A title with two meanings. The one, indicates my return to posting on these pages after months of failing to do so. The other the keenly waited arrival of the swifts (Apus apus) above our house. Not that I am placing them both on the same level in terms of significance. The reappearance of those most aerial of birds is as momentous from each year to the next. My efforts on this blog are mere folly by comparison, but a folly that is hopefully enjoyed my some.
Of the birds, I once tried to capture them in verse.
Swifts Again Swift sears the faultless blue Between fair-weather clouds. Leaves me looking for vapour trails, But find no such platitudes Towards our own endeavours. Only the purity of wing And a healthy disregard For the drudgery of the soil.
Swift is a dream-bird. Shadows cutting bird shapes Into the waking memory; Eyes opening to unworldly sounds And empty cirrus-brushed sky. And then from the portal of the sun Materialises higher and circling madly On screaming spirals
The autumn, so the calendar informs us, is upon us, in the reality of the natural world itself, the first inklings of the changing season are already a couple of weeks past, subtle as they may sometimes be. Here then are a few images of the summer making way…….
I do love a good shieldbug! This one is Pentatoma rufipes, referred to in the vernacular as the Forest Bug or Red-legged Shieldbug. Adult females lay their eggs in late summer chiefly on oak, as well as a few other deciduous trees species.
And here’s another shieldbug, the Common Green (Palomena prasina), curiously found resting on the some length of steel railing as the P. rufipes above at the Avon Wildlife Trust Willsbridge Valley nature reserve near Bristol. As immature nymphs, all true bugs (Hemiptera) experience a series of moults (or instars) as they grow towards adulthood. This one is a late instar nymph and once fully developed will hibernate as an adult until the following spring.
The Small Copper (Lycaena phlaeas) is one of our later-flying butterflies; they appear as three generations in many parts of the UK and can sometimes be on the wing well into October. This one was found supping on a thistle flower at RSPB’s Bowers Marsh nature reserve.
Another encounter at Willsbridge at the beginning of the month, the Dark Bush-cricket (Pholidoptera griseoaptera). I’ve got a number of shots of these robust insects, but I could resist capturing once more the outlandish charms of this female. She uses the sabre-like ovipositor on the tip of her abdomen to slice into plant stems into which her eggs can be inserted. These hardy creatures can persist well into the autumn.
I recenty came across this striking little creature (barely a centimetre in length) by chance at a nearby park. It is one Graphocephala fennahi, whose feeding on the sap of a particular shrub earns it the common name of the Rhododendron Leafhopper. It is an American species that was introduced to the UK early in the twentieth century and has since become a widespread species across much of the southern part of the country.
A few weeks travelling for the summer took me to – among other fine places – the New Forest. The area was established as a forest in around 1079, by William the Conqueror who wanted to protect the deer and other so called “beasts of the chase” for his own hunting whims at the expense of the common folk who relied on the land for their livelihood. Near enough a thousand years later and the New Forest, despite increasing visitor pressure and frequent over-grazing by the eponymous forest ponies, still represents one of the the UK’s most species diverse wildlife habitats. The deer still abound – the native roe and red alongside the long-introduced fallow – along with some of Britain’s rarest reptiles and scarce birds, while at the other end of the size scale parts of the Forest teem with invertebrate life, some found in few, if any other parts of the country. Of the latter the Orthoptera (crickets and grasshoppers) provide a good case in point.
The Wood Cricket (Nemobius sylvestris) can be numerous in the more wooded parts of the Forest (the majority of its area is actually open heathland), yet dispite belying their presence with a soft chirping song, they can sometimes be frustrating difficult to lay eyes on.
Whilst delighting at coming across an abundance of the above photographed cricket I was equally as excited to find this Heath Grasshopper (Chorthippus vagans). This is one of Britain’s rarest grasshoppers and is found in very few places outside of the New Forest.
The Woodland Grasshopper (Omocestus rufipes) is another scarce grasshopper that can be met with in the New Forest. While some species can sometimes be tricky to tell apart, this one possesses helpfully unique, white-tipped palps, as can be seen below.
I have taken many pictures of ruddy darter over the years, but I couldn’t resist a snap of this male sunning itself the other day on a wooden gate. They are photogenic and often obliging creatures…
Ruddy Darter (Sympetrum sanguineum).
