CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

Mystery Micro-moth

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:38:00 +0000

Can anyone ID this micro-moth that I found in the garden yesterday evening? I can't see anything in Sterling and Parson's Field Guide to Micro-moths that's a really convincing match......

Any help gratefully received .....

Worn-out wings

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Bees' wings suffer a lot of wear and tear during their brief lives and as they fly through the vegetation their beating wing tips often touch plants and become split and broken.

The wing tips of this bee, feeding on rampion Phyteuma nigrum flowers are almost completely worn away ...

... as are those of this one, feeding on green alkanet Pentaglottis sempervirens.

The loss of wing area must mean that these bees need to work a lot harder to stay in the air.

What goes on in a hoverfly's brain when its head rotates?.

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Owls are famously capable of swivelling their heads so that they can look directly behind them, but hoverflies have even more flexible necks. This one landed in front of me and began to clean its tongue with one of its feet, then........

..... swivelled its head through 180 degrees to clean the top of its head. That's its tongue pointing upwards.

Consider for a moment what goes on in a hoverfly's brain during this contortion.

Those large compound eyes given it almost 360 degree vision, above, below, to both sides and also, to a considerable extent, behind. So when it rotates its head like this its image of the world must invert in a fraction of a second. Often they'll rotate their heads clockwise through 180 degrees, and then do the same anticlockwise.

I'm struggling to imaging what the sensation must feel like .... maybe something like one of those big dipper rides .....?

Now that's what a call a field of buttercups.....

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:20:00 +0000

Currently several of the fields around Blanchland in Northumberland have some of the densest displays of buttercups that I've ever seen. Double-click the image for a better view.....

Early Summer in Teesdale

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:46:00 +0000

Some pictures taken around Romaldkirk in Teesdale today.

This year has produced some of the finest displays of hawthorn blossom that I've ever seen - but here's something strange. The two hawthorns that you can see in the picture above were once part of an old hedge, so are of more or less equal age. But whereas the tree in the centre has so much blossom covering its branches that it looks like an iced wedding cake, the hawthorn on the left has almost none at all (double click for a larger image). Maybe it flowered and fruited heavily last year and is having a year off...

Early June sees wood cranesbill, in the foreground, coming into bloom, while all the pastures are full of buttercups.

The curlews have chicks now, so when you walk through the fields the parent birds do their best to lure you away, uttering alarm calls to alert their chicks.....

... and there are willow warblers everywhere in the alders, searching for food for nestlings.

The old disused railway line between Romaldkirk and Cotherstone. It's a very pleasant two mile stroll between them, with good pubs at either end.

Romaldkirk. All the roadside verges in this part of the dale are frothy with cow parsley at the moment.

Pond snail

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:07:00 +0000

These bright orange ramshorn pond snails have been thriving in our garden pond for years, but I'm still not sure which species they belong to.

You can see the mouth and the radula quite nicely in this picture, or one of the snails grazing algae from the glass in a fish tank.

Double-flowered Midland hawthorn

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:03:00 +0000

I found this unusual double-flowered cultivar of Midland hawthorn Crataegus laevigata 'plena alba' in a hedgerow in Durham city a few days ago.

Midland hawthorn isn't very common in Durham and this double-flowered version is rarer still - this is the first time I've seen it.

This is common hawthorn Crataegus monogyna, which is the prevalent hawthorn species in hedgerows in the North East. Can't honestly saw that double-flowered hawthorn is an improvement on the wild type.

A Butterfly Bank.....

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Along the old disused mineral railway line between Garmondsway and Trimdon Grange, on the magnesian limestone in east Durham, there's a 200 metre south-facing stretch of embankment that's near perfect habitat for the the limestone flora and its associated butterflies.

When we visited last week the first generation of small coppers had just emerged. This one is sunning itself on one of last year's carline thistles - a very painful plant to kneel on when you are trying to take a photograph.

The bank is also an excellent site for the dingy skipper butterfly which, despite its derogatory name, is very attractive when it settles for long enough to be examined at close quarters. Chasing butterflies around on a hot day is frustrating and unproductive, and can only lead to extensive tramping of the flowers, so I just sat and waited for the butterflies to come to me. Dingy skippers like to sunbathe on patches of bare soil and sure enough a female settled right next to me, soon to be joined by a male, on her left here.

