On Sunday I had planned to cycle out to Parkhead on the Waskerley Way. I was thinking that I hadn't seen a small copper since returning from Avignon and that seems to be a good area to look for them. However the plan had to be abandoned as the Derwent Walk cycle track 14 is still closed. I could have sworn I'd seen a sign saying that it would only be closed until early July.
So another plan was called for and I decided to head in the opposite direction, effectively limiting my scope to revisiting a couple of gardens near the Tyne.
Comma
Cutting across to Blaydon, I hit the Keelman's Way westwards and quickly spotted a holly blue in the area of Blaydon Station. As it's a known site for small copper, I took a quick look around Ryton Meadows but, as elsewhere, the vegetation was so dry that the chances were minimal. In spite of one fleeting sighting of something brown, I doubled back and crossed Newburn Bridge to the local Community Garden.
Here the buddleia was producing the usual suspects - several painted ladies, red admiral, peacock and a good few comma.
As in my garden the other day however, the notable absentee was the small tortoiseshell.
People worry about the small tortoiseshell and for a while its decline was a bit of a mystery, but now ascribed to climate change, altered hibernation patterns and parasitic flies.
Moving on I took another look at the Calaminarian Grassland at Wylam to check - rather late in the year, or so I thought - the story that there might be harebells attracting the gold-tailed melitta. In fact there were a good few harebells, if somewhat sparsely distributed, though I could not find any sort of bee activity on them. One very small item was dismissed as a possible wasp.
Having expectedly also failed to find anything in the small Wylam Nature Reserve (more trees than flowers) I went up the hill to Bradley Gardens as the most likely of all to produce something interesting.
It wasn't long before, among the usual red admiral, peacock and plentiful painted ladies, I encountered another holly blue.
Holly Blue
It wasn't long either before a few more turned up and by the end of the day I reckoned I saw about five including a late visitor in my own garden. In fact a couple that flew past overhead looked very blue and I did wonder about common blue, however unlikely in a formal garden.
More of a surprise was the definite sighting of a couple of small copper, thereby achieving the original purpose of going out in the first place:
Small Copper
Neither would I have bet any money on a meadow brown turning up there. Mayne it's another statement about the arid nature of the grassland.
Meadow Brown
As ever the painted ladies were frequently posing on the ground. The only other butterfly I caught on film was a rather battered green-veined white.
Painted Lady
Green-veined White
There were a few hoverflies around at both the gardens which i basically chose to ignore apart from one. Apparently it is a common tachinid.
Common Tachinid
Today I had a slightly strange sighting in the garden - a nuthatch scurrying over the path and stones picking up bits of food. I didn't know they did that. I have also positively identified a couple of small whites on the buddleia. I wonder if I've been overlooking them?
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...
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.
Not far East of the Avignon suburb Les Angles, there was a nice South facing bank where I spent a bit of time. It was quickly possible to see marbled white and a number of suspected fritillaries and brown butterflies, which turned out to be meadow browns. (I had hoped for gatekeeper!) Very conspicuous also was the violet carpenter bee, as was the case throughout the whole trip. I hadn't realised how big their wingspan is in flight. Nearby I noticed a parked lorry whose driver seemed to give me an ironic glance as I cycled past..
Not far down the road the first white admiral appeared, as did a single, slightly dilapidated holly blue, the only time I saw one on the whole trip.
Violet Carpenter Bee
Holly Blue
In roughly the same area the first painted lady occurred as did the almost inevitable speckled wood, the South European version obviously.
Painted Lady
Speckled Wood
More excitingly the first for me new insect was this scarce chaser, a fine looking thing:
Scarce Chaser
It does occur in the UK but rarely according to AI:- "Threatened, it primarily inhabits slow-flowing river flood plains and marshes in southern and eastern England." However the cycle track to Aramon was as dry as a bone.
pattern and wing shape were wrong, though the upper wing position could easily lead to mistaking the vertical wing stripe of the admiral for the horizontal stripe of the glider. I hope that makes sense?
On the way hope I took a rest on a lone bench near Avignon and was eventually able to identify a spotted fritillary, which was particularly interested in the orange reflectors on my bike. It must have been feeling amorous.
I was keeping an eye open for the South facing bank near Les Angles again but all of the vegetation had been cut back and I remembered the lorry driver from earlier.
Day 2
This was the day that I planned to tour all the gardens I could find in Avignon, partly because this proved a successful approach when I visited Bordeaux last year and partly because I was looking to find at least some shelter from very strong winds gusting up to 40 mph.
Unfortunately none of the Avignon parks I visited had much to offer the naturalist although the Jardin des Doms is a big project with potential (and was the most windswept) and I elected not to join the hordes of tourists visiting the Palais des Papes.
