In The Garden

Following my own lead that gardens are the best place to be for insects this year, I've spent a fair bit of time in my own.

The best day so far was yesterday, when I made a rather hurried contribution to the Big Butterfly Count, recording totals of Red Admiral 7, Peacock 7, Large White 5, Painted Lady 10, Comma 2, Green-veined White 2, Holly Blue 2, Humming Bird Hawk Moth 2

I don't think I saw a small white but it was a bit chaotic.

Clearly it is a painted lady year and it is currently being seen daily.

Painted Lady

Painted Lady (underwing)

I continue to find butterflies in compromising situations, which very much applies to two of the large whites in each others' clutches for more than ten minutes that I noticed.

Large Whites

It hasn't quite come out in the image but they had a strong yellowish sheen so that I first wondered if I'd uncovered a female brimstone.

An absentee from the party was however the small tortoiseshell, and I don't think I've seen one yet in the back garden at all.

I was however particularly chuffed to get a great video of one of the hummingbird hawk moths.  Unfortunately it was too big for blogger, so you'll have to look for my post on facebook today.

One minor disappointment was not being able to catch up with one of the holly blues, which again landed on the buddleia but didn't hang around.

Meanwhile my neighbours across the road think they are getting visited by a raven - and I think they may well be right.

Raven?

In fact the first shot I took showed a second beak behind the silhouette so maybe there's a pair...

The Dry Season

After my brief outing to Chopwell East Field, I decided to see if things were any better at the brownfield site I visited early in the year and saw dingy skipper.  If anything they were worse and all I could muster in 45 minutes was a single green-veined white, one shaded broad bar moth and a tatty looking female common blue:

Common Blue

Otherwise the bird's foot trefoil had all but vanished and grasshoppers and mini moths patrolled the large expanses of sunburnt vegetation.

I don't know why I have been catching up with so many amorous butterflies lately but a quick exploration of the surrounds at a nearby car park revealed a couple of large whites getting in the mood.

Large Whites

Taking a policy decision it might be better to visit formal gardens (which get watered by human-beings) I set off yesterday to Seaton Delaval Hall gardens.

Conditions weren't great with a strong wind and very brief glimpses of sunshine.  The main formal garden seemed to have more emphasis on symmetry and exotic appearance than on encouraging nature and bees were the main visitors.

I was however quite pleased to find another white-tailed bumblebee on the lavender and also turned up what may be a member of the globetail hoverfly group. 

White-tailed Bumblebee

Globetail Hoverfly?

I haven't yet seen a specific suggestion for the hoverfly that accounts for the yellow face.

When the sun flourished briefly, the few whites were joined by the occasional red admiral and one peacock appeared.

Red Admiral

Peacock

The buddleia is now out in the back garden and has today been visited by large and small white as well as peacock. red admiral and some fresh-looking commas, flying strongly.

Comma

Today a couple of holly blues flew over and one caused a slight surprise when it landed briefly on the buddleia.  Not knowing they did that, I momentarily mistook it for an undersized small white!

I've been bemoaning the lack of bees, partly the result of a clearout of dying and over-invasive plants.  However a new pink plant has appeared without my intervention and has proved popular with honey bees and early bumblebees.

Honey Bee

I checked the plant out and it appeared to be marjoram, which was duly confirmed by sampling one of the leaves.

Some Hits and Some Misses - Part 2

On the Sunday we headed down to Finglandrigg Wood in Cumbria. 

This was the latest in a series of attempts we have made to see the marsh fritillary there and once again we missed out, mainly seeing more of the butterflies from yesterday.

Two of three times we got excited, only to find we had been deceived by other brown species, namely comma and painted lady. Once when I lagged behind the others all that remained at a bushy area was a peacock.

Comma

Peacock

Part of the delay was that I had come across a honey bee and realised with surprise that it was the first one I've seen this summer.  We later had a discussion about the lack of bees observed.

There was also a marshy area where I kept an eye open for the large heath, this time with no success at all.

We moved on to Campfield Marsh where the objectives were slightly different, as marsh harriers and an osprey nest had been reported.  This time we were successful with both as they were visible from the hide. After many attempts, I did eventually get a clear shot of the osprey with the chicks peering from the nest.  With the marsh harrier I was less lucky but managed to observe it through the binoculars several times.

Osprey and chicks

Marsh Harrier

Not much was seen on the nearby pool - some lapwings and a few greylag geese. Later on we observed some young willow warblers moving through the trees with parental supervision.

There were also quite a few dragonflies around but the only one that settled was this common darter:

Common Darter

An added bonus was a pair of roe deer that were feeding on a farmer's field:

Roe Deer

By the time we made our way back to the car it was early evening but it remained warm and the butterflies were coming out in force.  Here there were more meadow brown than ringlet, but also red admiral, small tortoiseshell and painted lady.

