On the Bike in Avignon - Day by Day (Part 2)

Day 3

The day started at Avignon Station, where I had a bit of spare time before catching a train to Orange and noticed there was an interesting bee feeding on some lavender.

Digger Bee

I haven't managed to dig into digger bees much but a suggestion on iNaturalist 
of urbane digger bee seemed fairly definite at the time. One slight problem is that anthophora urbana occurs in North and Central America so I think digger bee is as near as I'll get.

At Orange the idea was to launch North to Uchaux but ultimately I didn't fancy the road and turned back.  Before I did, I discovered another flower meadow, this time quite a large one, where several butterflies could be seen.  I very quickly found some dingy skipper (yet again after a near blank last summer) but also a skipper that was different.  Past experience in the Camargue (and for a change my memory) came in handy and I soon realised it was a mallow skipper.

Dingy Skipper

Mallow Skipper

There were a good few spotted fritillaries around and one kindly posed to allow me to get a good shot of the upper wing

Spotted Fritillary

Also seen but not photographed at this sight were clouded yellow, ringlet and brimstone, plus an annoying hairstreak that I narrowly missed. I wondered about ilex hairstreak but didn't get a good enough view.

After turning back to the Arc de Triomphe in Orange (yes there is one!) I joined the Via Venaissia aiming to join the Via Rhôna North of Carpentras. About 10 km out of Orange I encountered a farm garden where there were a few marbled white (which always seemed to be a sign that others were present) and stopped to check out what looked like large fritillaries. In fact they all turned out to be wall browns, painted ladies or spotted fritillaries. In fact the spotted fritillary proved to be the only fritillary found. Anyway I did this time get a good shot of another scarce swallowtail that appeared.

Scarce Swallowtail - Upperwing

One interesting point here was that a lady exiting the farm by car stopped specially to tell me to lock the bike up (which was no more than five metres away) as the area was often patrolled by "bandits" who would escape with it high speed given the chance.

Unfortunately the remainder of the ride proved to be somewhat disappointing.  The rest of the Via Venaissia led mainly through farmland with little to note and a lively Mistral to face. At the Via Rhôna I encountered rather arid country, with the occasional outburst of painted ladies where there were a few flowers.  Otherwise the main butterfly sightings were individuals blown across my path at high speed in the wind, not to be seen again.

At one area I investigated as promising I thought that I had found an interesting moth, which actually proved to be a couple of short-horned grasshoppers caught "in flagrante delictu."  A good job I'm having an eye test shortly!

Short-horned Grasshoppers

I was beginning to reflect that the lack of moisture in most areas was having a clear effect on sightings. There was not a drop of rain the whole week as temperatures gradually rose.

A little way North of the Île de Barthelasse, I did actually find a nice looking neglected path with plenty of vegetation and a few marbled whites.  What I actually sighted was largely a repeat of those seen in the morning including, annoyingly, a repeat of mystery disappearing hairstreak.

In the end I had to settle for a cleopatra and a pretty banded demoiselle.

Cleopatra (underwing)

Banded demoiselle

Day 4

In temperatures up to 35C, Day 4 turned into more of a survival exercise.  Starting out from Tarascon, I took a run across the North of the Alpilles.  This was firmly the day of the cleopatra as both males and females turned up repeatedly especially in the morning.  They were also extremely reluctant to settle but in the end I managed to get a video capturing a bit of both and showing the colouring.

Cleopatra

Matters were made considerably worse when I realised I had an hour less than planned to catch a train at Cavaillon, and so was forced into cycling at as much pace as I could manage for the last 25+ km.

I did stop briefly for a rest and had a bit of a surprise when on a rare plant I found a stripey bee that appeared to have a bloated white abdomen. It clearly noticed me and took off towards me and started flying from right to left repeatedly in what appeared to be some sort of threatening behaviour before finally moving off.

Unfortunately the camera couldn't help with even video evidence but I was able to establish that it was  a wool carder bee.

Day 5 

Increasingly tired and interested in creature comforts I decided to roughly repeat the run from the first day as it passed through the best area for nature.  The result was perhaps inevitably that, having dispelled any notion of finding the hungarian glider, I saw pretty much the same species - white admiral, marbled white, spotted fritillary etc. but with one major difference.

