Coed Fron Wylt

Lovely walk around the main path, ash trees looking a bit worse than last year.

Enjoyed finding an empty first generation mine of Stigmella tityrella on a Beech leaf, underside egg neatly placed in a midrib axil, mine wiggling between two veins towards the margin before the larva eventually exited the leaf.

A few more leaf mines

 

On Hazel I found a couple nfy (new for year),. so that's both the Phyllonorycter mine species on this tree sorted for 2022!

A single first cycle Phyllonorycter nicellii, the Phyllonorycter found on the underside of Hazel leaves, was spotted on the main circuit, near the dead Ash trees. Hardly any other Hazel was actually checked. As usual you see the nibbled windows around the edge of the mine from the upperside, together with the pulled up ridge, and then the silvered lower epidermis from the underside. The common name is the Red Hazel Midget.

And close by there was a single Phyllonorycter coryli, the larva of the nut leaf blister moth, with the silvered upper epidermis visible in the highly distorted valley of the puckered up leaf. 

 

Early leaf mines

 

My first finds this year of several Phyllonorycter esperella, the Dark Hornbeam Midget, on the upper-surface of the leaves of Hornbeam, Carpinus betulus. 

This could perhaps be Stigmella lapponica, on what looks like Downy Birch, Betula pubescens, whose egg should be on the underside of the leaf, but Stigmella confusella is another possibility with its egg on the upperside of the leaf