It was a day for signs: we worked all morning digging two deep post-holes for a new welcome signboard beside the ramp path, telling stories as we dug down through dry soil, pebbles and then soft clayey subsoil. Eventually we were deep enough and level enough to pop the sign in, and with nothing more than the spoil, pebbles, and a spirit level and a bit of tamping, we had a fine new signboard up. As if by magic, the TV camera team from ChiswickBuzz arrived to film us holding up spades, a Green Cross banner (some sort of quality of service award), and asking us to cheer improbably, so we shouted 1-2-3 Hooray! and waved spades like idiots, and the camera crew looked happy and wandered off.
Strangalia maculata on Hogweed
There were some bright black-and-yellow insects about pretending not very convincingly to be wasps, but their warning signs seem to work pretty well. After lunch we came back past the signboard to do a butterfly transect, and we nearly cheered as a visitor took a good look at the signboard. We joked that with an apostrophe missing, we’d have to dig the sign out and send it back for a refund.
On the transect we had good numbers of butterflies, but without so much sunshine it was without the masses of Gatekeepers of a fortnight ago. There were a pair of Commas, a Red Admiral, a Brimstone, and plenty of Small Whites, Speckled Woods, Holly Blues and Gatekeepers. A pair of (Migrant or Southern?) Hawkers scooted about from the hut to the ramp; down by the pond was an exuviae of something like a Broad-Bodied Chaser; a Common Darter sunbathed on the boardwalk, and a pair of Azure Blues wandered above the now happily full pond, laying eggs. The reserve echoed to the crash of demolition from the High Street.
The old bench by the pond had been getting very rotten and rackety, so the back, seat and one of the sides (yeah, 60% of it then) were taken off and the team had the job of putting it all back together using new wood and a bag of coach bolts.
If only things were that simple. Cutting the wood to length wasn’t too complicated. The side stretcher was angled but I managed to measure that with the saw and a pencil and marked holes from the bolts of the surviving stretcher. The bolts were too long, so they had to be cut down with a hacksaw to make it possible to use a socket spanner to tighten them.
Then we marked the position of all five timbers for the back and seat, marked the bolt holes, and drilled them. The two for the back were countersunk for the heads, and fitted to the posts. The bolts were heavier than the old ones, giving us trouble trying to tighten them in the small countersunk space available. I widened the gap with a bit of chiselling and managed to tighten the nuts using a pair of grips. The bolts weren’t long enough for the seat timbers and the thickness of the stringers so we drilled the timbers with starter holes (very narrow) and nailed them down with six-inch nails, a considerable effort. The vibration made the timbers climb up the nail, so when the nail was seemingly fully down, it in fact still had an inch to go and the timber was way adrift of the stringer. We thumped the thing down with a lump hammer and then continued tapping away on the nail with an ordinary hammer. The engineer’s maxim, ‘when all else fails, use b****y great nails’ did come to mind. It was very hot in the sunshine and we gratefully shared a thermos of iced water between us.
The pond bench rebuilt
The bench actually looked quite new and professional. Of course if the old posts fall to bits, we’ll have to start over, but it* should last a few more years yet.
* It – the bench – is now officially a “Grandad’s Axe”. You know, grandad’s axe is over 70 years old, and has had seven new shafts and two new heads over the years…
It was suddenly summer again this morning, so I packed cameras, binoculars and a sandwich and went down to Thursley in glittering sunshine. This photo perhaps catches something of the dazzle and sparkle of the bog pools and their shimmering guardians: a pair of Keeled Skimmers (Orthetrum coerulescens) are flying over the water; she is darting down to lay eggs, he is hovering above, guarding her from other males. Their wings sparkle and flash, and it is amazingly difficult to follow, frame, focus and shoot fast enough to get anything like a decent picture. But I rather like the motion blur in this one, and if it’s not perfectly in focus, you know why. I hope you like it too.
Emerald Damselfly
I was pleased, too, with this shot of an Emerald Damselfly, the sparkling water behind it forming a pattern of pleasantly out-of-focus circles.
Small Red Damselflies in Wheel
There were quite a few Small Red Damselflies about, mostly single but a few egg-laying pairs; and a modest number of blues, most likely Azures.
Apart from the hundreds of Keeled Skimmers, other dragonflies included Common Darter, Black Darter (I only saw a few females today), Black-Tailed Skimmer (just one), and Southern Hawker.
