Category: Insects

Micro Moth

Colour too much towards the golden in this photograph. It’s more the washed out pale brown of a dried leaf or grass stem. x9 Olympus Tough super-macro setting.

THIS MICRO MOTH lives up to its name as it’s just 11 millimetres in length. It’s the kind of little brown moth that my mum always used to identify as a ‘clothes moth’ but I guess that this one had a vegetarian diet as a caterpillar. There aren’t as many woolly jumpers available in these days of acrylic yarns, so my mum’s old adversary might now be an endangered species. It certainly would be if she had anything to do with it.

I’ve got no intention of attempting to identify such as nondescript moth (although there is now a new field guide, illustrated by Richard Lewington, so that has become at least a possibility) but because I can’t come up with a name that doesn’t mean that I can’t take a closer look at it. By the way, I found it lying dead on the coffee table, so no clues to its natural habitat; garden, woodland, meadow or even pond perhaps.

It isn’t so nondescript if you’re able to zoom in closer. I’ve taken these photographs using my Traveler USB microscope (except for the macro photograph, left).

There’s so much about this moth that reminds me an owl, although its beady eyes and the beak-like appearance of its proboscis (right) remind me more of a frigate bird!

Actually that ‘beak’ has an extra twist at the end; its more like one of those ‘blowout’ party popper novelties.

This moth might be the original little brown job but switch on the LED light of my microscope and its wings glitter like a costume in a West End musical.

The feathery edges of the wings remind me of the soft edges of an owl’s wing feather but I can’t believe that the moth would need them for the same reason; to soften the sound of its wingbeats. Perhaps having those feathery extensions swishing away behind it as it flies might to some small extent muffle the sonar echo that a bat relies on to locate its prey.

Zooming in even closer, using the 60x setting on the microscope, it’s possible to see the individual scales, like tiles on the moth’s wing.

The depth of field at this magnification makes it impossible for me to get both the wing and its feathery margin in focus and when I zoom in to 200x it’s even more difficult however this blurry image (right) does pick out some of the detail on the scales. They appear to have parallel ribbing or surface markings.

Lepidoptera, the order of insects that butterflies and moths belong to, is from the Greek lepid pteron, meaning ‘scale wing’.

Links: Richard Lewington, illustrator of ‘more than 1,100 superbly detailed artworks’ drawn for The Field Guide to the Micro Moths of Great Britain and Ireland, published by British Wildlife Publishing

Ringlet Triangle

 Common Red Poppy, Papaver rhoeas
Dip pen, Indian ink & watercolour 

4.45 pm: THREE SMOKY BROWN butterflies fly around our little sun-trap of a meadow, two of them are chasing each other. They’re all fresh-looking, as if recently emerged and don’t look as if they were out in the torrential rain a week ago.

My first thought is that they’re Meadow Browns and that would be appropriate as the first butterfly to appear while I’m drawing in my newly revamped meadow area but these are Ringlets.

They’re darker than Meadow Browns, and slightly, very slightly, smaller. The name refers to the ringed eye-spots on the wings but the feature that registered with me was the light-coloured margin. I noticed this along the rear edge of the hind-wing but it fringes the sides of both wings too.

The trailing edge of the Ringlet’s hind-wing is smooth rather than scalloped (as it is in the Meadow Brown). This might sound like a subtle difference but it changes the character, the jizz, of the butterfly.

Meadow Brown

A Song of Summer

It’s great to have my own little meadow area, even though it’s so small; a 7 foot triangle sown with a meadow mix, with a strip of imported (from North Yorkshire) meadow turf across one end. I can pop down there with my canvas chair and just start drawing.

What I miss though is the meadow soundtrack; nothing but the rustle of leaves, the hum of insects, the call of birds. That would be lovely; that kind of peace has always meant a lot to me. It’s one of the reasons that we head to the Lake District for a break, rather than a vibrant resort such as Blackpool. But this little wedge of meadow is in semi-detached suburban garden so the soundtrack is dominated by next door’s kids screaming. Heigh ho.

Okay, I’ll admit that they are screaming happily except when it comes, as it inevitably does as the excitement builds, to injury time! Boisterous children’s play has long been a part of the song of summer;

Whenas the rye reach to the chin,
And chop-cherry, chop-cherry ripe within,
Straw berries swimming in the cream,
And schoolboys playing in the stream

George Peel, The Old Wives’ Tale, 1595
(used by Benjamin Britten in his Spring Symphony)

Bramble Sawfly

THIS SAWFLY was crawling up the side of our car when we called at my mum’s this morning. Her garden is well stocked with shrubs, herbs and mature trees and there’s a lot of blossom about at the moment, which must attract plenty of insects.