Once she recognised that she was being courted she cocked up her tail and opened her scent glands, releasing pheromones that are the butterfly equivalent of Chanel No. 5, to secure his undivided attention. Double click this and the above image for a large, clearer view.

This is the butterfly bank in question.

At the moment it's dominated by drifts of common hawkweed Hieracium vulgatum but some of the choicer limestone flowers are coming out, such as .....

..... common milkwort Polygala vulgaris , and ....

..... and spotted orchid, growing here amongst salad burnet.

Flowery Tynemouth

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 09:57:00 +0000

There's a fine display of wild flowers around Tynemouth Priory at present. The top of the cliff is carpeted with red valerian. This plant, from south west Europe, was first recorded in Britain's gardens in 1597 and began spreading into the wild in 1763 - and it's still spreading, especially in coastal locations where it likes to grow in the mortar of old buildings. It produces a lot of nectar and is one of the plants that hummingbird hawk-moths like to visit.

Down on Tynemouth pier this sea pink (aka thrift) plant is thriving between the rusty old railways lines that once supported the travelling cranes that unloaded ships berthed alongside the pier.

The second introduced plant species that carpets the cliffs here is Alexanders, a green-flowered umbellifer from southern Europe that was introduced by the Romans and grows in great profusion here. Its glossy leaves are edible and it was once cultivated as a pot herb, but by the 15th. century had been replaced in the garden by more palatable celery.

The native wild food plant that graces these cliffs is wild cabbage, the ancestor of garden cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli and kale which produces these spectacular sprays of yellow flowers.

May-bug (in June)

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 20:30:00 +0000

This year seems to be a may-bug (aka cockchater) Melolontha melolontha year in Durham. This one flew into a computer store in Durham city centre. May-bug larvae spend several years feeding underground on roots before they hatch, so every three or four years large batches all mature together synchronously and hatch. They're attracted by lit windows at dusk and buzz around lights, in a way that can be quite alarming.

Adult may-bugs feed on plants. They're particular fond of tender young oak leaves and have been known to defoliate whole branches. In continental Europe they do a great deal of damage to orchards and orchard owners have been known to cover the ground between their trees with fine-mesh netting, to stop the adults emerging.

The 18th. century naturalist Gilbert White mentions periodic eruptions of may-bugs several times in his Journals, noting that when they appear hosts of rooks, crows and jackdaws feed on them. Here's a series of entries, revealing a four-year cycle of infestations:

May 26th. 1770
Chafers have not prevailed for some years now - they seldom abound oftener than once in three or four years. When they swarm so, they deface the trees and hedges.

June 30th. 1770
The Rooks pursue and catch the chafers as they flie, whole woods of oaks are stripped bare by the chafers.

December 1st. 1770
Some oaks have yet some green leaves. Those oaks that were eaten bare by the chafers leafed about midsummer and continued unusually green late into November.

May 17th. 1774.
Rooks bring out their young: they and the crows,and daws, and ravens, frequent the top of the hanger, and prey on chafers.

May 28th. 1774.
The crows, rooks, and daws in great numbers continue to devour the chafers on the hanger. was it not for those birds chafers would destroy everything.

May 19th. `775.
No chafers appear as yet: in those seasons that they abound they deface the foliage of the whole country, especially on the downs, where woods and hedges are scarce.

May 21st. 1778
Rooks bring out their young, after the chafers.

The saw-tooth pattern of white triangles underneath the wing cases is a distinctive ID feature.

The large, hemispherical eyes of may-bugs are particularly striking. This is a male, identifiable by its fan-shaped tips to its antenna (which are folded here).

The fine white hairs on the elytra of this specimen indicate that it has recently hatched - they quickly wear off as the insect ages.

Orange tips

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 23:30:00 +0000

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes the way in which orange tip butterflies always seem to roost in the open, usually perched on a flower, when bad weather approaches - but always emerge miraculously unscathed after a rain storm has passed.