I took it at Hadleigh Country Park in Essex, a fine site for – alongside a host of others – dragonflies and damselflies. There are a few special species among them, including the scarce emerald damselfly. This one was photographed at the same place a few years back…
I am incredilble fortunate, especially that I live and have grown up in an increasingly urbanised part of Southeast England, that I have close by an incredible choice of wild places into which to escape and indulge my passion for the natural world. There are ancient woods and flowery grasslands that teem through the spring and summer, with rare butterflies and bees among the many, many others. There are dragonfly haunted marshes, again with some special insects among their number and a coast that can throng bewilderingly with winter flocks of birds in their tens of thousands. All this within walking, or at most cycling distance from my house. These are things I endeavour never to take for granted. I am very lucky to have them and the health and opportunity with which to enjoy them.
Yet sometimes the unusual might quite literally come to you and this is where these musings on this occasion are heading. The garden, especially if it is one not too neat aroung the edges can have its own treasures.
The strikingly marked caterpillar pictured below I am pretty sure has featured before on this blog, but the fact that they have appeared in my own backyard means they make return. The toadflax brocade (Calophasia lunula) is a rather scarce moth in the UK, even though it feeds on the widespread common toadflax (Linaria vulgaris) and the widely naturalised, but non-native purple toadflax (Linaria purpurea). They have been resident in my parents’ garden for the last few years, but having only nicked some of their toadflax and introducing it into my own this spring it was something of a welcome surprise to find the caterpillars on it, busy with their defoliation.
It is another moth, albeit considerably smaller in stature (the toadlfax brocade caterpillars will be four or five centimetres long before they decend to the ground to pupate) that offered further inspiration for this post. It can be suprising what you notice while brushing your teeth in the morning, getting ready for work. In this case it was a tiny creature, barely a centimetre long, resting on the open bathroom window. It transpired to be no less than one Metalampra italica (below), sometimes referred to in the English vernaclur as the Italian tubic. Once thought to be endemic to Italy it has been widening its range over recent years. It was only in 2003 that the moth was first discovered in the UK. And now its turned up in an Essex garden.
No, not cattle; nor moths, for that matter. It is beetles that are being referred to in the title. While domestic livestock are not really my field (there may be a pun in there somewhere), the moths that also make use of the ‘longhorn’ moniker could well provide subject matter for a post in the future. But it is to the beetles that the current post belongs and a particular, personal favourite they are at that.
Among their number are some of the UK’s larger and most striking beetles. Even some of the smaller, less distinctive species possess some of the occasionally outlandish charm of their more substantial cohorts. They seem to have been particularly in evidence over the last couple of weeks and I can find it quite difficult when I see them to not point my camera at them, even the more familiar, often shot species. Among them however, have been one or two surprises. They take their name, incidentlly and as you will see, from their generously endowed antennae.
We’ll kick off however, with this beauty, the common, widespread and rather impressive Black and Yellow Longhorn Beetle (Rutpela maculata). Like most species of longhorns the larvae feed on dead wood, but the adults are often attracted to flowers to feed on pollen and nectar.
The Tawny Longhorn Beetle (Paracorymbia fulva) though, is rather rarer, distributed very sparsely over the southern England. I was very pleased to find this one at Priory Fields in Bicknacre, Essex.
The Umbellifer Longhorn Beetle (Phytoecia cylindrica) is another uncommon species and one of a pair in the UK whose larvae develop with inside herbaceous and not woody plants. I have found them at a couple of local sites this year (Little Haven Nature Reserve and Hadleigh Country Park, Essex), in both instances on Cow Parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris). The larvae live and feed inside the stems of this and other related species.
A pair of green-veined white (Peiris napi) siezing the opportunities of the spring; butterflies, I think, of understated and under-appreciated beauty. Tarred, perhaps, with the well-coined epiphet of ‘cabbage white’ that engenders the widespread ire for their ‘large’ and ‘small’ cousins, whose taste for larval foodplants encompasses the leaves of cultivated cabbages, the green-veined is an insect that sticks to wild members of that family – the likes of garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) or cuckoo-flower (Cardamine pratensis), among others.
Below is one my favourite images, taken a while back, of any butterfly I have had the good fortune to take.
Of the return of the swifts Ted Hughes famously wrote in his poem of that birds name
“They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working“
It is with same sense of reassurance that we welcome them back to sky above our house each year. Each year, come the first days of May, I feel a small pang of dread, that one year they won’t return to our neighbourhood. Each time that they do, any dread becomes relief.
So the world is still working…….just. Yes, ‘just’, much like this blog, where my good endeavours to rekindle my motivation for regular posting seem to stutter and stumble. It was a good many years ago that I first wrote on these pages and I am reluctant to let it fade entirely from view. It keeps me writing, when perhaps elsewhere I may be it may not be coming so easily; an odd thing is writer’s block. I have another book, long-awaited for publication, which when it eventually appears may do something to free the blockage. So here’s to posting again to keep those proverbial juices flowing, as well as, of course, sharing something of what provides me with so much inspiration.