Regiscola Bidens

At the spot West of Les Angles where I first stopped on Day 1, I found up to twenty massive insects circling an area of broken bushes.  They were black, about as long as a dragon fly, thicker than most caterpillars, and had two bright yellow stripes.  They also had antennae suggesting they were bees or wasps

On the way back later in the day I encountered a French Natural Biologist who told me they were regiscola bidens, i.e. mammoth wasp, a species that predates on the rhinoceros beetle.  Whilst it looks highly dangerous, it is actually very placid and rarely stings. Apologies for the poor photo.

I got chatting to the French chap who, as well as complaining about the local authority's failure to protect the area, for example by cutting it as on Day 1, told me that it held over 500 distinct species, of which over half had special protection status.

There was something about that that made me feel I had made the right decision!

Out and About

Last Wednesday I took a trip to the Tees Estuary hoping I might be in with a chance of catching up with a couple of rarities - the glossy ibis and the small blue butterfly. In the event I was successful with neither but still found a few things to catch my interest.

Starting at Saltholme RSPB I headed initially to Paddy's Pond, having found the pollinator garden virtually free of pollinators.  Here the view was largely dominated by a huge number of black-headed gulls with just a few pochard and shovelers for a little variety.  Turning back afterwards however, I did start to see some butterflies and was pleasantly surprised to find, on a path interestingly marked "Wrong Way", my first wall brown of this year.

Not sure how I missed it earlier, but I then immediately happened upon a nice area of banked flower meadow where there was another first of season sighting - at least 15 common blues, all but one of them male.

Wall Brown

Common Blue

A couple of orange-brown butterflies passing over the same area couldn't be identified.

The common blue turned up at several points as I wandered around the site but only one other female appeared.

Adjourning for lunch in the café, I was able to observe some common (I think) terns hovering to hunt insects from the surface of the water, the view occasionally interrupted by hunting sand martins from a man-made nesting wall. 

Tern hovering...then diving

Unfortunately I didn't manage to film one of the terns actually splashing into the water.

Here again there were a few pochards and shovelers.

Pochard

Next destination was the Fire Station Pond, which was where the glossy ibis had been reported. However I knew the chances of seeing were slim as the last sighting noted on the whiteboards was a few days earlier on 21st May, after having appeared fairly consistently for some while beforehand.

What I did see was two juvenile and one mature avocet and still more shovelers. Simply because it was so big and placid, I finally persuaded myself to photograph the single black-headed gull.

Young Avocets

Female Shoveler

Black-headed Gull

It seems I forgot to get one of the male shoveler.  A bigger miss however was a flyover by a marsh harrier which was too brief to do much about.

Next I drove to nearby Dorman's Pool, the possible site for the small blue.  Being unfamiliar with the site though, I made the error of following the signs to the hide, which turned out not to be the right place at all and only resulted in me seeing a damselfly.

Azure Damselfy?

A more promising area proved to be the walk along the private road and North towards the viewpoint.  here there was some kidney vetch, the larval food plant for the small blue, though much more bird's foot trefoil and hence several more common blue, this time including several females.

Female Common Blue

There was another wall brown and, noticeably scarcer this year, a speckled wood as well as - so hard to find last year but hard to avoid this - a single dingy skipper.

Speckled Wood

Dingy Skipper

It was more than a little frustrating that, with other things to do, I ran out of time to complete the whole of the path. So no small blue but hopefully I'll start looking in the right place next time!

An Eventful Weekend!

Last Saturday morning I was on my way to Newcastle in bright weather and decided to to stop off at the place where I saw a good number of small heath butterflies last Spring, a derelict brownfield location abounding in litter that must now be described as 'somewhere between Swalwell and Dunston.'

I started seeing butterflies as soon as I arrived but instead of the expected small heath, they were clearly dingy skipper and in considerable numbers.  There were also very brief sightings of a flying blue shape I thought to be a possible holly blue and a brief stop by a pale looking moth.

Unfortunately all were decidedly skittish and I had big difficulties getting any sort of a photo. So instead of visiting Ryton Meadows after I finished my shopping, I returned again in the afternoon.

By now it was really warm and the skippers were much more placid.  In total I reckoned that I saw about thirty of the supposedly declining dingy skippers in all, some of which were clearly trying to mate.

Dingy Skipper

Dingy Skippers in love

So I reported all this to the North East Butterfly Conservation website only to receive an instant message saying the sighting was noted but would not be displayed to members as it contained 'sensitive information.'  All very John le Carré!

I also solved the mystery of the moth and the blue flying objects, which proved to be one and the same thing - a treble bar or perhaps more likely for a daytime appearance, lesser treble bar moth.

(Lesser) Treble Bar Moth

In sunlit flight they do have a somewhat azure appearance, hence the illusion of holly blue.