We've had a colony of orange tips in our garden for over twenty years. Apart from butterflies that hibernate as adults - peacocks, commas and small tortoiseshells - they are always the first to hatch from overwintered pupae, just at the time when lady's smock Cardamine pratensis comes into flower. This is one of their caterpillars' food plants, but I've also planted the carnation-scented sweet rocket Hesperis matrionalis which they also breed on. The third caterpillar food plant is hedge garlic Alliaria petiolata, which the first female orange tips to emerge usually lay their eggs on. This can be a rather invasive plant if you let it run to seed but the caterpillars consume a substantial proportion of the seed pods.

The eggs are laid singly, either on the inflorescence axis (here on hedge garlic) or on a flower pedicel. They only ever lay one egg per inflorescence, because the caterpillars have cannibalistic tendencies if they have to compete for food.

The green caterpillars (see photo here) align themselves along the developing seed pods of the food plant, eating the pod from the tip towards its base, and in this position can be hard to spot.

Trouble brewing.....

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 16:38:00 +0000

My son recently discovered this queen wasp building her nest just inside the garden shed door. He's going to try to gently remove it intact and transplant it to another location, otherwise the shed will be out-of-bounds until autumn.

For more on wasps' nests, click here

Nursery web spider

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:20:00 +0000

My son and his partner found this very fine nursery web spider Pisaura mirabilis in their house yesterday. These rather fearsome-looking arachnids have the endearing (?) habit of catching flies, wrapping them in silk and presenting them to potential mates. The females carry the eggs around with them underneath their body until they are almost ready to hatch, then spin a nursery web over a clump of vegetation and deposits the cocoon of eggs inside, where the young can hatch and develop in relative safety.

This individual has lost a leg on the right side of its body. Young spiders can generally regenerate lost legs during moulting if the injury occurs early in their life but this is a mature specimen, so it's destined to be a seven-legged spider for the rest of its life.

Agitated lapwings and hysterical redshanks...

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 19:34:00 +0000

You can't walk far on the fells in Weardale at this time of year without causing a stir amongst the nesting moorland birds. About a dozen pairs of lapwing tried to see us off the premises when we walked up onto Chapel Fell, above St.John's Chapel, yesterday morning. When the camera freezes their wings in mid-downstroke like this it emphasises their extraordinary length and width, which allows them to perform those dead-defying aerobatics during courtship.

There were redshanks nesting near the footpath too. Both parents took to the air with hysterical piping calls and flew slowly overhead, trailing their legs and attempting to draw us away from their nest.

Frothy

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:08:00 +0000

The first official day of summer, and up at St. John's Chapel in Weardale the banks of the river Wear are fringed with a frothy mass of blossom.

In the background, bird cherry; on the left of the picture are the umbels of aniseed-scented sweet cicely; at the bottom right, sloe (aka blackthorn blossom).

This is a picture that sums up the consequences of the cold, late spring for our flora, because although sloe typically flowers in April it's in full bloom here in June. Spring flowers have been held back to such an extent that many have been overtaken by the summer bloomers.

The upside, as far as blackthorn is concerned, is that there are far more pollinators around now than there would have been during its normal flowering period, so maybe there will be a much better sloe crop than last year, so it might be a vintage year for sloe gin. Always look on the bright side of life, eh?

Sloe blossom

Bird cherry blossom

The Wisdom of Solomon and a Misogynist Joke (?!) in a 16th. century herbal

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Thu, 30 May 2013 10:44:00 +0000

We recently found this large patch of Solomon's Seal Polygonatum multiflorum growing amongst bluebells in the wild flower meadows near Hawthorn Dene on the Durham coast. It's a native species but certainly a garden escape along this coast.

There are various stories about how it earned its common name but the most likely seem to relate to the disc-shaped scars on the surface of its rhizomes or to the pattern of vascular bundles in the rhizome that are revealed if you cut it into thin slices (for herbal use - see below), which supposedly look like royal seals with Hebrew writing. How this is linked to Solomon, he of 700 wives and 300 concubines, remains a mystery. John Gerard quotes the story in his Herbal of 1597.

The reason Gerard included it in his herbal was that the plant has a history of use in medicine that dates back to the days of the ancient Greek physician Dioscorides, especially for treating bruises and broken bones. Gerard says that "the root of Solomons seale stamped while it is fresh and greene, and applied, taketh away in one night, or two at the most, any bruise, blacke or blew spots gotten by falls or womens wilfulnesse, in stumbling upon their hasty husbands fists, or such like", which is a quip that no doubt might have amused his renaissance readers (and maybe multi-wifed Solomon) but which most would find deplorable in our thankfully more enlightened times.

