More Flies and Other Creatures

A rather cold and intermittently wet spell of weather having reduced the number of appearances in the garden, I went back to a little birdwatching with F on Friday at Shotton Pools.

I wanted to see if the avocets had continued to frequent the shallow ponds and this was indeed the case, although numbers were not large. Also about were plenty of greylag geese, a few lapwing and a lot of heard-but-not-seen skylarks.

Avocet

Lapwing

I didn't notice at the time that the avocet has managed to fish something out of the water.

We were a bit mystified by the set-aside crop in a big farmer's field nearby, which turns out to be something called crimson clover.

Crimson Clover

A day after the latest captive in the summer house was a very small, moth-type item that wasn't keen to stay still.  So it was hard to be sure of identification but I'm pretty sure, having had one before that it is a drain fly.

Drain Fly

I think I may have solved the mystery of the fly I couldn't identify in my last post.  This time I managed to get better photos, enabling a remote suggestion of green longhorn moth.

Green Longhorn Moth

Green Longhorn Moth (wings open)

On close inspection the horns, which are indeed very long, can be seen like a length of fine fishing line.

So the moth I thought I saw was a fly and the fly I thought I saw was a moth...

The next thing was that a single large white butterfly (female) turned up from nowhere.

Large White

It's the first I've seen this year and a little surprising that it made its garden debut before a small white has managed to appear.

To complete the pattern of unpredictability, a large red damselfly passed by and another minute wasp (I think) but, more reliably, there was of course a nomad bee as well as a chocolate mining bee I didn't manage to photograph.

Large Red Damselfly

Nomad

I keep posting the nomads to iNaturalist but no-one wants to risk an identification.

Today in not great conditions, I saw my first common carder bee of the year. They'll be back.

Troubled By Flies...

 In spite of changeable weather, sporadic sightings have still continued.

A week ago on Sunday was the last day clear of rain, when on a bike ride I spotted the first red admiral I have seen since early March plus a few whites, although still to find a small white that will pose for the cameras.

Apart from that I found  my first garden bumblebee of the season - a queen - rooting around the ground last Friday. 

Garden Bumblebee Queen

You can just make out the yellow strip straggling abdomen and thorax though the the tail stripe is almost totally invisible.

Since then it has been very hitty-missy but I did manage a few sightings on Tuesday.

Heading into the summerhouse I discovered a small bumblebee battering itself on the glass. It never settled but was easy enough to capture in a bug box, where it perhaps understandably continued to struggle.  However I saw enough to identify it as a male early bumblebee.  The giveaway was a small orange tip at the tail.

Early Bumblebee

I think this is the first time I've seen a male.

When I left the summerhouse immediately afterwards to check something else I returned to find, comically enough, a buff-tailed bumblebee battering itself against the same pane of glass. This time the bug box served as a rescue mechanism.

Otherwise the supposedly rare red-girdled mining bee put in a lengthy visit (the fourth in total) and a large nomad bee posed perfectly of a leaf of garlic mustard. 

Another Nomad

As ever, it's hard to identify nomad bees precisely though I would say it seemed different to the one I mentioned in my last post.

Before that, I was starting to be pestered by flies.  Not because they were getting intrusive but because I couldn't identify them.  I did get as far as eventually realising the one on the left might not be a common dronefly but the second one had me completely confused.

Tapered Dronefly

member of Platycheirus family

No I'd never heard of the Platycheirus family either. I'm relying on expert testimony here.

Then something strange happened.  What appeared to be two small moths started circling each other aggressively like some butterflies do, except that when one landed it was clearly a fly with broad, darkly-patterned wings.  I got a photo of it but the features didn't show up well.  Also of little help is the brief video I got of one of them flying off:-

Unidentified Flying Objects

I've never seen anything like it before.

Shortly afterwards the skies closed in.  Maybe they'll re-appear one day. 

A Turn up for the Bee Books

Well the mining bees are turning up thick and fast and testing the depths of my rusty knowledge.  Unfortunately a lot of them are coming up as unidentifiable or suggestions from the likes of iNaturalist or Google Lens are inconsistent or contaminated by American sources.

However one particular lead has struck gold as it appears I may have seen a bit of a rarity - the red-girdled mining bee.

Red-girdled Mining Bee

This has been confirmed as feasible by a local expert who now thinks it may have been under reported in the North East as previously thought only to occur on the Spetchells.  But it occurred to me that I had seen something very similar at the Calaminarian Grassland near Wylam three years ago, when I thought it was a blood bee.

Anyway it has been turning up in the garden regularly (sunshine permitting.)  Here's an attempted close-up in the bug box:-

Close-up

This came from a video that I accidentally stopped after four seconds... Doh!

Otherwise a degree of confusion reigns over visiting mining bees in terms of establishing what kind of mining bee is visiting, for example this one:

Mining Bee

Or this one:

Mining Bee

... whereas this one could be the first honey bee of the year or another mining bee.

What seems clear from the number I get plus nomads and beeflies is that there must be a promised land of mining bees nearby.  Old maps of the area where I live are interestingly marked "sewage works."

By contrast the plentiful red mason bees are easy to spot.  They are starting to show some tentative interest in the bug hotel and still great fans of the summer house.

Red Mason Bee

Unfortunately one silly red mason bee managed to fall into a bucket of water, after which I fortunately managed to rescue it and found a sunny spot so it could dry off before flying again.

After bath

Before flying

Nevertheless, I still managed to get confused by one item.

Unidentified

This has the shape of a red mason bee but appears a good deal darker.  I wondered if it was a male but not convinced.

Not a great photo anyway.

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!