At first glance I thought that it was some kind of beetle, then when I took a closer look at the head and antennae I guessed at some kind of hunting wasp but Michael Chinery’s Collins Guide to the Insects of Britain and Western Europe includes a clear illustration of this species; Arge cyanocrocea, a sawfly whose larvae feed on bramble. It’s about 1 centimetre in length.

In Greek mythology Arge was a huntress. ‘Cyanocrocea‘ means ‘greenish blue/yellow’ which I guess refers to the blue sheen on the thorax and the yellow abdomen. I’d assumed that the blue was just a reflection so I’ve greyed it in my drawing but I have included a red spot on the front right leg which I now realise is the red of the car seen through a raindrop. Which demonstrates the perils of drawing from a photograph!

It was raining and we were in a hurry so I took a few photographs which I decided to draw from. That’s my way of really looking at new species before I reach for the book to try to identify it. Our bright red car didn’t make the best background and I couldn’t make out the shape of the abdomen because of the dark smudge that is part of the this sawfly’s wing pattern, so I’ve added a small sketch from the illustration in the field guide to show the hidden shape. Sawflies lack a ‘wasp-waist’.

You can see from the photograph that I’ve started my drawing with the head then gone out of proportion, going a little too large, when I came to the wings. Those round blobs on its thorax are droplets of rain.

Most female sawflies have saw-like ovipositors which they use to lay their eggs in plants and most sawfly larvae resemble the caterpillars of moths and butterflies. The field guide says that Arge cyoncrocea is often seen on umbellifers and the adults are about from May to July. In 1986 it was described by Chinery as ‘fairly common but confined to the southern half of Britain’.

Horntail at Braemar

The most spectacular sawfly I ever encountered was a ‘Wood Wasp’, also known as the Horntail, Urocerus gigas, which landed on our Standard Vanguard Estate windscreen as we stopped in a layby in the pine forest near Braemar in August 1960, when I was nine years old. I was so impressed by this insect that I sketched it in my Eagle diary. Later my dad got one of the secretaries in the typing pool at the Coal Board to type a letter I’d written for me send to the magazine Young Naturalist which I’d started reading that summer.

My dad suggested that we head the letter ‘HORNET?’ but the editor of the magazine was able to identify it from our description as a ‘Wood Wasp’ (which unlike the Hornet, has no wasp-waist).

The First Wildlife Talkie?

By coincidence, it was in 1960 that Gerald Thompson of the University of Oxford Forestry Department was working out how he could set about making a film of the Alder wood wasp and its parasites. This lead to him setting up the influential Oxford Scientific Films unit.

He was inspired by the work of F. Percy Smith who in 1931 made a film in the Secrets of Nature for British Gaumont Instructional Films called War in Woods, about the life of the Horntail or Conifer Wood Wasp. According to Thompson, in interviews filmed in 1998/99, this wood wasp film, narrated by Dr R. Neil Chrystal, ‘was the first science film with a soundtrack shown in the cinema’. Dr Neil was Thompson’s predecessor at what was then the Imperial Forestry Institute at the University of Oxford,

Thompson specifically refers to a special showing at the Super Cinema in Oxford so it’s not 100% clear that he considered this the first wildlife talkie ever, but that appears to be what he believed.

Royal Deeside

Also that year, near Balmoral, we saw a family riding horses across a heathy slope beside the road. Our immediate reaction was that this was the royal family, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, but my parents decided that it probably wasn’t them on the grounds that it’s so unlikely that you’d ever get to see the royal family out riding. But of course in the summer of 1960 if you were driving past the Balmoral Estate at the right time, you would have seen them.

Links: Gerald Thompson interview at WildFilmHistory.org includes link to a PDF transcription of the interview.
Secrets of Nature; War in the Woods, 1931, at British Pathé

Brockadale

AFTER SO many Robin Hood talks during the past two days we’re here on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society field meeting at a place which has long been associated with the outlaw. At the start of The Little Gest Robin Hood stands leaning against a tree in Barnsdale Forest. The forest was extensive and stretched northwards from the borders of Sherwood, so which part of Barnsdale did the ballad writers have in mind?

As at the start of the story Robin tells Little John, William Scarlock and Much to ‘go up to Sayles’ to scan the Great North Road for a ‘dinner guest’ (one who will subsequently be asked to pay!) they must be down here in Brockadale. Sayles is an outcrop overlooking the valley, now marked on the map as Sayles Plantation. Going back as far as 1841, iron age earthworks at Sayles were shown on the Ordnance Survey map as ‘Castle Hills’. Castle Hill is surrounded by several tower-like crags so it could have served as a look-out post and a defensible position for a band of archers.

Castle Hill was excavated a few years ago prior to an extension of quarrying operations. If the archaeologists discovered Robin’s hidden booty, they kept quiet about it.

Now managed, in part, as a Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve, Brockadale straddles the borders of North and West Yorkshire.

