Home and Away

Last weekend I visited V&A plus baby.  We took quite a long trip to the Loch of the Lowes which promised various interesting sightings including osprey, red squirrel and beaver but overall we were underwhelmed.  True enough the entry fee (!) for the two hides did give us a good view of an osprey nest but apparently the beavers are only around early and late when the centre is closed and none of the seven red squirrels resident showed up.

Osprey Chick

We took a bit of a wander and while the vegetation looked promising, there was an eerie lack of bird song once we were a hundred yards away from the car park.  The only thing of interest was a tiny scavenger crossing the road which turned out to be a vole and obligingly fed on the roadside verge for a while. 

Vole

I don't think I've seen a vole before.

We decided to move on and settled on Loch Leven RSPB Reserve which proved more interesting. Ironically, one of the first things we saw was an adult osprey hunting and I was quite pleased to get some in-shot flights at distance as well as a video:

Osprey

There was a large area of flower meadow that, although very parched as elsewhere, looked potentially attractive.  I was happy enough to find a lone small copper on heather near the footpath.

Small Copper

There were a lot of greylag geese in the fields by the lake but while the rest of us were taking a rest, A managed to spot three ruddy shelduck among them.  Unfortunately they proceeded to move behind some reeds and, late in the day, we must have spent another half hour or more trying to spot them.  All I managed to get was a blurry head and shoulders shot but it is clear enough for identification purposes.

Ruddy Shelduck

This wasn't a first sighting as there were some at Shibdon Pond just after I moved here.

On the way back out we noted some interesting flowers and came upon a cinnabar caterpillar as well as being greeted by some baby house martins nesting outside the visitors' shop.

Cinnebar Caterpillar

House Martins

The overall reflection was that Loch Leven would be well worth another visit earlier in the summer.

Back at home I've realised I haven't observed a garden bumblebee yet this year, and so decided perhaps belatedly to check out the bees in the garden more closely.  I haven't found one but have seen on at least three occasions a broken-Belted bumblebee.

Broken-belted Bumblebee

Really you'd expect to find them in the Pennine moorlands but this isn't the first summer they've visited the garden.

Otherwise the usual suspects have turned up regularly on the buddleia, record numbers of hummingbird hawk moth in particular. However another surprise was to see a speckled wood on it on two occasions.

Speckled Wood

Also seen on two occasions has been a willow warbler visiting the plum tree, but it has proved very adept at making a quick exit when its presence was noted.

Lastly, riding at fair speed along the Derwent Walk near Swalwell on Thursday I glanced right to see three or four ponies feeding at the edge of a field except that one was clearly - a zebra.

On the Bike in Avignon - Day by Day (Part 1)

Day 1

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.

After a break in Aramon I investigated a hilly area near Théziers where there a lot of white admirals and my fist sighting of a male cleopatra while I sat eating cherries bought in Aramon market.  Here, remembering my one off experience near Bordeaux last year, I started to wonder if some the really large butterflies I could see down the hillside were in fact hungarian gliders.  In retrospect however the flight

Spotted Fritillary

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

Furrow Bee

White-tailed Bumblebee?

I can't identify the furrow bee more closely.

Out and About

Last Wednesday I took a trip to the Tees Estuary hoping I might be in with a chance of catching up with a couple of rarities - the glossy ibis and the small blue butterfly. In the event I was successful with neither but still found a few things to catch my interest.

Starting at Saltholme RSPB I headed initially to Paddy's Pond, having found the pollinator garden virtually free of pollinators.  Here the view was largely dominated by a huge number of black-headed gulls with just a few pochard and shovelers for a little variety.  Turning back afterwards however, I did start to see some butterflies and was pleasantly surprised to find, on a path interestingly marked "Wrong Way", my first wall brown of this year.

Not sure how I missed it earlier, but I then immediately happened upon a nice area of banked flower meadow where there was another first of season sighting - at least 15 common blues, all but one of them male.

Wall Brown

Common Blue

A couple of orange-brown butterflies passing over the same area couldn't be identified.

The common blue turned up at several points as I wandered around the site but only one other female appeared.

Adjourning for lunch in the café, I was able to observe some common (I think) terns hovering to hunt insects from the surface of the water, the view occasionally interrupted by hunting sand martins from a man-made nesting wall. 

Tern hovering...then diving

Unfortunately I didn't manage to film one of the terns actually splashing into the water.

Here again there were a few pochards and shovelers.

Pochard

Next destination was the Fire Station Pond, which was where the glossy ibis had been reported. However I knew the chances of seeing were slim as the last sighting noted on the whiteboards was a few days earlier on 21st May, after having appeared fairly consistently for some while beforehand.

What I did see was two juvenile and one mature avocet and still more shovelers. Simply because it was so big and placid, I finally persuaded myself to photograph the single black-headed gull.

Young Avocets

Female Shoveler

Black-headed Gull

It seems I forgot to get one of the male shoveler.  A bigger miss however was a flyover by a marsh harrier which was too brief to do much about.

Next I drove to nearby Dorman's Pool, the possible site for the small blue.  Being unfamiliar with the site though, I made the error of following the signs to the hide, which turned out not to be the right place at all and only resulted in me seeing a damselfly.

Azure Damselfy?

A more promising area proved to be the walk along the private road and North towards the viewpoint.  here there was some kidney vetch, the larval food plant for the small blue, though much more bird's foot trefoil and hence several more common blue, this time including several females.

Female Common Blue

There was another wall brown and, noticeably scarcer this year, a speckled wood as well as - so hard to find last year but hard to avoid this - a single dingy skipper.

