Quiet Days in the Garden

A bit of a quiet phase after the excitements of Saltwell Park.

I know I said that butterfly snaps on the buddleia have been too frequent but there had to be an exception for the lone painted lady that appeared around 10 days ago.

Painted Lady

It's only the second one I've seen this year and I think the first in the garden since the Painted Lady Year in 2019.

A trend in the garden has been the increase in commas and I've wondered if this has been at the expense of the small tortoiseshell.  Pretty much absent at the start of summer, the latter have now started to appear and I did actually have two at the same time last week.  But the commas certainly have the majority, reversing the usual trend.  They did disappear for a time after heatwave but are now back in small numbers, presumably a fresh new brood. 

Most of the whites coming to the buddleia continue to be Large Whites with just the odd small white.

The buddleia certainly attracts large numbers of bumblebees but nothing out of the ordinary i.e. buff-tailed and white-tailed plus occasional carder bees.  Then yesterday a massive tree bumblebee turned up, big enough in fact to be a queen.  I think there is a theory that tree bumblebees can overwinter.

One surprise was an appearance by a hover fly I've never seen before.  It was extremely easy to identify it as a pellucid fly adventuring out from the nearby trees.

Pellucid Fly

A walk in the Alnwick area last week only produced a worn speckled wood.  As elsewhere much of the vegetation had dried up.

Batmen and Bee Grabbers

In spite of fine weather, butterflies seemed slow to start appearing on the buddleia this year and did not come in substantial numbers until the first week in August.  Normally one or two tortoiseshells visit the small bushes in the front garden during July but this year, the first non-white visitor was a comma.  In fact small tortoiseshells have not been at all frequent, whereas commas have become considerably more common - up to four at the same time visiting the back garden.

The predominant species besides have been peacock and large white with occasional small white, speckled wood and red admiral.  There have also been two flyovers by holly blue and I was quite pleased to identify a single green-veined white, a second brood specimen that could easily be taken for a small white at first glance.

Comma

Green-veined White

It's becoming an annual routine to photograph nymphalidae on the buddleia each year so I'm thinking to do less of it.  However, one more irregular occurrence while mowing the lawn nearby was this moth, which I take to be a large yellow underwing.

Large Yellow Underwing

Last Sunday I went on another excellent bee walk led by Charlotte Rankin at the Swedish Bee Garden in Saltwell Park in Gateshead.  As well as all the main species of bumblebee, there were a couple of red-tailed cuckoo bees and a vestal/gypsy cuckoo bee and a few minute furrow bees with a greenish body sheen.  On checking, there are a vast number of furrow bee species but one that seems more common in our area is the turquoise furrow bee.

Red-tailed Cuckoo Bee

With Charlotte's assistance we got into some of the less normal hoverfly species, including the batman hoverfly and swollen-thighed hoverfly and there were even some bee grabbers, flies that attach themselves to bees in flight to lay their eggs in the bee's waist.  I had the good fortune to find a colourful example, which from research may well be the four-banded bee grabber.  Several of us had never heard of bee grabbers before including myself so I can't claim to be an expert..

Four-banded bee grabber?

As we were mostly capturing species in pots for identification, most of the resulting photos unfortunately failed to meet my tough editorial standards.

Lastly I got out for a day's fishing at Brenkley on Wednesday.  In an effort to catch regularly, I float fished maggot close to the surface and must have caught 20-30 roach and perch, almost all of them pretty tiny.  Meanwhile the leger rod I put out for bigger fish did nothing whatsoever.  Apparently a lot of the carp were trying to shelter from the sun under the bridge at the other end of the pond.

I'm losing interest in coarse fishing slowly but surely and think I might try out my late dad's vintage fly fishing gear before winter sets in.

Tales of the Unexpected

In anticipation of a decent plum harvest this autumn, I decided to remove the peanut feeders from the plum tree and hang them temporarily on the washing line to prevent the birds from nibbling at the ripening plums.

They took a bit of getting used to the feeders zipwiring along the washing line and I thought it would be amusing to take a photo of the new set-up in action.

By total chance what I actually got was a shot of a marsh tit sharing one feeder with a blue tit.

Marsh Tit(l) and Blue Tit

That was really quite a chance as visits from a marsh tit are particularly seldom and I didn't see one at all last year.

The loser in this adjustment was the cheeky nut-stealing squirrel who spent a couple of days trying to work out how get onto the feeder and eventually giving up after crashing through the buddleia bush a couple of times.

Last Friday I led a Naturewatch walk around Wingate Quarry Nature Reserve, which I'm pleased to say impressed those present with its variety of butterflies (once the sun got out) and abundant flora.  There weren't as many marbled white about as I had expected but there were good numbers of large and small white, common blue and small heath.  In terms of flowers, knapweed, pussy willow and ragwort but I left it to our resident experts to identify numerous rarities including fragrant orchid.

Common Blue (f)	Common Blue (m)
Marbled White	Small Heath
Small Skipper	Painted Lady

The painted lady was a bit of a bonus, the first one most of us thought we had seen this summer.

Even before the sun came out, bumblebees were plentiful, in particular red-tailed bumblebees of both genders.  I hadn't noticed the males so far this year.  Some bees had been considerably blanched by the sun during the recent hot weather.

I spotted one particularly corpulent bee which I believe was a gypsy or vestal cuckoo bee, remembering that they are hard to separate in the field.

Gypsy or Vestal Cuckoo Bee

Puffins and Terns

I now strongly feel I'm playing catch up on summer events and not winning.

Anyway, just over two weeks ago Vicki, Alex and I achieved a target by taking the Coquet Island boat trip.  On the way we made a brief trip to the Hauxley reserve, which however was somewhat disappointing.  The water was low, species fairly limited and the low sun made it hard to identify what was there.

We did catch up with some female eider ducks and thought we saw some little grebe but others were harder to identify.

Female Eider

? Duck

I was for example uncertain about the bird on the right above.

In fact we had better luck with non-avian species, coming across small tortoiseshell, common blue and common blue damselfly.

Common Blue

Common Blue Damselfly

Of course avian flu has been a factor all along the Northumberland coast but you wouldn't have thought so on sailing round Coquet Island, where there were still birds in big numbers.  Apparently the RSPB warden has been bagging up any dead birds for disposal.  A large number of atlantic seals just off the island suggested they had plenty to be interested in as well.

The main reason for going was to see the puffins for the first time and we saw plenty, even flying across our path when we were still a little way off the island.  There was a bit of a swell on and it was hard to hold the camera steady to get pictures with the boat tossing around.  But perseverance paid off in the end.

Puffin

Puffins

The rare roseate terns were also present and I could see the area where they were supposed to be.  Unfortunately I couldn't get clear photographs at all and could only really identify common, arctic and (without realising it at the time) sandwich tern.

Terns

The sandwich tern is the large, white bird in the centre of the near foreground above.  The arctic terns have lighter tail and trailers than the common terns - or so I understand.

Arctic Tern

But it was the puffins who were the real entertainment.