Small Tortoiseshell

Red Admiral

Painted Lady

In fact we must have seen going on for 20 painted ladies, confirming the impression that this may go down as a 'painted lady year.'

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!

End of Summer Awards

It's become traditional to post something like "End of Summer" at this time of year when frankly I'm prone to early Autumn depression after the the end of the cricket season, and butterfly and bee sightings also become an increasingly rare occurrence.

I've been trying to avoid taking constant repeat photos of the same species over the summer months.  However this year I decided to reflect on which species have been the star features in my back garden and take photos of them before the buddleia flowers came to an inevitable end.

The overall winners were in no doubt.  In joint first place came red admiral, considerably outnumbering other members of the Nymphalidae family.  It was still being seen in good numbers on 16th September and the following couple of days before I went on on holiday on the 20th.

Red Admiral

In equal first place, and the most numerous species overall was the large white, including a big number of males.

Female Large White

Male Large White

The male large white also carries the distinction of being the last butterfly to be seen, studiously visiting the last sprigs of buddleia on 29th September - shortly after which date a storm moved in and effectively called a halt to proceedings.  

This meant that my annual ambition of seeing a butterfly on Buddleia after the start of October once again went unachieved this year.  There's only one wee sprig left now.  Ironically I have seen one more large white since - in Ashington Town Centre on 2nd October in decidedly overcast conditions.

Honourable mentions also go to small tortoiseshell, which proved to be a regular visitor once it got going at the beginning of August, and comma, which after an absence of about three weeks, turned up to surprise me by joining the admirals and tortoiseshells on the 16th.

Small Tortoiseshell

Meanwhile tits and nuthatches continued to visit the sunflower hearts feeders if somewhat less regularly.  Bullfinches haven't been sighted recently but I did catch a brief glimpse of a marsh tit while sheltering from the reduced temperatures in the summer house. I haven't seen one of those here for over a year.

I managed to lengthen my summer experience by spending five days in Berlin in continuing warm weather.  This wasn't at all a Nature trip but of course one or two things did turn up.

It's sometimes observed that bird species have different behaviour patterns in the British Isles compared to Europe.  The hooded crow for example we would need to look for in craggy seaside areas near the coast, but in Europe can be found strutting their stuff in posh residential areas, like this one I found in Westend district.

Hooded Crow

There were half a dozen of them later on in the day on Onkel-Tom-Straße in Zehlendorf. 

On the other side of the road, was a very red red squirrel bounding around in someone's front garden.

Red Squirrel

Near the Gedenkstätte Plötzensee when I visited there was a nice meadow verge where I saw but couldn't get a decent photo of some common carder bees that had a much more gingery appearance than the ones I see here. There were a few small white butterflies too but, in the whole five days, I interestingly in view of the fine weather, did not see another species of butterfly - just a few dragonflies and a hornet at a cemetery I visited.

A Mixed Bag

Keen to take advantage of the supposed heatwave, I set out for Wallington Hall Gardens on Sunday.  In fact the weather was cloudy all day and en route I thought I might do better with bees than butterflies.

On the whole the reverse was the case.  It was certainly warm enough, the winds were low and butterflies were out in abundance.

Particularly pleasurable was to see three painted ladies, to add to the one at Havannah the other week.

Painted Lady with Comma

Apart from commas, there were plenty of red admirals and small tortoiseshells, the former predominant on the several buddleia bushes, the latter more in other areas.  I don't recall having seen a peacock.

Other sightings were speckled wood and wall brown, the latter very briefly before being scared off, partly by a deranged young willow warbler that was going through the vegetation just a of couple yards away from me and appeared at times to be actually chasing the butterflies.

Deranged Willow Warbler

Not a well bird I suspect.

However it was the bees that produced the single business turn-up as I found several specimens of what I'm fairly certain were broken-belted bumblebees.

Broken-belted Bumblebee

Here's a second photo:

As a moorland species of Scotland and the Pennines, you'd have to ask what they were doing in a walled garden.  The yellow facial hair and legs are probably due to pollen.

The only other pollinators I noticed were honey bees, one with an orange tip to its tail and a plain-faced dronefly.

I decided to spend a good part of Bank Holiday Monday in the garden, just really to see if anything interesting would turn up. It was sunnier weather, but with a fair breeze most of the time.

Meanwhile I did a bit of counting of the most frequent butterflies.  Notably several commas turned up in the morning, but I did not see any after about 1.00 pm.  By contrast, small tortoiseshells were much more in evidence after about 3.30 pm.

