There are a number of freshly emerged peacock butterflies around but a more unusual visitor to the garden today was a brimstone. This pale yellow species, often the first to emerge in spring, is the one that gave its name to the group as a whole.
Category: Insects
Common Blue
It’s turned cooler so I get a chance to draw a male common blue before he becomes active. Birdsfoot trefoil is one of the foodplants of its larvae.
There’s a hint of violet in the blue of its wings. Common blue females are brown.
Sloe Shield Bug
Although I started painting this sloe bug, Dolycoris baccarum, as leaf green I soon realised that it had a purplish cast. According to the book, it’s very hairy when seen under the lens but it was so active as it trundled around the bug box that I wasn’t able to get that close. It never stayed under the magnifying glass in the lid long enough. It had found its way into the bathroom overnight.
As well as sloe (blackthorn) these shield bugs will feed on the flowers and fruit of other members of the rose family. This one might have come from a thicket of blackthorn a hundred yards from our house in the corner of the meadow by the edge of the wood.
Sloe bugs are common on sand dunes.
Frantically trying to escape, like a mime artist doing a glass box act, it occasionally fell on its back as it attempted to climb the sides so I gave it its freedom, taking a macro shot from which I made the pencil drawing.
Blue Damselflies
2.30 p.m.; Common blue damselflies are mating down by the pond, the blue male clasping the olive female.
She rests on the water surface as she carefully lays an egg on a submerged leaf of pondweed then the pair move on to lay the next.
There are smooth newts lurking below. One grabs a female and swallows her head end first, the two wings protruding from its mouth.
I watch for a few minutes. The males zip around like little blue neon tubes, chasing each other and resting in the sun together on the leaves of plants around the pond.
The pairs flying in tandem continue to lay, often just inches from a waiting newt below.
Tree Wasp
I LET a couple of wasps out of the studio window this afternoon but inevitably the odd one will get trapped indoors and I found this one lying dead on the windowsill in the spare bedroom, giving me a chance to take a closer look at it.
The photograph was taken with my new Fujifilm FinePix S6800 bridge camera. I always like to draw from the photograph before turning to the field guide but comparing photograph and sketch I’m surprised how out of proportion I drew the central part of its face. The little sketch (right) drawn directly from the wasp itself is more confident and proportionate than the one drawn from the computer screen. But the macro photograph brings out details that are barely visible to the naked eye.
As its name suggests the Tree Wasp, Dolichovespula sylvestris, often builds its nest in trees and shrubs but at the weekend we found one nesting on the ground on the grass verge by the path at Walton nature park. It has also been recorded as nesting in barns, empty bee-hives and nestboxes.
In the 3 second film clip below you can see a wasp flying out. I didn’t block the flight path for longer than necessary.
Tree Wasp nest
Lesser Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing
I found a dead Lesser Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing, Noctua janthe, lying on the path in the greenhouse this morning and, as I’d plugged in my USB microscope to take a closer look at the fungus I decided to take a few shots of the moth too.
The saffron yellow underwings are a striking contrast to the drab upperwings. The border looks as if it has been painted with Impressionist brushstrokes when viewed at 60x.
I suspect that the light blue scales are reflecting daylight from the window.
Zooming in to 200x reveals comb-like ends to the scales.
Coloured scales camouflage the moth when at rest and reveal distracting colours when it is disturbed and it opens its wings. It’s also possible that the coating of scales and the furry edges of the wings help muffle the sound of the moths wingbeats, helping it escape from any bat that hunts by sound alone.
Ringlet
This Ringlet butterfly was a roadside casualty that Barbara spotted when we were in Dalby Forest, North Yorks Moors, last month.
I put it under the microscope to focus on the eye-spots. Each has a bright fleck in the middle, even the smallest of them, which must help give the impression of a gleaming snakelike eye, distracting any attacker either by surprising it or fooling it into pecking the butterfly’s wing instead of its body.
Yellow-tail Moth
When disturbed the Yellow-tail Moth, Euproctis similis, sticks the end of its abdomen up between its wings. Both male and female have the yellow tip although it is larger in the female.
Some female moths spread pheromones by raising their tails and the males use their feathery antennae to home in on them.
So why does this male raise his ‘tail’ when disturbed? Is it a way to surprise a predator?
It’s the first time that this species has turned up in the moth trap.
Yellow-tail moth caterpillars have been found on Japanese Knotweed, an invasive garden escape which very few native insects feed on, but they’re more likely to feed on sallow, blackthorn and hawthorn.
Broad-Bordered Underwing
THERE WERE at least half a dozen Large Yellow Underwings in the moth trap this morning plus some of their smaller relatives but this is the first time that I’ve seen the Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing, Notcua fimbriata. This is a male; the female is paler.
It’s more typical of wooded areas than gardens but as the foodplants of its larvae include docks, nettles, brambles, sallows and willows it’s not surprising that it has turned up here.
Fan-foot, Dun-bar and the Silver Y
Although it’s years since I last saw a Silver Y moth, Autographa gamma, I didn’t have any difficulty in putting a name to it, thanks to the conspicuous calligraphic Y on its wing. This is the first time that it has turned up in
the moth trap and that could be because, as an immigrant each year to Britain, it has taken until now to reach Yorkshire.
Dun-bar
There are so many brownish, streaked little moths, both micro and macro, that I find drawing them gives me my best chance of picking out the pattern as I look through the field guide. Taking a close look at this, I noticed that the two bands and the inconspicuous dot made a pattern like a carnival mask, enabling me to identify it as the Dun-bar, Cosmia trapezina, a common moth from lowland Scotland southwards, wherever there are trees.
Fan-foot
While I sketched these moths Barbara went through the book and came up with a name for this obscure-looking delta-winged little moth. It’s the Fan-foot, Zanclognatha tarsipennalis, a common moth of woods, hedges and gardens.
The the three lines on its wing are;
- curved/wavy
- like a question mark
- almost straight
with a row of fine dashes along the edge of the wing.
Orange Swift
Lets have an easier moth; the male of the Orange Swift, Hepialus sylvina, has a bright orange-brown forewing. It’s larvae feed on herbceous plants including dock, dandelion and bracken.
Underwings
These two underwings are so regular in the moth trap that I tend to ignore them so that I thought it was about time that I made a quick sketch of them.