What attracted me to the area was the abundance of bird's foot trefoil nearby, which also meant numerous red-tailed bumblebees were about, but interestingly no common blues.

Red-tailed Bumblebee

Earlier on I had found a couple of items in the garden that I was able to tentatively identify as narrow-waisted wasps.  Again these had the experts humming and hawing as to their precise identity in Latin. Though there is a clear difference between the two, in broad terms and plain English they are apparently potter wasps.

Potter Wasp 1

Potter Wasp 2

On the Sunday I decided to check out the Calaminarian Grassland at Wylam to see if I could find the red-girdled mining bee there as suspected, and then proceeding to the Spetchells at Prudhoe in the hope of finally seeing my first ashy mining bee, which I had read is a bit of a rarity also with only about ten sightings a year - mainly by the River Tyne.

On arrival by bike I had no difficulty in finding bees buzzing around that had an amount of red on the abdomen and saw roughly around 20 examples, some larger and some smaller ones.  The trouble was that they were all hyperactive and only landed so briefly a snapshot was near impossible.

The big surprise was that two or three times a very dark bee of near bumblebee proportions turned up behaving in a similar manner before jetting off at speed.  When one did land it was unmistakeably  - an ashy mining bee.  In total I made about ten observations of an ashy bee but suspect at least some were the same individual.

I decided to take videos of both to enable proof of the identity of each.  Unfortunately, feedback on the item with the red abdomen was that it was unidentifiable and more likely to be a member of the Sphecodes species (Latin for blood bee.)

Here are both videos so you can judge for yourself! 

Ashy Mining Bee

Probable Blood Bee

I was well-pleased with my first ashy mining bee and blood bees are a known difficult area. It's also a pity that the second bee managed to spend all its time in the bug box under a slightly blurred area. However you can probably gather that I'm getting a bit fed up with the problems of insect identification. 

Basically I learnt what I know about bees from CR, who was a brilliant populariser and encouraged one's attempts to identify them using everyday English names.  Now I seem to only find amateur experts, clearly more knowledgeable than me, who complain about the quality of photos submitted, spout Latin terms that need to be looked up and frequently claim detailed identification is impossible.

I feel like telling them to tell they should give me their best opinion.  After all my field guide suggests there are predominantly three species of blood bee in North East England - Geoffroy's, box-headed and sandpit so it's a fair bet that it was one of them.  It would be no problem for me to explain that an identification is possible or probable rather than obscuring the issue with broad species types.  It's as if they fear losing their expert status if they actually get an identification wrong once in a while.

Anyway I never bothered with the numerous nomad bees I saw at Wylam, knowing that a clear verdict was unlikely.  I did see a couple of chocolate mining bees (andrena scotica for the Classics scholars) and a single, slightly worn holly blue butterfly.

Holly Blue

It's so much simpler with butterflies - in the North East at least.

A Busy time of Year

Over the past ten days, the number of sightings has really exploded and it's hard to keep tabs on it all.

It started with a ride to Byker and back with sightings of a mistle thrush, cormorant and two pairs of shelduck.  More engaged with the insects, significant for me however was the first sighting I have had this year of a comma butterfly.

Comma

That was on 23rd April.

Over the succeeding days, sightings of bees accelerated still mainly led by red mason bee. I managed to get a video of one of the nomad bees which produced a better than usual image, suggesting it is either a flavous or early nomad bee. 

Flavous or early?

There has also been a couple of smaller bees turning up but proving elusive because of a prevailing wind.  I fancied one might be blue mason bee (which has turned up before) but various photos didn't show good angles and advice suggests that it is Gwynne's mining bee.  The only decent shot of the other one still wasn't great and iNaturalist's lead suggestion of hawthorn mining bee seems unconvincing.

Gwynne's Mining Bee

Unidentified Mining Bee

Around the same time there were no great problems identifying the first female orange tip to visit the garden.

Orange Tip (female)

Confusion however again reigned on a walk at MiltonRigg Wood in Cumbria last Sunday with V&A. It was quite an impressive venue with a good amount of bilberry.

I saw a few bumblebees with a red-tailed stripe and thought I might have found a red-tailed bumblebee queen at one point.  However the one very poor photo I got showed a white stripe on the thorax so I suppose could have been a bilberry bumblebee queen.  Similarly thee were a couple of fleeting visits from carder bees but so brief it was impossible to assess if either were a moss carder bee.

