I thought that I’d give my laidback lepidopterist friend Roger a bit of a challenge with his birthday card this year. This is going to be difficult if you’re not familiar with British butterflies, so answers at the foot of this post.
And if that isn’t enough here are four bonus species – all different species of a group of small butterflies that hold their forewings at an angle above their hindwings, so they look a bit moth-like.
Answers
Top cartoon, back row, left to right: Red Admiral, Purple Hairstreak, Painted Lady Front row: Small Tortoiseshell, Purple Emperor, Comma, Small Copper
Bonus species, left to right: Large Skipper, Small Skipper, Dingy Skipper, Essex Skipper (and yes, as Roger pointed out, Dagenham is no longer in Essex, it became a part of Greater London in 1965!)
I didn’t get around to including the Chequered Skipper, shame about that.
My friend John Gardner, celebrating his birthday today, has built up an impressive list by running an ultra-violet light moth trap in his garden. Hopefully these reprobates haven’t turned up.
Moths have a bad name in my brother Bill’s childhood writing. He wrote this damming indictment aged six and it’s survived in a school exercise book from his infant school days.
We all know that moths are the unsung nightshift of ecosystem services, busy pollinating and recycling while we sleep, so these days it’s not often that one of them, in this case the humble clothes moth, gets to play the pantomime villain.
Another illustration for the PG-rated children’s storybook Yes it is, or OH NO IT ISN’T! in this case. Manic Moth: “Oh! Yes it IS!!!!“
I thought that I’d nailed it and created a moth that looked as scary as Nosferatu the Vampire but coming back to it he’s more closely related to Peter Firmin’s Nogbad the Bad. I think it’s to do with the way he walks, which would work well as a cut-out animation.
This common plume moth, Emmelina monodactyla, was resting on the garage door. Despite appearances ant its ‘monodactyla‘ species name, it does have the usual two pairs of wings but it rests with them tightly rolled. Also tucked in are its long rear legs, held lengthwise alongside its abdomen.
Common plume caterpillars feed on bindweed. The adults are attracted to ivy and sallow blossom and, later in the year, to ripe blackberries.
Because of the wet autumn and winter, I’ve only just cut the long shoots off our Golden Hornet crab apple. Recycling some twine from a wigwam that I’d made for climbing plants last year, I’ve tied them into bundles to create a habitat which I’m hoping might attract solitary bees, beetles or other invertebrates.
I would have done the same if I’d got around to cutting back the long shoots on the rowan in the front garden too but a pair of blue tits are showing a lot of interest in the nestbox there, so I’ll leave that job until the autumn.
We cut the Joan Jay autumn-fruiting raspberry canes down to 18 inches last autumn and now in spring they can be cut right down to two or three inches, as they flower on new growth. I’ve cut them in half to produce a couple of bundles, one of which I’ve inserted into a cavity between the rocks at the edge of the raised bed.
Robin’s pincushion growing on wild rose in the hedge along the Balk, Netherton. It is caused by the gall wasp Diplolepis rosae, which lays its eggs in a bud in springtime. The larvae develop in chambers in the gall and the next generation of gall wasps will emerge in the spring, almost all of them females. Males of this species are very rare but the females can lay fertile eggs without mating.
It’s also known as the bedeguar gall, from a French name which is derived from a Persian word meaning ‘brought by the wind’.
Yesterday, after taking out a few weeds, I swept sand into the cracks between the paving slabs by the front door. Already this morning, there are signs of activity. Could these be tracks left by an insect? Or a woodlouse?
Something has been active in the corner. I didn’t notice this tiny snail shell until I spotted in the photograph. It might have been dislodged from a crevice yesterday but I suspect that it’s been introduced along with the sand.
The sand is from Denmark. The grains are small, mostly less than a millimetre, and well-rounded, so perhaps this is windblown sand from a former dune system. Denmark has extensive dunes along its western, North Sea, coast and, further inland, extensive areas of glacial sand and gravel.
In my photograph, the glassy grains are quartz and I think that the larger, fleshy-looking ochre fragments are feldspar.
Danish sand: Dansand No Grow Block Paving Sand
Doorstep Bio-blitz
Garden snail
The seven species that I disturbed as I weeded around the paving stones yesterday come from seven different families, four classes and three phyla, so, within inches of our front door, we have an annelid worm, a gastropod mollusc, an isopod crustacean and a social insect.
I disturbed a large ant as I swept the driveway, which I guessed was a queen. The queen disposes of her wings after her nuptial flight, then sets about finding a suitable site – such as here under the paving stones – to start her colony.
Coincidentally, later, a few yards away, I spotted a worker ant carrying a single transparent wing, which looked like one that had been discarded by a queen.
Making a start on the pen drawing, watercolour to follow.
I’m going back to pen and watercolour. I was looking at the sketch that I made in 1972 for my Greenhouse Mural, which I featured in my previous post. The drawing is rather messy and the media rather mixed – dip pen, watercolour and a touch of acrylic – and is applied with more enthusiasm than skill but the sketch has a lot of life in it. Coming back to it after over forty years, I can remember the exhilaration of the challenge that I’d been presented with.
This month’s Wild Yorkshire nature diary in the Dalesman.
After a year of practicing drawing on my iPad I’ve got to the stage where I can illustrate my Dalesman magazine articles with digital versions of my regular drawings, so I think it’s good time go back to traditional media and try to apply what I’ve learnt.
Meadow photographed in the walled garden at Nostell, as were the hoverfly, bumble bee and vapourer moth caterpillar. The other insects were photographed on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society meeting at the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Thorpe Marsh reserve, near Doncaster.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m not making use of my iMac. Ideally, I’d sit in a sunlit meadow with my sketchbook and draw whatever came along but in this case I’ve got dozens of photographs taken last summer to bring together in a double-page spread. This Photshop CC 2019 collage looks disjointed but I’m convinced that I can make it all flow together as I draw. It’s not intended to be a snapshot of life in the meadow, instead I’d like to evoke the experience of strolling through the grasses on a summer’s day.
There are some excellent new field guides around including one on hoverflies and another on bees. When I’ve completed my illustration, I’ll drop it into a page layout in InDesign to check that my text will fit in, which will hopefully run to about 600 words. Being able to identify the insects means that I can be more specific in the stories I tell about their habits.
This Down-looker Snipe-fly,Rhagio scolopacea, was keeping watch from a fence-post at the edge of the parkland alongside Top Park Wood, Nostell, in May last year. It habitually rests facing downwards and it will dart off on short flights, like a snipe.
This was probably a male defending a territory as it waited for a female to appear but this common species of snipe-fly has occasionally been recorded snatching insects in mid-air. The larvae are predators, feeding on small earthworms and insects in leaf litter and in decaying wood.
Despite its impressive appearance, it is harmless to humans.
Drawn from a photograph taken by the Middle Lake, Nostell Priory, April 2018
If Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen was asked to design an aquatic insect, this is what he might come up with. The smoke-tinted wings of the alderfly are folded like a roof and supported by a tracery of veins, in the style of a Tiffany lamp. Despite these stylish wings they don’t venture far from the water’s edge.
The alderfly larva is a predator, using powerful pincer-like jaws to to prey on aquatic insects such as caddis and mayfly larvae.
