This southern hawker dragonfly, Aeshna cyanea, was hawking around by a sheltered path through the woodland at RHS Harlow Carr Gardens but obligingly perched on a rhododendron leaf, allowing us to photograph it. This is a male, distinguished by the three blue-spotted segments at the tip of its abdomen.
A nuthatch calls insistently as we take the path behind the Doric Temple.
These twisted trunks remind me of old olive trees, but I think that they’re Rhododendrons.
Giant Sequoia bark has a spongy texture, which acts as insulation in forest fires. Much as I like sequoias, I’m sorry to hear that large plantations of them are being planted on some Welsh hillsides: this might be an efficient way of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere but it won’t do a lot for another key environmental problem, the loss of biodiversity.
No prizes for guessing that this is a red-tailed bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius, but it’s different to a regular worker, as this is a male, with a yellow collar and cap and a foxy-coloured ‘tail’ that’s more orange-red than scarlet. On a dull afternoon at Wrenthorpe on Friday, it was doing what drones do best, hanging around taking a break on our friends’ herbaceous border alongside another equally unmotivated male.
In most hoverflies you can tell which is the male by looking at the eyes: in males there’s no gap between them, presumably an adaptation because the males spend so much time hovering, keeping an eye out for females or rival males. Helophilus hoverflies are different: the male does have a gap between the eyes, so you have to look at the tip of the abdomen. In the female this is pointed while in the male its rounded off with a genital capsule.
So this is a male Helophilus pendulus, a species name that translates as ‘pendent sun-lover’, appropriate as in summer male hoverflies typically hover, more or less on the spot, as if suspended by an invisible thread.
At Cannon Hall garden centre, this bumblebee was busy visiting the flowers of a salvia but instead of entering the flower in the usual way it was using the back entrance, checking out those holes nibbled in the back of the flower and bypassing the stamens and stigmas. It occasionally paused, apparently to do a bit of nibbling itself, perhaps to enlarge an existing hole or start another.
Grapevine
At Hilary’s Village Store in Cawthorne we sit under a vine laden with bunches of small green grapes. We’re told that this vine is a cutting from a desert grape grown in a large south-facing greenhouse in Scotland. There the grapes were edible – although they were best eaten outside in the garden so that you could spit out the seeds – but here, outside and north-facing, they’re not going to ripen enough.
However we didn’t come here for the grapes, in a village tea garden it had to be cream scones with our lattes.
After yesterday’s sun, this morning was overcast and cool enough for this male gatekeeper to stay perched on a bramble leaf as we photographed it. Gatekeepers are named because the males, distinguished by the dark band of scent glands on their forewings, were often seen patrolling their territory at the entrance to a wood.
Since we first started visiting St Aidan’s RSPB reserve a couple of years ago the main track along the foot of the hill has matured from what you might have called open scrub to something a little closer to woodland edge habitat. The gatekeepers appreciate that but perhaps it doesn’t suit the kestrel that was often seen hovering over this stretch, or the stonechat, which we saw on almost every visit, perching on top of a post. Today the posts have disappeared amongst the long grasses and willow bushes.
The reserve proved to be a good place to try out the Zeiss Victory SF 8×32 binoculars that I’ve got on a 48-hour loan. I was able to focus on the butterfly from as little as about seven feet away and see far more detail than I could with the unaided eye.
These common blue damselflies were clasping each other in tandem amongst the grasses.
The 8x32s have a much wider field of view than my regular pocket-sized 8x20s, so I found could quickly focus on any bird: a common tern diving, a linnet perching at the edge of the reedbed and, the most spectacular, a bittern flying high down the valley in the direction of Fairburn Ings.
Buzzard and stonechat at St Aidan’s on a previous visit.
Back home, as I reluctantly prepared to pack away the 8x32s for the courier to collect tomorrow, I was able to use them one last time as a buzzard performed a lap of honour, circling over the meadow.
On Wednesday evening, I found this dor beetle lying on its back on the tiles near the back door, kicking its legs in a futile attempt to turn itself upright again. I rescued it and released it on the patio. They’re attracted to light so it may have flown in and made a crash landing when it collided with a cupboard door.
Working in pairs, the adults bury dung for their larvae to feed on.
This looks very like the species Geotrupes stercorarius except for the antennae. According to George McGavin in the RSPB Wildlife of Britain:
the club-ended antennae have 11 segments but are not elbowed”
George McGavin, RSPB Wildlife of Britain, The Definitive Visual Guide
These were elbowed. The beetle was almost an inch long, perhaps 2 centimetres. It was flattened in cross-section, compared to, say, a similar-sized bumblebee.
These beetles are often infested with mites, hence one old name ‘The Lousy Watchman’. I didn’t see any mites on this individual but it had been infected with a fungus and some tiny sporangia were growing from its left jaw and its mouthparts. Picking up spores must be a occupational hazard for a beetle that specialises in digging.
Drawn in Adobe Fresco with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, using the ‘Natural Inker’ pen and the ‘Color fill’ brush.
This pellucid fly, also known as the pellucid hoverfly, obligingly sat on an umbel of hogweed as we photographed it. It’s one of Britain’s largest flies so although I hadn’t brought my DSLR and macro lens, it still made a good subject for my iPhone.
It’s larval stage lives in the nests of bees and wasps, scavenging its way through waste products but also turning carnivore eating the larvae of its hosts.
This is our first visit to the High Peak since before lockdown and we’re on our regular circular walk between Hope and Castleton.
We see are a couple of fresh-looking red admirals, half a dozen meadow browns and a blue dragonfly with a greenish thorax hawking back a forth over a little backwater pool on the bend of this stream, Peakshole Water, downstream from Castleton.
But it wasn’t just us watching insects, unknown to me as a photographed this valerian further downstream at Hope, the insects were watching us. When I downloaded the photograph I spotted this wasp, which must have been hovering within a couple of feet of me, with a ‘what are you doing?’ expression on its face. So rather like the lamb I attempted to photograph stealthily earlier on.
We’re walking rather than sitting and sketching, but I do get a chance to try out my new pen, a Lamy nexx an EF nib, as we wait for lunch at the Castle Inn.
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.
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.
With ‘No Mow May’ drawing to a close, it’s time to count the flowers that have sprung up on our front lawn. I throw a small chunk of wood over my shoulder to randomly select my square metre sample.
Results: 8 daisies, 2 common mouse-ear and 75 germander speedwell flowers.
Plantlife calculate that, taking this as an average for my 14.4 square metre lawn, the flowers are producing 1.7 milligrams of nectar per square metre, enough to support 2 bees across the entire lawn.
Let’s hope that I can improve on that with next year’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ survey.