Meanwhile V's merlin app was reporting all sorts of birds, notably including pied flycatcher and redstart (very feasible) as well as ring ouzel (somewhat dubious).  The birds were high up in the well-established trees, and only A managed to see a couple.  All I saw was a pair of mallards on the wetland area...

More successful was double outing with AMG on Thursday.

First target was the green hairstreak at Dipton Woods Corbridge.  Last time I was there the hairstreaks had started to occur in a recently-felled area near the North Eastern end of the path and I had a suspicion things might have developed.

Sure enough, we found them in numbers there, often in groups of two or three.

Green Hairstreak

Overall I counted thirty and that was without re-foraging this new 'hotspot' on the way back to the car. We did also visit the area where they've been seen in previous years but this old 'hotspot' appeared somewhat overgrown and only accounted for two of the sightings. Incidentally someone managed to see as many as 74 somewhere in County Durham.

Other sightings were a peacock, and about six each of speckled wood and small white, in both cases the first definite sightings I have noted this Spring.

The next stop was The Spetchells at Prudhoe, where we fully expected to see vast numbers of buffish mining bees.  But first there was a pleasant surprise when a holly blue turned up next to the path along the Tyne.

Holly Blue

There's been a few sightings of holly blue this Spring (maybe a good year for them?) and one turned up in my garden this morning as I was preparing to write this entry. It flapped around in front of me as I headed for the summer house for about a minute.  Unfortunately, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a plate of biscuits in the other, I was powerless to react.

Anyway, the very dry Eastern end of the Spetchells was virtually devoid of buff-tailed mining bees.  Walking west we did manage to contact them but it was the case of a maybe a hundred rather than the thousands around at the end of last April.  Also in attendance were of course good numbers of Gooden's nomad bee, their main predator.

Buffish Mining Bee

Gooden's Nomad Bee

I must say I haven't been too impressed with my Nikkon camera in recent attempts to capture images of insects. It does fine with birds but is often out-performed by my wee Panasonic for close-ups of smaller items. I think I may need to check the settings to see what can be improved.

Approaching teatime we took a quick look for the sand martins but they haven't appeared yet.  What we did see on the way back was a couple of brown shapes that may have been dingy skippers but we couldn't be anything like certain.

So the next day I took a brief ride to Pathhead Nature Reserve and did find a couple of them messing around on the northern bank of the area.  Even with the Panasonic, it was difficult to keep up with them.  They were very small and active and closed their wings almost immediately on landing so they were heavily camouflaged in the brownfield mini-landscape.

Dingy Skipper

I decided to take a tour round the rest of the site, seeing nothing else but when I returned they were still there as before.

I sat down to eat a couple of snacks thinking that one of them would inevitably offer me a better shot - and never saw them again over the next twenty minutes. Odd!

Win some, lose some

A minor furore of activity last Sunday, hoping to beat the declining weather.

I finally got to take a good look around the Cambois area for the grayling - but didn't see one!  The nearest I got was mistaking a meadow brown with a broader than usual white underwing patch as a possible.

Meadow Brown

This was disappointing as my two previous attempts were successful and so I found myself pondering the reasons.

In my head the best time for the grayling at Cambois is mid-July but I held off until August because the Butterfly Conservation website says that is when they are most on the wing.  But I noticed that most of the vegetation was dead and even meadow browns were scarce in comparison to my first visit, and there are news stories about Autumn arriving early because of the dry conditions...

Anyway there were a couple of minor consolations.  I visited a sunny overgrown bridge just past the plant hire company and found the first female common blue I have seen summer - which was also by far the tiniest one I've ever seen - as well as my first wall brown of the year.

Tiny Common Blue

Wall Brown

Afterwards I headed for the hills - the Havannah Three Hills Reserve near Hazlerigg to be precise. I wouldn't have done, having roundly criticised the deterioration of the area when I went last year.  However, there have been reports of a late dingy skipper and a silver-washed fritillary, which is almost non-existent this far North.

I started scouring the supposed butterfly hot spot, which has now been more or less completely overgrown by heather. Apart from a few whites and a red-tailed bumblebee, I did find one butterfly, a small heath.

Small Heath

However a more fortunate encounter was with another naturalist who reported seeing the dingy skipper, being chased around by male common blues in an area the other side of the rough path to the lake.

Obviously I took a look and did indeed come across said common blues (about 6 overall) and eventually the dingy skipper.  Seek and thou shalt find!

Common Blue

Dingy Skipper

The skipper struck me as being slightly small and rather more brown than ones I've seen before. But bearing the repeated trouble I had trying to see one earlier in the summer in mind, I was well satisfied.

