Baby Blues (hopefully)

/ nrowberry / Leave a comment

In the last couple of weeks the posts seem to have been colour themed, first red, then yellow and now blue! The big blue news is that the Blue Tits are nesting!! So excited to see them using the bird box (the old one of course – they’ve turned their beaks up at the new deluxe one!) The brief video clip below shows both adults flying in and one exiting again. I think at this stage they were still making the nest as we saw them with nesting material.

The photo below is a still taken from the film. Hopefully things will go well for our pair and we can give updates on their progress – fingers crossed for a successful fledging and baby blue tits.

Blue Tit on Bird Box

 

The blue tones seem to be spreading round the garden too, with the emergence of several  blue hued flowers. Today I spotted these tiny Speedwell flowers hidden amongst the grasses. Not the easiest to photograph as they are so damn small. I didn’t realise they were so hairy either until I downloaded the photos.

Speedwell

And finally, no blue post would be complete without Forget-me-nots. These bright little flowers have been a favourite since I was a child (many moons ago) and are a sort of unofficial totem for Too Lazy To Weed. They spring up wherever we haven’t weeded – so pretty much over the whole garden!

Forget me not

 

Jurassic Monster!

/ nrowberry / 1 Comment

When you think of Jurassic, you tend to think of T. rex and possibly Richard Attenborough. Most of us don’t picture a minute micro moth, barely 2 millimetres long, but the Too Lazy garden has just that – Mompha jurassicella – a very long name for a very small moth. What’s exciting about this little moth, is that it is the first known record for Malvern.

Mompha jurasicella

We spotted it at the weekend on a primrose stem – which looks huge by comparison. You’d think being so small it would be easy to get it all in focus, but not so; it took 4 photos to get all the relevant bits sharp enough to identify it. Not that we managed to do that ourselves. Identification was courtesy of a very kind man on Facebook and an equally kind County Moth Recorder to confirm it.

Although this tiny moth has been recorded in Worcestershire, it is apparently the first record for the Malvern area, so we’re really chuffed with it. Being so small though, it’s likely lots of the local gardens have it, just that their owners don’t go grubbing about in the undergrowth looking for it! Does make you wonder what else is lurking amongst our weeds?

Hairy Footed Love

/ nrowberry / Leave a comment

A week or so ago I blogged about the delightfully named Hairy Footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes), having spotted a male one buzzing around the garden. They are quite a loud bee, so much so, that I’m starting to recognise them by sound (going to be by new party trick – identifying bees blindfolded!) The males emerge in the Spring a bit earlier than the females so for the first week they were all we saw. The male below is a typical buff gingery colour, with of course hairy feet!

Hairy footed male

The females emerge a bit later and we saw our first one about a week after the males appeared. They look like a completely different species, being dark pretty much all over, with golden hairs on their back legs. For some reason all the females we saw seemed to be preferring the pink varieties of primrose, whereas the males had been going solely for the yellow (sexual stereotyping in bees???) In the photo below the female already has a male admirer.

Hairy footed female

I’d got the trail camera set up in the hope of catching some bee action, and could see from a distance a group of males chasing a female. I thought the trail cam was pointed right at them, but needless to say it was slightly off. So I’ve got several videos showing bits of the chase, but none capturing it completely. Hopefully the one clip below gives an idea of the action though.

To say the males were persistent would be an understatement. They harassed the long suffering female, who was only really interested in the flowers, not her admirers.

I did manage to take the freeze frame photo below from the videos – you can see one poor female, with a line of 4 males looking like they’re queuing for her attention.

Hairy footed pursuit

I also discovered that the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society are running a Spring bee recording scheme and the Hairy Footed Flower Bee is one of the species they’re interested in. So our amorous little bees have been duly logged. If anyone wants to log their own records, go to http://www.bwars.com/content/submit-sighting-anthophora-plumipes-hairy-footed-flower-bee

A Host of Golden Daffodils

/ nrowberry / Leave a comment

Not sure how many daffodils you need to qualify for “a host”, but what few we’ve got are at their best in the garden right now. They seem to be a lot later than everyone else’s in Malvern, the neighbours daffodils were blooming marvellous about 6 weeks ago; but better late than never.

