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.
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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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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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.
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