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

Bishop Middleham Quarry

After a year long covid-inspired delay, a few of us from the Naturewatch group finally managed a trip to Bishop Middleham Quarry, which is one of the highlights of the Durham magnesium limestone belt.

It was indeed a productive habitat and very easy on the eye.  The flora are probably the most outstanding, notably the helleborines and orchids, of which we saw I think four varieties.  The ones not pictured were common spotted and fragrant orchid.

Pyramidal Orchid

Dark Red Helleborine

Bee Orchid

Brown Argus

Of course a large part of my interest was the hope of seeing some less common butterflies but the conditions were rather overcast and our hopes were not high.  Fortunately we got the best of it around midday wheen a number of ringlets started to show and it wasn't too long before I saw the star of the show - my first ever brown argus in this country and it proved to be the first of several.

Distinctly small in size, I was also surprised by the amount of blue on the body.  I also found myself wondering about nomenclature as the Northern Brown Argus is supposed to occur here too. However my European Butterfly Guide talks instead of Mountain Argus but they appear to be the same thing.  As the Northern version of the northern/mountain species has a white not black upperwing spot, I'm confident it wasn't what we were seeing. Never mind the fact there are examples with black spot within a white spot!

Away from the wonderful world of terminology, further butterfly species sighted were meadow brown and small heath.  Thre was just one common blue and no appearance by (perhaps surprisingly) small copper and less surprisingly wall brown (not sunny enough) and dingy skipper.

Meadow Brown

Small Heath

Ringlet

Only two burnet moths were spotted plus one other I needed to research to discover it was a blackneck but there were surprisingly few bees.  The ones that were out were mainly carder bees and red-tailed bumblebees. 
    

Six Spot Burnet

Blackneck Moth

Red-tailed Bumblebee

It's funny how you see things again not long after you've seen them.  While helping out at the tennis club yesterday there were a couple more of the common wave moth I spotted in Cumbria.  And this morning while out for a paper there was another small bumblebee on lilac that had a red tail.  The trouble is it also had a second yellow stripe on the abdomen and I had neither camera nor mobile phone on me.  So I'll have to pass on that one.