Daffodils

Yellow is definitely this season’s colour at the moment. Some is of course down to me choosing yellow, such as these crocuses, to brighten up the cold days.

Crocuses 2

But a lot of it is due to the more natural, self seeding “weeds” such as the primroses and dandelions that proliferate in our garden.

Dandelion PrimrosesAll these spring flowers are good news for the insects, which are now starting to arrive in the garden in moderate numbers. The yellowyness of Spring continued with the first butterfly in the garden – a Brimstone. In typical Brimstone fashion it was too fast to get a photo, but we think it was a male as it was bright yellow – the original “butter coloured fly” or butterfly. Hopefully soon one will hang around long enough to get his photo taken. But the good news was that it meant I could log it onto the new online garden butterfly survey – http://www.gardenbutterflysurvey.org/ – my first record for the year.

As well as the first butterflies and bees, the first wasp put in an appearance too. It was a bit dopey and hung about on the fence, warming itself in the spring sunshine for quite a while – good news for my photography attempts. I know wasps aren’t everyone’s favourites, but close up they really are quite stunning!

Common Wasp

The Bees Knees (or Feet)

/ nrowberry / Leave a comment

This last week of sunshine (and showers) has brought the bees out in our garden – at least three species already, plus a massive unidentified one going like a bumblebee out of hell over the roof!

When it comes to identifying bees, it would seem a bee’s knees are hardly relevant at all. In the case of our first positively identified species this year, it was the feet that were key for the charmingly named Hairy Footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes). This is one of the earliest bee species to appear in the spring and we had several merrily tucking into the primroses last weekend.

Hairy Footed Flower Bee

The second species to be spotted in the Lazy Garden was this little mining bee (Andrena sp.) seen basking on an ivy leaf in the sunshine. Unfortunately there are lots of species of mining bees and my photography wasn’t up to scratch enough to be able to identify this one. I did load it onto the ever-useful iSpot website, where several very helpful people discussed various possibilities (I would love to say “debate raged” over my bee, but that would be a bit over dramatic), before concluding that it was best to just stick with Andrena sp. rather than get it wrong. Hopefully our mining bee will reappear sometime and I can get a better photo to nail the identification.

Mining Bee Andrena sp

The final species this week was the humble, but oh so important, Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) seen here already sporting a fine set of pollen sacs. Bee populations in general are struggling so much at the moment, it was great to see 3 species at least surviving in our garden.

Honey Bee

And finally I’ve been having a go with the trail cam filming our bee friends. As per usual with the trail cam, I had to wade through quite a lot of footage of things blowing about in the wind (in this case mainly primroses) before finding this short film of our Hairy Footed Flower Bee, doing what he does best – landing on flowers with his hairy little feet!

Doomed Beauty

/ nrowberry / 2 Comments

It was week two of the Garden Moth Scheme last weekend – I put the trap out twice – once for the official GMS count and once just because I probably need to get out more! Needless to say the non-GMS night produced more moths than the official night, but then it was several degrees warmer. I was tempted to log the better of the two results, but decided to be a good citizen scientist – after all the aim of the scheme is to find out about moth numbers on average nights, not just on the best ones!

The official night still produced 6 moths of 4 species, including a small Double Striped Pug (Gymnoscelis rufifasciata), which landed on the garage wall next to the trap at the beginning of the night and stayed there until dawn.

 

The trap also attracted a Common Plume (Emmelina monodactyla) – a funny stick like micro moth, shaped like a capital T, hence its other common name T-moth.

Emmelina

The second trapping night produced 24 moths of 8 species, including a new species for our garden the March Tubic (Diurnea fagella).

 

Another first for the garden was this much more attractive (apologies to the above March Tubic) Herald moth (Scoliopteryx libatrix). I’d been wanting to find one of these in the garden for a while (having previously only seen it when I’d rescued a few from a friend’s building site of a garage). Herald moths overwinter as adults, so this was probably one that had been hibernating somewhere nearby and emerged on one of the first warm nights.