Large Skipper on Bog-Cotton
We saw few butterflies apart from Large Skippers which bustled about flowers near the boardwalk, and little Gatekeepers (I do mean they were smaller than usual) … until we arrived on the amazing Parish Meadow that was once a dump for emptying cesspits. Now it has an ecology strikingly unlike the rest of Thursley Common.
Centaury on Parish Meadow
The meadow was full of Meadow Browns, Graylings (mating), Ringlets, Essex Skippers, a Brimstone, Large and Small Whites, and … a Purple Hairstreak (about the Oak trees). The rabbit-bitten pasture, dotted with little flower-stalks of Centaury, was thick with Ragwort, which in turn was richly covered with Cantharid beetles, solitary bees, wasps, and hoverflies and other Diptera. We put up a Silver Y moth which obligingly landed in front of us and perched in the open. We found the traces of a Green Woodpecker killed by a Sparrowhawk; but happily saw a live one in the Oaks nearby.
Cantharid Beetles Rhagonycha fulva mating on RagwortSilver Y MothSparrowhawk Kill – this Green Woodpecker’s flying days are over
The boardwalks were busy with Lizards and Skimmers sunning themselves.
Lizard on boardwalk
We met a local group of birders, complete with masses of tripods, telescopes and cameras, and asked if they were looking at the Stonechats. No, they replied, the Hobbies, there are three. We looked up, and sure enough there were three raptors. But in our binoculars, they turned out to be a Kestrel, a Hobby, and a Red Kite! Perhaps there were some more Hobbies somewhere else.
A little way further, absent the birders, we found a dead tree with some juvenile birds perched about it, and a lot of twittering. Yeah, a typical Chiswick Cafe. Some of them were young Redstarts; the others, young Stonechats: pretty confusing. But the Redstarts flew up into a Pine tree – not a Stonechatty thing to do – and sure enough, there was an adult Redstart on a lower branch, plain to see. And a Stonechat adult rasped out its grating call over to the right.
In a group of tall Oaks, we sat and ate a sandwich; and a Spotted Flycatcher flew across and perched on a high dead branch. It spent five minutes looking about, twisting its neck remarkably, but making no sallies. When I was a boy I saw them in the garden every summer; now they’re really something special, like, er, Starlings and House Sparrows.
Meadow Grasshopper
The sandy heath paths were full of little holes dug by Ammophila Sand-Wasps, and others made by Philanthus Bee-Wolves (or Bee-Killer Wasps). Both are called digger wasps (“Sphecidae”) in most books, and it’s certainly a good name, but the family has been split up, so Philanthus is now in the Crabronidae, which contains most of the old “Sphecidae” (we’ll have to say sensu lato for this); the new Sphecidae (sensu stricto) only contains what used to be the Sphecinae, which includes Ammophila. Rich scope for confusion. Sphex is the ancient Greek word for wasp, and it’s interesting that Linnaeus chose this word for a digger wasp rather than the social wasps, which have the Latin name Vespa for the hornet, and Vespula, little wasp, for common wasps.
Bee-Wolf (Bee-Killer Wasp Philanthus triangulum)Bee-Wolf carrying a bee into her burrow to provision her nest.Sand-Wasp Ammophila pubescens. She too digs a burrow which she provisions with a caterpillar or two. The sand is dotted with angular lumps of iron pan.
Out of a low bush of willow and gorse right beside a boardwalk came a strange, quiet but insistent squawky chatter of alarm. Peering in between the branches, a small slim dark bird with a long dark tail could be seen hopping about anxiously: a Dartford Warbler. It was extraordinary to be within a few feet of this shy, rare and retiring bird, and watching it for several minutes. There are actually quite a few on the heaths of Surrey and the south coast, but they’re never easy to see—most of my views have been of disappearing rear ends, diving into gorse bushes.
Well, what an exciting day in nature. In London, too. The meadows are now as dry as we’ve ever seen them; and they’re full of butterflies. The Small Skippers have flown; in their place are plenty of Essex Skippers, on an increasing amount of Ragwort.
An obliging Gatekeeper, wings open
They are accompanied by clouds of Gatekeepers: we must have seen 100 of them, with 35 counted on one leg of the Butterfly Transect alone (going along to the beehive behind the Anthill Meadow). And good numbers of Meadow Browns (a dozen or so) and Small Whites; with twenty or thirty Holly Blues, they were high in the woods, visiting leaves, even on the ground.
Male Sparrowhawk
A male Sparrowhawk perched on a dead branch above the pond boardwalk.