Large whites, which have been very frequent this year, predominated but all three main variations of white were present.  On a very unscientific count, I reckoned that again the most numerous visitor, red admiral, outnumbered peacocks by a good bit over 10 - 1.  Perhaps it hasn't been a great year for peacocks.  My memory suggests that in past years, there have sometimes been more of them than red admirals.  Still no painted lady however.

As often on these occasions, a couple of things happened within a few minutes of each other.  An unfamiliar moth turned up on the buddleia.  It showed up orange in flight but looked a good deal different when settled.

New Moth

I assumed orange underwing but they don't settle with their wings tightly together.  A helpful suggestion on facebook is broad-bordered yellow underwing as orange underwing is in any case no longer on the wing in August.  Sure enough, internet photos show its colour is more orange than yellow.

Then up in the trees a blueish shape passed by.  It was a slightly less fleeting view than the one at Bradley Hall Gardens.  I'm pretty confident that it was the holly blue.

Meanwhile, the bullfinches kept sneaking up on the birdfeeders three or four yards in front of me.

Female Bullfinch

The male was rather more elusive.

In the evening I spent an hour or so at Marden Quarry hoping the night heron would turn up.  It didn't.  There were however a good number of gadwall to keep the mallards and coots company.

Gadwall

Long Live The Small Tortoiseshell!

My recent sighting of the twenty plumed moth drew a bit of interest on social media, one commentator noting that he's only ever seen one before and not in the North East while another contradicted that there are many records of it in Northumberland.  Well, I'd certainly never seen one before.

During the recent partial heatwave, I've been taking the opportunity to check out some of the local gardens. An interesting find two weeks ago was Birkheads Secret Gardens near Sunniside.

There wasn't much sun on arrival, but I was assured the butterfly garden would have some sightings on offer. I wasn't so sure and thought I'd check out a couple of hoverflies and bees en route.

Common Drone Fly

White-tailed Bumblebee

For the Latin speakers the drone fly is Eristalis tenax according to a local expert.  I'm pretty sure about the white-tailed bumblebee.

For the other hoverfly spotted we're stuck with generalisations.  Apparently it belongs to the Syrphini tribe, otherwise known as common flower flies.

Common Flower Fly

Anyway on reaching the butterfly section, there were indeed a good number to be seen, and I found I was taking the sort of shots I had been hoping to get in my garden:

Red Admiral with Peacocks

Peacocks warming themselves

One noted absentee was small tortoiseshell.  As it hadn't been turning up at home either, I have been reflecting that it used to be far more common and seems to be in decline compared to other members of the Nymphalidae family.  The reasons for its demise are not fully clear but there may be some incidence of parasites and habitat loss.

Of more interest on the day was to learn from the lady in the wee shop that the County Recorder for Durham had spotted a brimstone in the Gardens, considerably further north than its known habitats.  It's not much on the wing just now but another visit later in the year seems obligatory.  

I was also struck by the number of flower meadows on the farm nearby.

Anyway six days later I was at Talkin Tarn for a catch-up with V&A.  We did a little walk but in more sombre weather only two butterflies were spotted, a small white and - you've guessed it - a small tortoiseshell!

Small Tortoiseshell

Another bit of useful learning was to find numerous clumps of devil's bit scabious and we wondered if the marsh fritillaries present elsewhere in Cumbria have discovered its existence.  It's their food plant.

Devil's Bit Scabious

Last Sunday, I was back on the garden trail, initially visiting Whickham Hermitage Garden at Newburn which wasn't too impressive. Flanked by high trees on the South side, it was hard to see that it would get a lot of sunshine.

Although smaller, the Tyne Country Park Sensory Garden at Newburn was more productive, producing all three main whites, the main members of Nymphalidae including comma - and of course a couple of small tortoiseshell.  The only absentee was painted lady.

I again focused briefly on hoverflies and was struck by the pattern on this one:

Drone Fly

This is another drone fly, exact identity uncertain.

My last call was at Bradley Hall Gardens which was the largest and had the biggest variation of flora. 

Butterfly sightings were similar to those at Newburn and with similar numbers, but with four or five small tortoiseshells.

Small Tortoiseshell

... plus I think I may have caught a fleeting view of a holly blue, though I didn't see it long enough to be certain.

Typically of course the small tortoiseshell then started to turn up in my garden after an absence of several weeks during which I had occasionally wondered if the comma had effectively replaced it.

I did a couple of counts for the Big Butterfly Count  Over the two, the highest numbers were for large white and red admiral, followed by comma, peacock, small white and green-veined white - and just one small tortoiseshell.

Nevertheless it is still with us!