Damsons

Chapel Lane, Little Smeaton, 10 a.m.

JULY IS the middle of our summer but in the hedgerows there’s a feeling that autumn isn’t too far away. Hawthorn berries are beginning to appear – still green at the moment – but these damsons by the lay-by are well on their way to being ripe.

I’d always assumed that the ‘brock’ in Brockadale referred to the badger but apparently it means ‘broken dale’; the slopes are broken by craggy outcrops of magnesian limestone. The name might refer to quarrying on the valley slopes.

Perforate St John’s Wort (note the little ‘perforations’ when you hold a leaf up to the light, left) was used to treat wounds in Robin Hood’s day by the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, who had a preceptory at Newland, near Wakefield, and were Robert Hode’s close neighbours in the town on Warrengate, where Robin and the Hospitallers both held property.

The chalky soil that makes the limestone meadows so refreshingly different to the buttercup meadows that I’m so familiar with elsewhere on the coal measures and gritstone country of West Yorkshire.

Burnet Moths

This morning there are hundreds of 6-spot burnet moths about, some of them basking or feeding on the flowers of scabious and clustered bellflower.

Marbled White

There are also a few marbled white butterflies around today, mainly basking on a plant by the outcrop (top picture).

Sheep and cattle graze in the field below. Grazing is an essential part of the management of the grasslands, helping prevent bushes taking over and shading out the limestone meadow flowers.

Britain Revisited

Most of these drawings were made in Brockadale in July 2009. I was revisiting the east of England locations that I first drawn in July 1979 while working on my Richard Bell’s Britain sketchbook for Collins. There were so many places to revisit during July that I had to find some way of dealing with the rain. I took a pop-up shelter that I’d bought at Netto and set it up overlooking Brockadale (top picture).

I got some funny looks from passing dog walkers but at least I was able to work on my drawings most of the time except when the wind blew the rain straight down the valley and into my tent. I then zipped up the opening of the shelter and ate my picnic lunch snug in my shelter perched on the outcrop, as the rain battered against the canvas.

Winter Gnat

This little insect, shown here 4 or 5 times life size, must have flown into a carrier bag I was carrying as we walked back from town across the park and got squashed. My microscope reveals that it’s a Winter Gnat, a two-winged fly that is conspicuous at this time of year when there are so few insects about. You seen them dancing in swarms in damp grassy places especially in the late afternoon, which was when I unwittingly trapped this one.

This seems to be a female because it has a curved dagger-end to its thorax which I guess is the ovipositor.

A Kind of Therapy

We had the phone call at 5.15 a.m. to say that Barbara’s mum Betty had died peacefully in her sleep at the Hospice. Rather than sit in a heap, we’ve worked our way through the day by gently getting on with the various tasks we’re obliged to do, such are registering her death.

Betty has been a largely unseen presence in my online diary for the last 12 years. There are dozens of drawings of the Hawthorns and the Ash log at the end of her garden. I’ve been asked to say a few words about her at the funeral. She combined a disarming innocence with a twinkle mischief so I want to get the tone just right between her sense of fun and the sadness and sense of loss we feel. And that inevitable feeling ‘I wish that I’d asked her more about her early life’.

School Museums

As we come out of the back entrance of the Registry Office on Northgate, Wakefield, we pass this unprepossessing 1960s prefab-style building which takes me back to my first inkling that I wanted to publish my natural history sketchbooks as an illustration student in the early 1970s. This is where I came because at that time it was the West Riding School Museum’s Service. Eric Woodward the director must have got fed up of seeing me but he patiently encouraged me as my idea for a Natural History of Wakefield grew from a wall chart to a booklet to facsimile sketchbook with fold-out maps, posters and prehistoric panoramas; a kind of History of the Entire Planet, which just happened to be centred on Wakefield.

The School Museums was just one inspiration for me. They sent out stout wooden boxes on loan which opened up to reveal little displays of historical objects, model dinosaurs, scale models of buildings and so on. I liked that idea of a carefully made Box ofDelights which goes out into the world with an informative display and some inspiring objects that you can examine hands-on.

As a college project I worked on a display about spiders and their webs which could be sent out to a school like a giant-sized pack of cards and slotted together. It never got as far as being added to the School Museums collection but I don’t think the materials – mounting card with transparent perspex for the step-by-steps of how a web is made – would have survived the rough-and-tumble of the classroom.

Chris Woffenden e-mailed me. He sums up how I felt when I saw this former creative hub converted to its present mundane purpose as a council storeroom:

Small world – I was a Graphic Designer/Illustrator there in the 80’s. Eric Woodward was a great encouragement to us all – whether drawing or model making etc. I grew up inspired by the delivery of those wooden boxes as a child at school in the 70’s – never thought I would work there. It was a sad day when it closed down – an even sadder one for the children at school at the moment that don’t know what they are missing.