Briefly to the Cricket Ground

I set off from Williams Field, checking on the broken hardboard mural that had been taken down, and trying to think what to do with all the spare grass beside the football field.

I had a good look around the area I call the "Community Woodland" at the back of Williams Field and found Gatekeeper and Meadow Brown butterflies (one each). I thought I also saw a Chrysotoxum bicinctum. The trees are developing quite well and providing good habitat. I wonder whether the oak seedlings need thinning?

Behind our developing woodland I had a look along the shady public right of way and found three or more Speckled Wood, Pararge aegeria. They looked only moderately fresh, and I thought this was a good place to find these. The trees just here have apparently been planted by the farmer, but still provide the appropriate micro-climatic options these butterflies seem to like.

Along by Harris Field smallholding there were at least two male Common Blue Butterflies, sunning themselves next to the alfalfa field. I wondered if they were part of the same colony as the Common Blues I saw 150 m. away on the grassy orchard, or perhaps had wandered from there. There were none in the orchard. Another Speckled Wood flickered along the shady part of the path.

You get a great view of Oxenhoath from Steers Place, it is such a lovely house:

There are plenty of other gorgeous houses around here as well, this one up towards the cricket ground, which I believe is called Cricketers Cottage Farm!:

Slow and steady at Cliffe

Lots of Whites, Holly Blues, Gatekeepers, Meadow Browns and a Peacock. Need to go and look for the Small Heaths on the path!

Black-tailed Godwits, Avocets, Redshanks, Greenshanks, Oystercatchers, 2 Grey Plover, 1 possible Snipe, Little Egrets, Black-headed Gulls, Great Black-backed Gulls, Herring Gulls in flight, Shelduck, Coot, Teal, Pochard, Little Grebes, Great Crested Grebes, Cormorant in flight.

Discussed the various species of Emerald Damselflies with a keen young chap. 

Bourneside Meadows

The landscape down towards Bourneside Meadow does not seem to have benefited from the small amounts of rain so far, and the whole area feels dry and almost devastated. The crop of forage beans have been sprayed with dessicant, and stand with blackened stems that rattle loudly against each other whenever Monty gets into them.

Alongside the crop margins there are lots of Prickly Sowthistle, Sonchus asper, mostly with white woolly seed (really cypsela) heads, and going over rapidly. Some of the old plants are heavily covered with a powdery mildew, and overall therefore even the weeds are struggling. Intriguingly there are young plants from earlier seeds already forming rosettes ready for the winter and flowering next year.

It was nice to see the first of a series of male Common Blue butterflies. Polyommatus icarus, as I turned off the track towards the meadow, and I think I saw a total of about 9 males altogether, with perhaps 3 females as well. This one is a male:

For the whole time I stayed within the meadow I didn't see any Brown Argus butterflies, Aricia agestes. However as I left, I did find four, all together in the very long grass alongside the river bank, trying to roost and settle on the grass stems and leaves being blown about by the wind. This communal roosting is characteristic behaviour of both this species and the Common Blue. The Brown Argus does seem to be give a much more silvery impression overall in flight, as well as perhaps being slightly smaller and narrower.

There were regular overflights from various white butterflies whilst I was at the meadow, and I did get close to one of them, which turned out to be a male Green-veined White, Pieris napi, nectaring on a Mint flowerhead. I know it was a male because it only had one dark spot on the upperside of the forewing, whilst females have two, and tend to have much darker forewings overall. It was nice to check the wing patterning, and the almost blue-greenish white hairs on and around the body. The hairs themselves might be white, but look blue-greenish just against the body.

The hairs extend around the abdomen, although this is not always so easily seen.

This butterfly on the other hand, seen later in the meadow nearer the river, was much more likely to be a male Small White, Pieris rapae, because of the lack of black triangular markings at the ends of the veins on the outer margin, although the overall upper wing pattern is very similar.

It was great to see the substantial clumps of Mint. The rounded terminal flowerheads and projecting stamens suggest that it is probably Water Mint, Mentha aquatica, supporting the generally wet nature of the ground around the large pond. The leaves were very hairy, not obviously petiolate on first glance (but they must have been, and this was confirmed on close examination), rounded with generally forwardly bluntly projecting teeth. The flowers were lilac, and a few mm in length with triangular calyx teeth as described in the books. Standard number of 4 stamens in the genus, with a central style and stigma, together with equal calyx teeth, (corolla and) calyx hairy on the outside in this species.

The Godwits return to Cliffe Pools

Hundreds of Black-tailed Godwits, Avocets and dozens of Great Black-backed Gulls, Black-headed Gulls, Coot, Redshank, 1 Peregrine. The peregrine was standing quietly on the sand spit the other side of Flamingo, not significantly disturbing the other birds close to it as long as it stayed on the ground.

White Butterflies, 4 Gatekeepers, 5 Meadow Browns, 4 Holly Blues, 2 Commas, 1 Small Heath, 1 Small Tortoiseshell, 2 Red Admirals.

Common Blue Dragonflies.

Round the reservoir and back via the Victoria Road bridge

On the reservoir banks there was a huge change in the obvious vegetation patterns. The lush mix of colour of a wide range of flowers in June has been replaced by a an almost complete cover of brown seeding grass, with dominating white Wild Carrot, Daucus carota, interspersed with a few plants of Bristly Oxtongue, Picris echioides. This is a view of the "Wild Carrot landscape" that clothed the whole of the top of the banks and the outer slopes.

