and the mating sparrows were drawn at Birstall.
Nuthatch Nest
We watch a pair of nuthatches feeding their chicks in a nest hole high up in a willow. They arrive with food every five or ten minutes and usually collect a faecal sack which they swoop down amongst the shrubs away from the nest to dispose of.
The female is noticeably lighter and more silver grey than the male which has a slate grey back. At one stage, after looking into the hole briefly, she pauses motionless on the right hand edge of the tree near the hole, facing downwards, with an item of food (perhaps a. It turns out that the male was in the nest hole and when he pops out a minute or two later with a faecal sack in his beak, she goes in.
Our friends John and Heather Gardner have been following progress on this nest watching the parent birds carefully blocking the natural cavity in the willow with beakfuls of mud. At this stage of a the process as soon as the nuthatches left the tree a blue tit would fly in the to investigate the hole. The nuthatches have seen off the competition.
Nuthatches nested in the same cavity last year but the mud barrier needed replacing after the winter.
Above the nest hole a hoof fungus projects like a canopy over a door.
Wintersett in May
Sessile oak, dandelion, timothy grass, plantain, yellow flag, hawthorn blossom and seeding willow catkins at Wintersett Reservoir this morning.