Here are a few images to account for the last couple of months.
Watching the courting Great Crested Grebe in the early-April sunshine at Ardleigh Reservoir and the smoky wings of an Alder Fly (Sialis lutaria) flutter up from the water’s edge.
I was surprised this year to find a few Wood Ant (Formica rufa) active on a chilly day at the end of January. Fast forward to the first week in April and sight of thousands of ants crowding around the base of an oak tree in Danbury was more remarkable still.
Here’s a close up of the beastie in question……
The simple beauty of female Orange Tip (Anthocaris cardamines) butterfly settled on Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), one of its larval foodplants. Ivy Hatch, Kent.
After another inexcusably lengthy hiatus from adding anything whatsoever to these pages, I return to my blog with the spring. This season itself has returned with attrition, through the grumbling dregs of a winter not keen to relinquish its hold on the land. But return it has, if only a little held back.
While I try, when writing about such things, to think a little outside of the norm, in as much as endeavouring to give the reader an insight into something at least a little less talked about, I am on this occasion being unashamedly predictable. It is the chiff chaff that brings me back to the keyboard, I bird whose simple, but sonorous voice is as truer signal of the season as any other.
The chiff chaff (Phylloscopus collybita) returns to Britsh countryside as the blackthorn blooms.
Others may be more melodious in their announcement of arrival, more adventurous in the richness of their music and variety of their phrases, but those two, eponymous notes, proudly thrown out among the nearly leafless boughs is never anything other joyous to my ears. Some may question the fervour of my argument, but few would deny this plain, olive-green little bird its rightful place in the spring chorus.
Over the coming weeks the tiny wintering population of less than 1000 will burgeon with the arrival of African migrants to well over a million birds reaching the wooded and parkland habitats over the greater part of the British Isles. Theirs is a song that once familiar with is difficult not to notice.
For the unitiated here is a link to hear the song, although your speakers will likely do it scant justice. Go to the woods and hear it first hand.
The first thing that struck me today, as I stepped out onto the marsh was the susurration of the reeds, of the slight breeze rousing each winter-brown blade into a collective, soft hiss; a sound heard, not through its loudness, but by the way it fills the spaces among and around any other noises within its vicinity. There are few sounds of nature more calming. Then from sound to sight and it is the ranks of plumed heads that come to the fore, each leaning in unison, themselves stirring gently in the breeze, each one luminous, back-lit by the crisp morning sun.
The marsh is alive with birds, heard and seen. I am scolded, as I pass, by the rasping tones of a water rail, that master-skulker among the stems, so much more often heard than seen. This one was close enough for me to hear the rustle of reeds as it slipped into thicker concealment, but still it eluded my eye. Not long after a Cetti’s warbler splutters into it’s loud, stuttering song. This is another elusive bird that may taunt a hopefully onlooker from deep within the cover. Today though, I am treated to an open view. While the songster sings, another, perhaps a would be mate, perches high up atop a reed, almost like a large wren, with chestnut brown plumage and tail cocked. As soft ‘pinking’ call betrays the presence of another denizen of the reeds that can so often frustrate. There are bearded tit somewhere, clambering among the stems, stripping the feathered heads of their seeds. But once again, today I am lucky, as I later find a pair content to be feeding in the open.
A Bearded Tit (aka Bearded Reedling) feeding on reed seeds.
The birds out on the open water are decidedly easier to see. With the sun at my back the gathered gulls gleam, the greens and. browns and shelduck and shoveler stand out in perfect contrast to the white that separates them; the wheeling lapwing flicker sharply black to white, white to black against the near-cloudless blue. Even the subtleties of the scalloped greys and eye-stripes of a pair of spotted redshank probing avidly in the shallows is pick out with clarity – rare birds in the winter, scarce at the best of times.
It is an almost dreamy scene, of the wonders of wetland wildlife, experienced in bold relief and enjoyed in solitude. And where did I find this? Some lonely corner of the Norfolk Broads? Perhaps some watery expanse in the Cambridgeshire Fens? Neither. Distracted momentarily from the wild riches at hand, the rumble of traffic reminds me where I am. This is the RSPB’s Vange Marsh nature reserve, beside the busy A13 as it passes a sprawling South Essex townscape on its way to London thirty odd miles to the west. Wild places are wonderful wherever we find them.
essex naturalist 