Haysden Country Park

The walk today was around the very busy Haysden Country Park on the outskirts of Tonbridge. The site was really chosen because its quite close to Tonbridge station, our next port of call, actually to pick Olive up, returning from her trip during the week to see Nain in North Wales.

The park is very well used, by dog-walkers, cyclists, and also couples and families just out to enjoy the sunshine. Its a very pleasant environment, very good for wildlife as well as having many attractions for the public.

Its also good for watersports as these canoists are demonstrating:

And its got some high quality wooden statues and totems:

As we got into the park, I noticed that the water level in the shallows was really quite low, as you might expect from the very limited rainfall over the past few months.

It didn't stop an intrepid boater paddling his way through the vegetation, towards the Shallows Bridge - although I don't know whether he got much further than that!

There are still a reasonable number of flowers still about, better than many places in the area. This was the last of the common toadflax, Linaria vulgaris

and here are a few of the remaining Comfrey flowers, Symphytum, growing by the river. They could either be Common Comfrey, Symphytum officinale or perhaps more likely the introduced hybrid Russian Comfrey, Symphytum x uplandicum. The styles are particularly persistent in the flowers as the corolla is shed in this genus:

This is the Himalayan Balsam or Policeman's helmet, Impatiens glandulifera, a plant introduced by the Victorians, but now escaped into the countryside and dominating many river banks across the country. As the young leaves and seed pods are edible, this might turn out to be its Achilles heel!

These are the green seed pods getting ready to spontaneously burst open and spread their seeds metres away from the parent plant,

By the high bank of the shallows, there is a patch of new shrub planting probably from last autumn/winter and the "weeds" have taken advantage of the soil disturbance to grow in the opened up patch during the last season, thus giving rise to a patch of Hawkweed Oxtongue, Picris hieracioides. These are clearly in full flower this week - both species of Oxtongue do flower late, certainly into October, as also seen at Cliffe Pools yesterday.

Again you can see the orangey discolouration of the underside of the outer florets, also seen in the Bristly Oxtongue. It may be that this colouration is found more on the younger capitula, as you can sometimes see on the unfolding inflorescences, on the right in these pictures. The insect on the flower on the left might be a solitary bee or a solitary wasp - I can't get any further than that!

This is therefore one of the most likely hotspots in the Park for hoverflies, and sure enough on my first approach I found a Helophilus species nectaring. This genus is more usually found feeding on the honeydew on leaves, although it does get onto flowers, for example in gardens. The leaf nectar resource is nearly exhausted this late in the year, so they do seem to be even more likely to turn to the nectar or pollen to be directly found in flowers.

This species seems most likely to be Helophilus pendulus, a species that I don't think I've seen before, although the genus is a bit difficult. I have seen some other Helophilus specimens that I have tentatively ascribed to Helophilus hybridus. However this one has got a good black central face stripe, a good black bar towards (but not quite reaching) the rear of tergite two and across the full width of the tergite. Fairly conclusively only the distal third of the hind tibia are black, which should be characteristic of the species. I think its a female, but I can't be sure in this genus.

This picture is a bit blurry at the face end, but shows the abdominal and wing patterns up quite clearly. The outer cross vein points outwards rather than cutting back and veins R2/R3 are nicely separated where they reach the wing margin, not fused into one outer "stalk". The smaller buff patches are rather variably separated from the main orange ones according to the books, but appear quite reliable in many photos of the species on the web.

This picture is a bit better on the central black face-stripe and the limitation of black on the hind tibia to a maximum of one third of the distal end of the limb, which separates it from the most closely related species. Another feature is the yellow at the distal end of the hind femur, thus joining the yellow at the proximal end of the tibia.

This picture appears to suggest that the insect is sucking from the stigmas or anthers, rather than going deep into the florets for nectar. Its also a very good shot indeed of the wing vein pattern.

Then a Sphaerophoria scripta male turned up briefly

and finally a very dark drone fly, Eristalis tenax,

On the Impatiens glandulifera down on the peaty island in the river, the bees were still active, exploring the complex geography of the hooded flowers.

A little later on, by the Stony Lock, several dragonflies were scooting around in the clearing overhead. I got a glimpse of one of them and thought it was possibly a migrant hawker, but it was only a very brief glimpse and its so easy to make a mistake with these.

Then on the way out I checked the Hawkweed Oxtongue again and spotted the dark variant of Eristalis tenax one last time, getting a good photo of its hairy dark hind legs.

and in a rather blurry close-up, the double dark stripe of hairs running diagonally across its compound eye!