What I did find however was a very nice piece of flower meadow sitting for no apparent reason next to a car park near the Chemin des Canaux cycle track. Here there were a lot of small coppers for whom the mating season had clearly begun, making it easy to spot the difference between the males and females.
Male Small Copper
Female Small Copper
I don't think I've ever noticed this gender difference before. The male is well darker.
Common blues were also mating and less easy to catch up with as constantly on the move and a few large skipper were also sighted.
However, the one that got me really going was a scarce swallowtail, drifting repeatedly around the sight. I have seen them before but seldom and did not know that they were to turn up again over the coming days.
Scarce Swallowtail (underwing)
A couple of interesting bees turned up too, and I think the one on the right might just be a white-tailed bumblebee
Last Saturday morning I was on my way to Newcastle in bright weather and decided to to stop off at the place where I saw a good number of small heath butterflies last Spring, a derelict brownfield location abounding in litter that must now be described as 'somewhere between Swalwell and Dunston.'
I started seeing butterflies as soon as I arrived but instead of the expected small heath, they were clearly dingy skipper and in considerable numbers. There were also very brief sightings of a flying blue shape I thought to be a possible holly blue and a brief stop by a pale looking moth.
Unfortunately all were decidedly skittish and I had big difficulties getting any sort of a photo. So instead of visiting Ryton Meadows after I finished my shopping, I returned again in the afternoon.
By now it was really warm and the skippers were much more placid. In total I reckoned that I saw about thirty of the supposedly declining dingy skippers in all, some of which were clearly trying to mate.
I also solved the mystery of the moth and the blue flying objects, which proved to be one and the same thing - a treble bar or perhaps more likely for a daytime appearance, lesser treble bar moth.
(Lesser) Treble Bar Moth
In sunlit flight they do have a somewhat azure appearance, hence the illusion of holly blue.
What attracted me to the area was the abundance of bird's foot trefoil nearby, which also meant numerous red-tailed bumblebees were about, but interestingly no common blues.
Red-tailed Bumblebee
Earlier on I had found a couple of items in the garden that I was able to tentatively identify as narrow-waisted wasps. Again these had the experts humming and hawing as to their precise identity in Latin. Though there is a clear difference between the two, in broad terms and plain English they are apparently potter wasps.
Potter Wasp 1
Potter Wasp 2
On the Sunday I decided to check out the Calaminarian Grassland at Wylam to see if I could find the red-girdled mining bee there as suspected, and then proceeding to the Spetchells at Prudhoe in the hope of finally seeing my first ashy mining bee, which I had read is a bit of a rarity also with only about ten sightings a year - mainly by the River Tyne.
On arrival by bike I had no difficulty in finding bees buzzing around that had an amount of red on the abdomen and saw roughly around 20 examples, some larger and some smaller ones. The trouble was that they were all hyperactive and only landed so briefly a snapshot was near impossible.
The big surprise was that two or three times a very dark bee of near bumblebee proportions turned up behaving in a similar manner before jetting off at speed. When one did land it was unmistakeably - an ashy mining bee. In total I made about ten observations of an ashy bee but suspect at least some were the same individual.
I decided to take videos of both to enable proof of the identity of each. Unfortunately, feedback on the item with the red abdomen was that it was unidentifiable and more likely to be a member of the Sphecodes species (Latin for blood bee.)
Here are both videos so you can judge for yourself!
Ashy Mining Bee
Probable Blood Bee
I was well-pleased with my first ashy mining bee and blood bees are a known difficult area. It's also a pity that the second bee managed to spend all its time in the bug box under a slightly blurred area. However you can probably gather that I'm getting a bit fed up with the problems of insect identification.
Basically I learnt what I know about bees from CR, who was a brilliant populariser and encouraged one's attempts to identify them using everyday English names. Now I seem to only find amateur experts, clearly more knowledgeable than me, who complain about the quality of photos submitted, spout Latin terms that need to be looked up and frequently claim detailed identification is impossible.
I feel like telling them to tell they should give me their best opinion. After all my field guide suggests there are predominantly three species of blood bee in North East England - Geoffroy's, box-headed and sandpit so it's a fair bet that it was one of them. It would be no problem for me to explain that an identification is possible or probable rather than obscuring the issue with broad species types. It's as if they fear losing their expert status if they actually get an identification wrong once in a while.
Anyway I never bothered with the numerous nomad bees I saw at Wylam, knowing that a clear verdict was unlikely. I did see a couple of chocolate mining bees (andrena scotica for the Classics scholars) and a single, slightly worn holly blue butterfly.
Holly Blue
It's so much simpler with butterflies - in the North East at least.
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!
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.
