Wild Life In The Garden

slug-free Hostas!

Red Damselfly

Starling fledglings

Pester Power

Female Crab Spider (Misumena vatia) and bee prey

Common Malachite Beetle

Poached Eggs

Waiting.....

Ragged Robin

Brian Mark II (orange tip pillar)

Footballer hoverfly

Beautiful Demoiselle

Brown Silver-Lines moth

Jay (who had just eaten a Song Thrush's Child :o( )

Male crab spider on his ox-eye daisy

I've been entirely caught up in the lives of our Crab Spiders this week. I found Mrs Crab sitting on one of the Ox Eyes a few days ago and was amazed when I went back to check an hour later to discover her fiercely guarding an immobilised bee underneath the flower. She has hunted, caught and eaten a bee of this size three days out of the last four. She sits in wait on the edge of her flower, perfectly blended with the petals (they can change colour to match their backgrounds) and when a bee lands she darts out, injects him and it's game over. She wasn't too chuffed when Poppy and I bent in for a closer look: she raised one leg and waved it at us in warning. I explained that we didn't want to eat her bee, but she didn;t seem convinced so we left her to it.

Soon after I found her, I discovered the tiny wee black-and-white chap in the pic above, swinging in a very carefree attitude between the ox-eyes. Hmm (I thought) he's another Crab spider, albeit entirely different to Mrs C. I looked him up and discovered he isn't different at all, he's actually her husband (and about a tenth of her size).

She is eating like mad to produce enough energy to lay her eggs, which she'll fold a leaf or petal over and then stand guard over for three weeks until the spiderlings hatch. During that time she won't eat a thing and at the end of it all, she'll die. He is hanging about because he's needed to fertilise the eggs. I can't stop watching them. It's endlessly fascinating to me, these short and vital life cycles played out among a single group of flowers.

Other children in the garden this week have been five extremely noisy starling babies. They have stalked about the lawn after their parents, loudly berating them and demanding food on the spot. It went as far as actual pecking of tail feathers as well as all the gaping. This went on for two days, before the parents cracked and started shouting back at them. The kids soon got the message and I've only seen them briefly since, swinging through the sky in a great big starling mob.

The Jay is not in my good books. Hearing a terrible cacophony of furious blackbird warning calls a couple of afternoons ago when I was out setting up Badger Cam, I scrambled through the undergrowth to investigate, suspecting a stoat attack, only to find two thrushes dive-bombing the Jay who held one of their speckled offspring in his feet. He wasn't remotely worried about the parents, but he was afraid of me. He dropped the baby as I approached: I found it still warm lying crumpled in the leaf litter at the foot of a tree. It's nature in action, but it always troubles me when it's young animals.

On a happier note, the Beautiful Demoiselle is a new garden addition. I'm not convinced it came from the pond because they are usually nymphs of running water, but it was a joy to see it anyway. The Red Damsel did come from the pond- there are loads of them eclosing this week in the sun, along with one or two blues. Brian (caterpillar) has hatched from the orange tip egg I showed you in a previous post. I have to remind myself not  to look too often for him because he's about the size of a very thin piece of cotton and I worry about smudging him with my thumb :o)

Cooler here today and rain is forecast tomorrow, so I'm off to Hobbycraft to restock ribbons and bias binding for various sewing projects.

Hope all are well?

CT :o)

Of Moths, Violets, Fritillaries and Birds Eggs

Sprawler

Clouded Boeder

Many-Plumed Moth

Green Carpet

Mottled Umber

Muslin Moth

Lunar Marbled Brown

Angle Shades

Lesser Swallow Prominent

Pale Prominent

Poplar Hawkmoth

A reasonable selection from the night before last. Not as many as I'd expected, but it could be that the recent cold spell has slowed things down in Moth Land, just as it has prolonged the sloe blossom and the bluebells.

Talking of Botany, I did a violet survey along the lane yesterday and counted hundreds of them. They are important because they represent the larval foodplant of one of our loveliest families of butterfly- the Fritillary. I am involved with a project later this Spring aimed at improving habitat (and therefore survival) of one of the most threatened of the Fritillaries, the Small Pearl Bordered. Yesterday's survey was not specifically SPB related, but was to enable me to contact the council and find out when they've got verge cutting scheduled, because if it's before June/ July that will be a disaster for the Silver Washed Fritillary who lives here.

Silver Washed are flutters of ancient woodland and I was thrilled when one visited our garden last summer to nectar on the world's most expensive buddleia (you may remember it's arrival two summer's ago costing a fortune and measuring the size of a five pence piece. It's earnt it's place in the garden now I feel). 