He also mentions that Matthiolus, the Italian 16th. century physician, "teacheth that a water drawn out of the roots, wherewith the women of Italy use to scour their faces from sunne-burning, freckles, morphew, and any such deformities of the skin" which, - who knows? - might yet be revived by the cosmetics industry.

Eye-to-eye with a fly

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Sun, 26 May 2013 19:18:00 +0000

I haven't managed to identify the species that this fly belongs to yet, but it does have beautiful eyes.......

Bumblebee mites

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:30:00 +0000

Today's Guardian Country Diary is about this queen bumblebee Bombus pratorum that's infested with mites.

The mites belong to the genus Parasitellus and this individual is particularly heavily infested, but her plight isn't as dire as it might seem. These mites don't feed on the bee or transmit disease in the way that Varroa mites of honeybees do. They're commensals, living in the bees' nests and eating the sticky coating from pollen grains, as well as consuming debris that accumulates in the nest. Other than using some of the pollen that the bee collects, they don't seem to do any serious harm and may indeed be beneficial.

It's usually newly-emerged queens that are as heavily infested as this and it does sometimes seem that they are struggling under the load of hitch-hikers, but after a bit of a rest this one took to the air again without much difficulty. The mites tend to congregate in parts of the bee where it's difficult for their host to comb them off with its legs.

The mites spread between bumblebee nests via flowers. When as infested bee visits a flower a few hitch-hikers dismount and hide in the blossom until another pollinating bee arrives, then they climb on board and are carried back to its nest.

Lowlife

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:34:00 +0000

A couple of months ago I stacked some old broken fence panels on the soil at the bottom of the garden and when I moved them today I found they were sheltering all sorts of interesting soil invertebrates.Two species are illustrated below.

This wonderfully articulated centipede was living in the soil under the wood. Judging by the number of pairs of legs, I think it must be Haplophilus subterraneus, which has between 77 and 83 pairs. The books say that it sometimes glows in the dark if it's disturbed at night, so I might go back and have another look later tonight.

These are springtails - possibly Folsomia candida. There were thousands of them, probably eating fungi that were growing on the decaying wood panels.

Springtails are noted for their ability to hurl themselves into the air using a spring-loaded appendage called a furcula under their tail. If you've never seen a springtail jump, take a look at this clip from David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth

For some more, higher magnification images of springtails, click here

For some detailed information on the Collembola - the subclass of six-legged invertebrates to which springtails belong, click here

Take a look at Steve Hopkin's wonderful web site for ID photos of springtail species and for some truly stunning pictures of these tiny animals take a look at this Flickr gallery belonging to Eddie the Bug Man (Eddie Nurcombe)

The Snail, the Woodlouse and the Millipede with disgusting but valuable habits...

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Sun, 19 May 2013 19:39:00 +0000

If this post title sounds like a modern-day Aesop's fable well, in a way it is, because it does have a moral. Not one, but two morals...

Have you ever wondered what millipedes eat? Probably not, but if you have the books will tell you that they are herbivores that sometimes eat gardeners' seedlings and are therefore a pest.

When I found this millipede clinging to the back of a garden snail's shell I wondered what it was up to. Could it be that millipedes attack snails? If so, they'd go up in my estimation.

All was revealed when the snail glided away, almost running over a woodlouse in the process but leaving some tell-tail evidence: snail poo.

Yes, remember you read it here first: millipedes eat snail poo.

Maybe not the most pleasant addition to the sum total of human knowledge, but there is a moral to the story.

Millipedes do indeed eat some of the gardener's seedlings but they are also part of a vast community of soil invertebrates that play a role in cycling of minerals. This snail poo might well be all that's left of some lettuce seedlings I planted out a few days ago, but at least I'm secure in the knowledge that, once they've passed through a millipede's digestive system, some of the nutrients will find their way back to the soil and feed the next batch of my seedlings that a snail snacks on....

The second moral is that the only sane way to approach vegetable gardening is to recognise that you are part of the great web of food interactions and nutrient recycling, and to become reconciled to the fact that some of what you plant - sometimes most of what you plant - is going to pass through the digestive system of a snail and maybe a millipede too, rather than your own.