Oak bush dying of drought
Signs of drought were everywhere: the pond is really low, but the brief rains of the last few days have brought levels back up a little. We spend a while giving 7 barrowloads of water to the planted birches on the embankment, and even rescued a few small oaks that were really suffering. The holm oaks, from the Mediterranean maquis, however looked perfectly comfortable: presumably with their waxy leaves and closed stomata, they are barely growing in the dry season.
Girl power: fixing a batten for trellis on green hut
We fixed up a trellis on battens bolted to the extremely hard steel of the green hut; it took forever to pierce the metal, but after that it was easy to do up the bolts and screw the trellis to the battens.
Yes! We saw a Purple Hairstreak!
And yes, the butterfly transect was crowned by a confirmed sighting of an insect we’d felt sure must be here: a Purple Hairstreak. One sat on a low-hanging Oak leaf for us to check with binoculars and shaky camera. The streaked wings with their tiny tails could not be mistaken. The conservation officer was … visibly pleased. We also saw what seems to have been a Beautiful Carpet Moth – again, the photo was distant but we all saw it with binoculars.
It was hot and humid, and we worked quite hard, but it was a beautiful and memorable day.
Here’s a bug that avoids being eaten by looking quite enough like an ant to fool a variety of predators. Its name, mirmicoides, means ant-like. Its naturally thick body is made to appear to have a typical ant “waist” with a judicious bit of white camouflage.
Ant-mimic predatory bug, Himacerus mirmicoides, dorsal view, on Ragwort
Certainly an interesting “bug” to find. (It’s a true bug, family Nabidae, the damsel bugs, in the Hemiptera.)
On Yarrow
The long and distinctly un-antlike rostrum is held under the head, so predators presumably don’t notice it much. The antennae are similarly much too long to be an ant’s.
Cormorants basking off Hasle, BornholmMason Wasp Odynerus spinipes (Eumenidae) on aphid-sticky leavesGoosanders in the Baltic seaThree unlucky Dor Beetles on cycle trackBlue! Cornflowers across a Cornfield
Bornholm is in some ways as Britain was half a century ago or more: there are still swathes of cornflowers and poppies, though many of the fields are plainly weed-free except for narrow margins. The sky over arable fields and set-aside is loud with the song of skylarks; the hedges are full of the cheerful little-bit-of-bread-and-no-CHEESE song of yellowhammers. Swallows race in numbers low over the corn; the towns are busy with house sparrows, swifts and house martins, the many handsome old houses and churches offering plentiful nesting places to suit all parties. The woods held good numbers of blackcap, with willow warblers in the more open areas, a chiffchaff or two, plenty of whitethroats in scattered bushes, a garden warbler or two.
Some things are simply modern, despite the unspoiled rural look of the island: butterflies seem to be few – red admirals, speckled woods, peacocks, small tortoiseshells, meadow browns, and what I think was a fritillary over a marsh-fringed lake – it was quite big and fairly pale, roughly like a dark green: perhaps it was a marsh fritillary, but I couldn’t stay to find out. It was somewhat windy all week, so perhaps there are many more species on windless days, but I rather doubt it (and wind does seem rather usual on the island).
Of course in many ways it is quite different. The presence of eider ducks and goosanders in numbers on the (brackish) Baltic Sea, along with the occasional mute swan and mallard (and a less surprising shelduck), is strikingly unfamiliar. The crows, as in Scotland, are a reminder that this is the North: handsome grey-mantled hooded crows instead of their all-black carrion crow cousins; and there are rooks in numbers all over, including in the villages, boldly scavenging.
Ichneumon Wasp and Cinnabar larva, just after the ‘sting’
Well, what a piece of luck. I was just inspecting the ragwort where the Cinnabar caterpillars were clustered (by the rail of the Anthill Meadow), and had seen they had grown, and had dispersed from one stalk to three or four — when I saw an Ichneumon approach with the usual dancing flight. Grabbing the camera, I took three photographs, of which the above is the last, and I think the prettiest.
Ichneumon Wasp pointing ovipositor at Cinnabar larva
This is the second photo: the wasp has her abdomen curled beneath her body, towards her prey (ok, host, she’s a parasitoid).
Ichneumon attacking Cinnabar larva
And this is actually the first photo, the wasp very close to the caterpillar, her ovipositor sharply folded under her thorax: the caterpillar has just twitched sharply, presumably on being ‘stung’ with an egg now fatally implanted in its body. The cinnabar is aposematic, full of bitter and poisonous chemicals, which don’t protect it against this sort of attack, evidently.