On the internal banks themselves there was a bit more diversity with an apparent ecological zonation, of Common Fleabane, Pulicaria dysenterica, then Mayweed, Matricaria, and finally Grass and Wild Carrot, Daucus carota. It is interesting to speculate on the mix of physical, biological and temporal factors that created this pattern.

There was one very smart male Common Blue Butterfly on the Eastern bank of the reservoir, with great colour on the upperwing, but I only caught the undersides with the camera. Still it looked very fresh, fairly newly emerged.

Gatekeepers galore!

Several Gatekeeper "faces":

The scales of a butterfly or moth are extremely varied in form and function. Some of course are upright and fringed, the better to release the scent pheromones, such as those found in the male "sex-brands" mentioned in previous blogs or in tufts in some other species, but some are developed into extremely long hairs, as seen on the body and in these patches on the wings in this Gatekeeper. This explains why where on the insect you see the hairs you get fewer coloured scales (whether genuine pigment colours or refractive colours), a feature that I had noticed previously but never stacked up properly to draw the correct conclusion. The function of hairs is presumably primarily insulation - but I wonder how the presence of the hairs affects other things such as flight, and specifically drag, for example.

This should be a male, as it has the wide dark marks in the middle of the forewings.

The hairs on the underwing often appear more vertically orientated away from the wing - is this gravity or not? It doesn't look like it. If it's a deliberate difference, then could it be for aerodynamic purposes?

This is a fairly typical upper forewing, and again I think this should be a male with a wide dark smudge as a sex-brand in the middle of the forewing!   It is nice to see the clear brown brand around the outer edge of the wing shared by both sexes, with a neat tiny fringe of hairs at the wing edge.

Very late at Dene Park

Far too late in the day, no camera, just a walk for Monty, maybe 35 minutes on site.

Only butterflies seen in the dank drear evening with thunderstorms threatening were one Meadow Brown, Maniola jurtina, and One Green-veined White, Pieris napi.

The Green-veined White, may have been one of the first of the second brood, according to Thomas and Lewington.

The other insect tentatively identified was a Green Shieldbug, Palomena prasina, in its brown winter colours - a bit early I would have thought, and its definitely not a confirmed ID.

Bourneside Meadow

The butterflies were superb at Bourneside Meadow today. It was particularly nice to see the Small Copper, Lycaena phlaeas, although Warren also saw it today at Pittswood and at the Nursery of Ashes Lane, so I suspect it may be more widespread across the parish than I had realised.

I saw several male Common Blue, Polyommatus icarus, males but they were moving too quickly to be photographed. These must be early representatives of the second generation of this summer, which has started just this last week, after a break of about a fortnight from the first generation. Singles or pairs are regularly seen by Warren every summer, so this suggests adults of this species should also be fairly well spread across the parish. This butterfly forms reasonably discrete colonies measured in tens or hundreds, with individuals occasionally wandering some distance.

This species is most active in sunshine and is a frequent visitor to flowers. Males are the more active of the two sexes and set up territories which they patrol in search of females. The female is less conspicuous, spending most of her time nectaring, resting and egg-laying. When egg-laying, the female makes slow flights, low over the ground, searching out suitable foodplants on which to lay. When a suitable plant is located, a single egg is laid on the upperside of a young leaf (UK butterflies), which should be fairly clearly visible.

In dull weather this species roosts head down on a grass stem. As for similar species, such as the Brown Argus, this species roosts communally at night, with several individuals occasionally found roosting on the same grass stem.

The chrysalis is attended by ants, which may take it into their nests, feeding off the honeydew it may excrete.

One of the clues as where the Common Blue breed is going to be the location of the larval food plants. I checked some of the Birds-Foot Trefoil plants in the meadow and I thought most of them were Greater Birds-Foot Trefoil, Lotus pedunculatus, but at least some definitely looked like Common Birds-Foot Trefoil, Lotus corniculatus, as in the relatively hairless plant with (only 3) orange flowers below. Both are included in the fairly wide ranging list of trefoils and medicks that are used as larval foodplants, so this species of butterfly should do well on this particularly rich patch of wild flowers.

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I also spotted (I think) a Brown Argus, Aricia agestis, picking it out from the Small/Essex Skippers as it fluttered past me, found where it had settled, and grabbed a very poor photo just to confirm the record of the colony. The wings are a good chocolate colour and there are good orange spots around the edge, with no blue dusting towards the body, so I do not think it is a Common Blue female. From the rather rounded wings and the full extent of the orange spots it is possibly a female rather than a male Brown Argus. As it seems quite fresh this might be one of the first of the second generation this year.



On one of the Hogweed heads there was a Crabronid wasp, Crabroninae. The wings lie flat across the abdomen. It is very likely to be an Ectemnius species. Sometimes you find Cerceris species in Philanthinae but these are quite easily distinguishable, by the unevenly ridged segments of the abdomen, the head shape, the yellow face and the overall jizz,  http://www.ispotnature.org/node/281557  and http://www.ispotnature.org/node/280405. The yellow proximal sections of the antennae suggest Ectemnius rather than the otherwise very similar Crabro, where the antennae are black overall.

Another confusion possibility is Mellinus arvensis, generally late in the season, and without the yellow on the bottom of the antennae, or the silver or gold hairs on the clypeus, and with more orange rather than yellow legs.

As to getting down to species, this is very difficult - useful notes from Ardea:

"For female ID you need to get a clear view of the shape of the clypeus (basically upper lip) which you can only see well from the underside of the head, against the light. The clypeal hairs obscure the shape from the front. WIth your photos, long Mesonotal hairs, golden clypeal hairs = either lapidaries, ruficornis (scarce), cavifrons and sexcinctus."