Silver Washed lay their eggs in July and August on the north side of tree trunks about one metre up from the ground among mosses and lichens. When the larvae hatch out a fortnight later, they immediately hibernate in the crevices of bark where they remain until Spring. In May when the violets are out, they wake up and descend to the ground to feed on the new violet growth. They are fully grown by early June, when they pupate, attaching themselves to a leaf which they so closely resemble that they are very hard to find in this state. They remain as pupae until July when they emerge as adults, who spend a lot of time at the tops of trees but do descend to nectar (often on bramble).

This is why I am so keen to make certain the council doesn't cut the verges before any larvae have had a chance to grow properly and get back up on to the trees out of the way. I hope they will listen. Britain's verges represent an increasingly important resource in terms of wild flowers, nectar and larval foodplants for our insects. The more development that happens and the more agriculture intensifies, the more important these verge-side residues of what once was widespread become. I hope the council will understand the significance of this and take their guardianship responsibilities seriously. If you fancy a walk down your local road noting the presence of violets you could drop your local council a line and repeat what I've said in this post. The more people that raise awareness of this the better.

I'll leave you with a rather lovely egg shell the dogs and I found while out walking this morning. It's a Song Thrush. They are the most amazing blue. The second pic is a couple of Blackbird's from last spring for comparison,

And finally, guess who I found nectaring on some wild cuckoo flower (growing in the garden rather than grown from the basal leaf) yesterday morning? Only Mrs Orange Tip :o)

Happy Days,

CT :o)

All the small things

common carder bee

female orange tip

whitethroat

orange tip egg

I am routinely teased here for "taking pictures of grass." I was delighted therefore, while dipping in to the truly marvellous book that is And The Worm Forgives The Plough, to find that the author was interested in what he called the "extraordinary in the ordinary." It is a phrase I now shoot back whenever anyone in my family sniggers at my fondness for all the small things.

Had I not been interested in the minutiae of nature, I would not (for example) have found the orange tip egg hiding under the bracket of the ladies smock bloom in the photo above (it's the small orange torpedo sticking out at right angles from the stalk just under the flower). Despite watching the flowers like a hawk in recent days, I have failed utterly to see the female at all, and have only glimpsed the male in passing. Very Rapid passing, which is what male OTs are wont to do when newly emerged. The photo of the female OT came from a walk on Saturday through a nearby woodland.

I was also delighted this week to discover a resident Whitethroat or two in trees next to the house. I love 'em, they are right up there with owls and swallows for me. They are confident, friendly little birds with a forthright expression in that beady eye that's hard to resist, as if they enjoy everything there is in life and aren't afraid of saying so. It's an infectious attitude, cemented by the way they throw out their brisk song while perched at the top of a bush/ tree/ hedge with a confidence and aplomb you really can't help but admire.

The Whitethroats are summer migrants (another reason to admire them in my book- I am continuously amazed at this impressive feat of long-distance flying), as are Swifts who have also just returned (on May 5th). I watched two wheeling in the sky above Romsey while sitting in a traffic jam, their scimitar wings slicing the air, and then saw more at Kings Somborne the following day.

They heralded the return of summer weather- it has been proper hot here the past two days.  Red Damsel flies are appearing and the honey bees have decided a hole in the bricks beside our bedroom window is the perfect place to set up home and have been buzzing excitedly about it all afternoon. I warned them not to go in through the window into the house while they were investigating, but of course they did and I spent some time ushering errant bees back outside.

Badger Cam has continued to provide pleasure and entertainment. I add below a selection of videos for your entertainment. I am puzzled by the furious/ indignant spitting in one of them. Not made by the badger in the image, I can only assume there is another one off-shot who is giving something (possibly the fox I recorded in a previous still being chased by a badge) a piece of his/ her mind. Badgers have a wide vocal range. 
Foxes are turning up on the camera with increasing frequency. I was concerned that the fox in the daylight video had mange, but having read up on it I think it's more likely he/ she is is summer moult. They can start this from the back forward apparently.

The video with the rook rattling peanuts has a backing track provided by my resident cuckoo, who continues to take enormous delight in cuckooing just out of sight and then flying off whenever I get close.
There will undoubtedly be more of that this week, and hopefully the female will also make herself known by the bubbling call she makes after egg-laying. I haven't heard it yet, but there are certainly plenty of Dunnocks singing at present so hopefully it won't be long. We're also waiting the return of Nightjars on to the forest. Any day now....
And in addition I am about to lay some refugia on a nearby site to survey reptiles. I will let you know the outcome. Although I have never seen them there, I am reliably informed there are adders. I am hoping for slow worms because they don't appear in our garden and I am Very Fond Of Them.

The Moth Box is out tonight. A warm May evening, it should bring in some lovely things. Leanne, watch this space.... 