 

But the star of the show was this magnificent Oak Beauty (Biston strataria) – a large moth with fantastic feathered antennae. We have had them in the garden before, but this was a lovely fresh specimen, looking his or her best. Sadly this beauty was doomed. Before I could move him to the safety of a quiet corner, he took off, flapping towards the apple tree. Unfortunately hubby and I weren’t the only ones watching him go and before we knew it, a robin swooped down and had our bright beauty for breakfast. It must have made a big fat treat for the robin, but I must admit I felt more than a little guilty at our part in this poor moth’s short life!

Oak Beauty

So the two nights trapping brings the total species count for the year to 12, which includes 4 new records for the garden – not a bad start to the year at all. Sadly the Oak Beauty can’t say the same!

Siskin Surprise

/ nrowberry / Leave a comment

The wildlife interest in our garden seems to be swinging at the moment to and fro between the moth traps and the trail cam. Last weekend the trail cam definitely came out on top though, when it threw up a complete surprise in the garden. I guess many of us put out these cameras with the vague hope that they will reveal something unexpected and this weekend ours did. It may not have captured anything super rare, but it did film a Siskin – a bird which we didn’t even know we had in the garden. Of course it would have been nice to see the Siskin in the flesh rather than just on film, but at least we know now to look out for it!

We’d hung this bird table out a week or so ago and were initially a bit annoyed that its design meant it immediately swivelled, tipping all the seeds into one corner.  But this jaunty angle actually appears to be working to our advantage, as the slope (and general instability) seems to be deterring the pigeons and larger birds and allowing the smaller ones to get a look in.

The Siskin is an attractive bird, so I tried to get some correspondingly attractive still images from the film. Unfortunately it was so intent on scoffing the sunflower seeds, that it was difficult to get an image without food hanging from its mouth, so these were the best I could do.

Siskin 1

Siskin 2

The sloping feeder attracted several other species that afternoon, although none stayed as long, or were quite so fond of their food, as the Siskin – a bird after my own heart!

Great Tit

Robin 3

 

Moth Count Down

/ nrowberry / 2 Comments

Less than a week to go until the summer Garden Moth Scheme starts, so I’ve been dusting off the trap and my ID skills, such as they are. Although I’ve been moth trapping for a couple of years now, this will be the first time I’ve submitted my results to any study like this and I’m really looking forward to it.

So on Friday night I put the moth trap out as a sort of a dry run,  in the site I’ll be using through the summer for the scheme.  It was a slightly warmer night than it has been recently (a balmy 2.3°C) and virtually no wind, so I was reasonably optimistic about catching something at least. Sure enough, my optimism was rewarded with the grand total of 7 moths of 4 species; more moths than I’ve had in all the other trap nights this year put together. I even had one species I’ve never recorded in the garden before (probably because I don’t normally trap in February). The Grey Shoulder-knot (Lithophane ornitopus) below most probably hibernated as an adult moth over winter to emerge in the spring.

Grey Shoulder Knot

The remaining 3 species all belonged to the Orthosia genus of moths, which would have spent the winter as pupae. The first of these was the Common Quaker (Orthosia cerasi) which I’d already caught this year and mentioned in earlier blog posts.  The second was the unfortunately named Clouded Drab (Orthosia incerta) seen below camouflaged very well against a stone background.

Clouded Drab

The final species was the much more interestingly titled Hebrew Character (Orthosia gothica), named apparently because the dark mark on its wing looks like the Hebrew character Nun: It’s not a perfect match, but you can see what they were getting at, when whoever it was named this moth.

Hebrew Character

So 6 species of moth under my belt for this year so far and looking forward to seeing what the garden holds in the coming months. Having the discipline of having to put the moth trap out every week for the scheme, will hopefully yield a few extra species that I would otherwise miss. And it’s nice to know that our Malvern moths are in some small way contributing to the wider knowledge of the UK moth fauna.