Not knowing its exact location, I didn't realistically expect to see the fritillary, which was probably a bit of a one off.  However there was a nice surprise when I foraged around a bit on my way back to the main track:

Painted Lady

While there hasn't been a major irruption, there have been a few painted ladies around this summer and I still have hope that one may climb the 500' up to the buddleia in my garden.

Talking of which, butterfly sightings of previously mentioned species have continued in increased numbers.  Red admiral is still the most frequent and there has been one addition I was half expecting:

Hummingbird Hawk Moth

The tits continue to go nuts for the sunflower hearts I've been putting out and male and female bullfinches and nuthatches regularly visit the feeder as pairs.

Nuthatch

Lastly, I don't know what it is about the tailgate of my new car but pollinators seem to like it.  The latest visitor was a queen...

Buff-tailed Bumblebee Queen

It was obviously struggling, caught out by the disappearance of the sun on a cool day.  So I performed the old trick of bringing it in the house to warm up for forty minutes, after which it happily flew off.

Events and Non-Events

Cycling along the Tyne for events in Newcastle, I've repeatedly noted a number of shelduck combing the mudflats in the area of Dunston Staithes, on either side of the water.

Shelduck

There was another pair further out.

I think I can safely say that the early broods of speckled wood are doing better than last year as they have appeared regularly when I've been out, not least in my garden.  Even more regular is still the orange tip including females.

Not for the first time I've noticed that the males this year are often small.

Speckled Wood

Orange Tip (female)

I've now had green-veined white and small white in the garden too.  Seeing the speckled wood often reminds how common they were in my first year here, in complete contrast to Dumfries and Galloway.

Last Friday, I reckoned red mason bees were starting to appear, got one photo and, sure enough, there was activity around the bug hotel to prove the point:

Red Mason Bee

More mysterious was the appearance of this hairy specimen with a white face.  Trapping it in the bug box didn't give me any better idea.  However the male red mason bee has a white face, which would suggest I haven't seen one before.

Red Mason Bee (m)

The obvious rival would be the European Orchard Bee, which has so far only been sighted in the South of England.

Otherwise the main visitor has been a rather fat carder bee, so perhaps a queen though very intent on nectaring.

Last Sunday I set out full of confidence to Weetslade Country Park to visit an area where I had seen several butterflies last year and saw - precisely nothing.  The flowers in the target area were simply not out and although there was bird's food trefoil on the hills, it was sparse and not yet in full bloom.

So it was less confidence that I set off to revisit Path Head Nature Reserve, nominally targeting the dingy skipper but in retrospect, I think I achieved my goal.

At first it looked like another no show and I was already half way round before I saw any invertebrate at all.  Then I saw a tiny green thing with wings and antennae and so I thought maybe mini mining bees.

Mini Mining Bee and tiny green things

I wasn't sure and wondered if those on the left were wee wasps.  However a comment on facebook suggests they belong to the Oedemera species - basically flower beetles.  We live and learn!  The larger one on the right might be a common mini-miner but frankly identification of mini-miners is so dubious it's hardly worth the likes of me bothering.

Further round the track it livened up a bit as there were twenty plus sand martins flying around the wetland and visiting the wall constructed for them. They were whizzing around so fast that the camera couldn't cope, but I got a couple silhouetted against the wall at distance.

Sand Martins

A bit further along a white butterfly appeared and inconveniently settled partly obscured in a deep hollow, requiring another photographic chef d'oeuvre to identify it as a green-veined white.

Green-veined White

Then, chasing around unsuccessfully to catch up with the first two red-tailed bumblebees I've seen this month, I disturbed something sandy grey that flew across the path before becoming invisible..  Initially I dismissed it as probably a day-flying moth.  But when I later advanced on a clump of bird's foot trefoil to investigate a ladybird, something else grey flew up from behind the clump and I twigged that I might indeed have hit on two dingy skippers.

Tracking them in flight against the reclaimed brownfield site was however impossible.

And now a homely touch...  Last time I shopped for bird food I mistakenly bought sunflower seeds instead of suet pellets.  But on using them in a feeder I noticed that I was getting visits from a couple of furtive bullfinches.

Furtive Bullfinch

I'm now wondering whether I've seen them on feeders before. Probably not.

Oh and last of all, I found this fly in the dining room the other day, again in the never-seen-one-like-that-before category.  More consultation suggests that it is a footballer hoverfly and as far as I can see from what research I've done, that appears to be correct.

Footballer Hoverfly

What a great name! As I said, we live and learn.