Wishing you all a pleasant evening,

CT :o)

PS- I'm very glad to be able to continue blogging on a more adhoc basis, but please forgive me not answering comments and also not always getting round to read all your blogs. Less time spent on the computer has helped my eyes no end and I'd rather do some blogging than none at all :o)

Of Bluebells, Otters, Cettis Warblers and Cuckoos

Baby Robins

Cuckoo

Fish scale from fresh otter spraint

spot the Cettis Warbler

Common Dog Violet

Greater Stitchwort

Comfrey

It's Bluebell time of the year. There are several woods within striking distance of home that are currently carpeted in Blue. No one ever seems to visit them, so the dogs and I are currently drinking them in by ourselves. Last week we went off piste away from the footpath that winds through the fields and stepped into the secret world of the wood. We followed a Badger Path (my favourite kind of walking at present) as it wound and twisted through the trees among the bluebells and wood anemones and eventually it led down to the sett where one entrance was strewed with bluebell stalks. It could have been for fresh bedding, but badgers are notoriously playful things and it may just have been for the sheer joy of rushing to and from the front door with greenery in your mouth. When we emerged out of the wood and rejoined the footpath that runs through the uniform green of monoculture agriculture it felt very sterile after the botanical richness of the wood. All the more so because, while we were still on the badger path, a Tawny Owl had swooped silently over my head, landed in the tree in front of us and turned to stare down at me for a moment, before an irate blackbird dived at him and, scolding loudly, drove him on into the wood. We could track the owl's progress by the noise the woodland birds were making- a pair of Jays took up the screeching further along, which I thought was a bit rich considering that Jays are hardly innocent when it comes to taking the young of other birds themselves.

The Cuckoo photo is my first ever and I am very proud of it. He led me on a merry dance and I had to work Very Hard Indeed to get it. Who knew they were so shy? Especially given the 'woo hoo! I'm over here! ' racket they make and the hardiness they display completing the annual migration from Africa and back. After a long complex chase involving me crawling through bramble bushes and blackthorn thickets and across swamps (I still bear the scars) and him playing a hugely fun (for him) game of landing on a branch for a few minutes tantalisingly just ahead of me, cuckooing, then flying off as I got within photo-range, I finally tracked him down to a tree a few feet away and managed, by dint of hiding under a bramble bush, to get the photo. You can see from the look in his eye he was mighty suspicious and in fact flew off a second after I clicked the shutter, leaving me hiding in bushes on the edge of a school playing field with a long-lense camera in my hands and a pair of binoculars round my neck, covered in cuts and scratches and damp from the swamp with no mitigating cuckoo in sight. I beat a hasty retreat before the police were called.

Our Cuckoos are Dunnock parasites (as many woodland cuckoos are). They are one of, if not the only, species of cuckoo who don't bother to camouflage their eggs. Dunnock eggs are small and blue, woodland cuckoo eggs large and mottled. The reason? Dunnocks are accommodating little birds who are neither fussy nor suspicious about eggs that look different to their own so will brood whatever happens to be in their nest. Reed Warblers however, will kick a different egg out sharpish, so wetland cuckoos have adapted their eggs to be almost identical to the Reed Warblers smal beige mottle eggs. Clever, no? 
I'm listening out for the ladies now, as egg laying time should be upon us (although the recent cold weather may delay things as there won't have been many caterpillars out for them to fatten up on and egg laying takes a lot of energy, especially after you've used up fat flying here). The females bubble when they've laid an egg, and, unlike most female birds, they tend to lay between 2-5 in the afternoon to make sure the host bird has already laid her egg for the day, which the cuckoo takes away in her beak. Naughty.

The Otter spraint and the Cettis Warbler were by way of a consolation prize. I spent a morning on the river last week looking for water voles and although I found burrows and fresh latrines, no small furries were in sight. Otter spraint is surprisingly not unpleasant (that is a sentence I never expected to write). I was once told that it isn't a bad smell by an Otter Man and I fear I wrinkled my nose sceptically, but he was right. It smells of the sea. The small transparent circle on my finger in the photo is a fish scale taken from the spraint, which was fresh. This nicely demonstrates why otter spraint is so hard to find - once it's a few hours old it dries and becomes invisible to all but expert and practised eyes. I also found the jetty they'd been using to slip in and out of the water. While I was busy sniffing otter spraint and feeling rather glad on the whole that there was no one about to see me, the Cettis Warbler started calling from the tree next to me. It's a loud melodious song for such a small, inconspicuous bird. They are notoriously hard to find so I was very pleased to not only hear one but get a photo too. Then a Reed Warbler started up and I was torn between recording it and the Cettis. The Cettis won. The Roe Buck topped the river morning off. I was hoping to see the Stoat who often appears when I'm on the river, apparently oblivious of my presence, and gambols about on the bank, but I suppose one shouldn't be greedy. 

I'll leave you with a video of Mr Fox (or possible Mrs) risking daylight to gobble up left-over peanuts, and wish you all a pleasant evening. Hope all are well?

CT :o)