Speckled Wood

Dingy Skipper

It was more than a little frustrating that, with other things to do, I ran out of time to complete the whole of the path. So no small blue but hopefully I'll start looking in the right place next time!

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!

Madeira Day 6 and Evaluation

"So what happened  to Madeira Day 5?" you might understandably ask.  The simple answer is I had a day off on the sun lounger and in the swimming pool!

Day 6 was my last day in Madeira but an evening flight left me time for another short walk.

My original intention was to walk the road to Quinte Grande for a snack but on getting there sooner than expected and not feeling hungry I changed plan. It wasn't far to get to Campanario, so I decided to revisit briefly the Levada do Norte and make my way back to Cabo Girao via the Vereda das Fumas instead of through the tunnel.

Although I only spent half an hour on the levada, it was pretty productive although the wagtails were no longer around.  

There were firstly a couple of hoverflies I wasn't sure about and still haven't identified.

Hoverfly

Hoverfly

There was a suggestion that the one on the left is a marmalade hoverfly but I'm not convinced - it's plainer in pattern, darker and has a different body shape to ones I have seen.

 Near the area where I saw the painted lady two days ago a small white flew over and settled on the other side of the levada.

Small White

What is interesting here is the paucity of markings. Presumably a male, the spot is very pale and there is a complete lack of making on the edge of the upper forewing.

Of course there was a profusion of speckled woods and this one is an example where the background colour of the upper wing is a bit paler than the one I saw in the Tropical Garden.

Speckled Wood

Also settling very briefly was a butterfly that was clearly a blue but on checking the hurried photograph, clearly not the common blue I first expected.

Long-tailed Blue

In fact it is a long-tailed blue, known locally as pea blue, but the poor focus makes it hard to see the underwing pattern and of course the tails are not in view.

Crossing the road onto the lower section of the levada, a red admiral was for a change obliging enough to pose for the camera.

Red Admiral

However the next stretch, which is partially shaded by a rocky skyline, was less productive until the very end of the Vereda das Fumas.  Here there was a brownfield area with plenty of flowers that was attracting the attention of several clouded yellow.  I thought one I saw might be a female and spent some time trying to chase it down.  In fact I think they were all males.

Clouded Yellow

I like the detail on the head anyway. Today I had the feeling that the butterflies were just starting to get really active after a week of good weather.

After an ice cream at the tourist trap, I took a last brief walk up to the capella but saw nothing there of interest and it was time to head for home.

_______________________________________

In terms of overall comments, Madeira has to be mainly about the flowers.  I was really struck on flying in from the sands of Fuertaventura how green the island is. Anyone who loves flowers will be delighted by the immense variety.

In that respect it is perhaps puzzling, given the vast number of species of flowers how few pollinators there are - only 18 species of butterfly and one diurnal moth and around 20 species of bee, less than the number of bumblebees alone in the UK.  

Presumably wasps, flies and hoverflies make up some of the numbers but I still find myself wondering how so many flowers get pollinated.  One plant I never saw was buddleia and I idly speculated that its introduction might lead to an explosion of butterfly numbers.

One explanation for the lack of species variety of course is that Madeira is an isolated island so some of the species that are there have been imported accidentally or otherwise.  However some butterflies clearly make it on the wing from Africa and the Canary islands. There are also a number of obvious inconsistencies.  Madeira has small tortoiseshell, red admiral and painted lady so why not peacock? How come the large white died out when it is so plentiful elsewhere? How does the relatively even temperature on the island affect the development of butterflies and bees that flourish in other places where there is much greater seasonal variation in temperature?

These are just the thoughts that ran through my mind rather than any attempt to find a scientific explanation. I'm certainly glad I went and enjoyed what I found.

Madeira Day 4

Today I decided to do a walk along the Levada do Norte in the hope of extending my butterfly sightings in the forests North of Cabo Girao.

The trail led me along a narrow path with a mini levada past and through several gardens with some stunning flowers.  It struck me that they were just as interesting as anything I'd seen at the Tropical Gardens yesterday, so here are some examples.  I'm no expert on flowers so no guarantees as to the accuracy of the attempted approximate identifications.

(Rough?) Poppy	Wood Sorrel?
Babiana (genus)	A Hullwort

All improvement suggestions welcome...

Having missed an early red admiral, I joined the Levada do Norte at the point where it goes through a tunnel under the motorway (torch essential!) and set forth slowly in a Northerly direction.  The recommended walk from the hotel was about six miles return but, anxious to reach woodland, I reckon I did about double that.

I certainly saw a greater number of butterflies than on the Butterfly Tour but apart from the inevitable speckled woods, none of them settled for more than a few seconds.  The eventual count was:-

Painted Lady - 1

Red Admiral - 2

Clouded Yellow - 4

Small White - 6

Speckled Wood - 200 (estimated)

Of these only the painted lady was the only one that graced the camera lens.  I must admit that I was pleased to see one so early in the year even if it wasn't a great shot.

Painted Lady

I decided on a change of tactics for this walk and started lining up the targets using the LCD screen rather than the viewfinder.  It then seemed easier to pick out the intended subjects, including the following insects:

Bent-lined Carpet Moth

Indian Milkweed Bug

Again I'm grateful for extra help from iNaturalist on these. There were also three or four larger moths I wasn't able to identify and didn't settle.

Also sighted on the way out near Campanario was a blackcap and on the way back and slightly further North a group of grey wagtails.  I had hoped they'd turn out to be yellow wagtails thinking they would be the local equivalent but apparently not the case.

Grey Wagtail

As for the forests further North towards the picnic area, they produced precisely nothing except more speckled wood.  However they were predominantly pine and palm trees.  You probably would have to go a good deal further to find more Lauressilva forest.