Down by the pond there were plenty of Azure damselflies, one Common Bluetail, and some really tiny newly-metamorphosed froglings hopping about in the mud. A Small Skipper perched obligingly on a Yellow Iris leaf, not far from a plump Iris Sawfly larva.
Small Skipper on Yellow Iris leaf
Down at the Picnic Meadow, ignoring a picnic and dropped bicycle in the entirely dry brown grass, an Essex Skipper visited some Bramble flowers. It’s just like the Small Skipper, but without the orange on the antennae. A Meadow Brown sat in the grass.
Essex Skipper on Bramble flower picnic meadow
In the woods, a Holly Blue flew high, near a Holly tree. A Small White completed the butterfly tally for the walk.
I wasn’t really birding but it was nice to see a little cloud of House Martins flycatching, and a richly dressed Dabchick diving for food.
Foamy wisps of scented Meadowsweet flowers were visited by honeybees; a Strangalia maculata longhorn beetle (it doesn’t have an English name, but it’s not the one usually called Wasp Beetle) clambered slowly over the flowerheads. It looks reasonably wasplike, if not terribly convincingly; it would be interesting to know if it is itself foul-tasting and hence actually aposematic, or just hitching a free ride through Batesian mimicry.
Strangalia maculata, a waspish longhorn beetle, on MeadowsweetBee on Bramble flower
The Wetland Centre was very sunny, a little windy for butterflies (only Small Skipper, Red Admiral and Green-Veined White) but with the bees buzzing around the many flowers, very attractive. Several Orchids were in bloom, including purple and pyramidal. Even the different bindweeds looked wonderful. A pair of Mute Swans rested calmly with a cygnet or two at the bronze feet of Sir Peter Scott.
A teneral (new) darter
The dragonflies included one Black-tailed Skimmer, sunning itself on a “wildside” path; several blue hawkers, probably Hairy Dragonflies; an Emperor; a teneral darter, probably Common Darter; masses of blue damselflies – all the ones I managed to check were Azure Damselfly; and a few Common Bluetail damselflies.
We’re working on planters and a trellis to cover the side of the green shed, in the hope of growing something a little softer and more natural-looking. These amorous butterflies landed exactly where we were planning to fix the trellis.
The pond is really low in the heat (and the grass is brown and crisp, and Birch trees large and small are dying). There are Large Red, Azure and Bluetail damselflies urgently laying eggs; this pair of Azures was in the incredibly complicated mating posture that we call the Heart or Wheel, with secondary genitalia locked on in preparation for transfer of the spermatophore; then the female does her thing with sperm storage. Bizarre.
Red Admiral – battered but still flying
If there’s an insect equivalent of a World War II Hurricane landing safely with most of its tailplane, rudder, and wings shot away, this battered but defiant Red Admiral must be it. I saw the odd outline and thought “Comma?” – then I saw the colours and thought “Hot weather, beaten-up butterfly, Painted Lady”; then it landed and I realized what it was.
Heat. It’s apparently the hottest day in England for nine years: right now it’s 33ºC here, and remarkably sticky.
Cinnabar Moth Caterpillars on Ragwort
Among the dry grass are an increasing number of Ragwort plants; at the moment, having seen just one Cinnabar moth flying briefly, there is also just one plant covered in Cinnabar caterpillars. They are aposematic: brightly coloured black and orange, warning, like wasps and bees, of their poisonous cocktail of chemicals picked up from their food plant. They seem to grow in numbers until they devastate the Ragwort population, which then crashes … which wipes out the Cinnabar moth, until a new outbreak of Ragwort restarts the cycle. It seems to me the nearest thing to the Lotka-Volterra model ever, given that the model basically predicts wild swings in population of “predator” and “prey”. For lynx and snowshoe hares it’s a wildly wrong model; for moths and Ragwort, maybe there’s something in it.
Making croc coffins (plant boxes) for the car park
We spent some happy hours cutting up a lot of wood to make two large “planters” to disguise the green metal box of a shed in the car park. The plants will need constant watering, which sounds a bit of a problem, but maybe for annuals it’ll do fine. We nicknamed the planters “crocodile coffins” as they are the size of young crocs and perfect for their funerals, if crocs need ceremonies.
Yesterday evening we had a fine view of the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in the western sky, Venus an elegant bright crescent (evening star) on our side of the sun, Jupiter a smaller and dimmer star, visibly a complete disk, far away from us of course on the other side of the sun. The 80mm birdwatching telescope did a good job; of course it would be lovely to have a big astronomical telescope to get a bigger view.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