So, I think of gardening as a source of endless photo-opportunities and don't expect to harvest too much. It's the way to reach gardening karma.

So, on to the next question: if you are a snail, what does it sound like when a millipede walks past? Probably, like this...

Slug slayer

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:00:00 +0000

After 12 hours of apocalyptic rain the clouds finally parted and the sun came out - and so did the frogs. Now that they've spawned in the garden pond, which is swarming with tadpoles, our resident frogs spend most of their time lurking in the flower beds and there's nothing they like better than a good rain storm, which brings all the slugs crawling out from the undergrowth.

Very satisfying for the frogs, and from a gardener's perspective too, when they swallow these slimy pests.

The frogs tend to be very wary when they first emerge from hibernation but as the months go by they become accustomed to me gardening around them and sometimes become quite tame. On several occasions in the past I've managed to entice one to take small slugs presented on the tip of my finger, which makes a change from hand-taming robins with meal worms.

You put your left leg in .....

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:53:00 +0000

Bumblebees, like this common carder bee, have a distinctive pattern of behaviour when they are too lethargic to fly. This one was foraging very slowly on dandelions in Teesdale this morning, showing no inclination to fly, but when I gave the flower a little prod ....

Double-click for a larger image

..... it did this, the bee version of the hokey-cokey (for those to young to known what this dance is, click here!). It raised its middle leg and waved it about. I've noticed that comatose bumblebees often show this kind of defensive behaviour when they are disturbed.

When I passed by again, half an hour later, when the morning had warmed up a little and it had presumably refuelled on dandelion nectar, it had gone.

Gold standard

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:34:00 +0000

If I had any sense I'd probably have dug out the dandelions in the gardens long before now because they seed themselves so prolifically, but instead I've been watching the constant stream of bees - with their pollen baskets stuffed full of orange dandelion pollen - visiting the flowers all afternoon. There are golden drifts of dandelion flowers everywhere just now - along road verges, on waste ground and in pastures - and every year they provide a reliable source of vast amounts of pollen and nectar for bees.

The strange thing is, though, that dandelions don't need nectar, pollen or pollinators to produce a full crop of seeds - for the reason why, click here.

Africa Gomez, over at Bugblog, has more pictures of some of dandelions' many insect visitors in spring.

Wildlife on Walls: 10. Brittle Bladder Fern

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Brittle bladder fern Cystopteris fragilis is one of the characteristic wall ferns of North East England, growing in crevices in shady limestone walls or in mortar and often thriving in old industrial sites, such as the inner walls of railway bridges and the ruins of old lead mine workings in the Durham dales.

It owes its common name to the shape of the coverings over the clusters of spores on the underside of its fronds and to the brittleness of the frond stems, which are succulent and snap easily.

Click here for more plants and animals that live on walls

Elegant moss capsules

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:00:00 +0000

These elegant spore capsules belong to the common woodland moss called swan's neck thyme moss Mnium hornum and their presence is testament to the fact that the individual plants that bear them are female. Sometime back in the winter the egg cell inside a microscopically small flask-shaped structure called an archegonium, tucked away somewhere down amongst the leaves, was fertilised by a swimming male cell called an antherozoid, that swam across the surface film of water on the moss plants, attracted by organic acids secreted from the neck of the archegonium. Countless similar sexual encounters between moss plants occur every day on the woodland floor on mild, wet days in winter and early spring.

And these are the structures that release the male sex cells. The glistening structures packed amongst the rosette of leaves on the shoot tips of these male plants are the antheridia - flasks full of male antherozoids, each equipped with a whip-like flagellum that propels it through the film of water. Sometimes rain-splash in the rosette of leaves will hurl water droplets laden with antherozoids towards surrounding female plants. Sometimes small soil animals may carry antherozoids on their bodies. The odds against a successful fertilisation are long but the antherozoids are many and the net result is a fertilised egg cell, and ultimately a spore capsule full of spores that will be dispersed on the wind and grow into a new moss plant. Mosses have been reproducing like this for over half a billion years, surviving five great mass extinction events that have extinguished many other forms of life.

Durable little plants, aren't they?