A Suffolk Garden in July – Insects Part 1

Tags

azure damselfly, blackfly aphid, blue-tailed damselfly, brown hawker, burnet moth, buttercup, comma butterfly, Essex skipper, feverfew, greenbottle, helicopter, ichneumon wasp, insects, July, meadow brown butterfly, migrant hawker, oedemea nobilis, peacock butterfly, Red Lily Beetle grub, rhagonycha fulva, Ringlet butterfly, robber fly' bindweed, ruddy darter, sawfly, small skipper, Small Tortoiseshell, small wolf spider, speckled wood butterfly, spotted crane fly, Suffolk, white butterfly

A Speckled Wood butterfly

I realise that we are now a week into August but better late than never.  There were so many different insects about last month that I will have to make more than one post to cover them.  I have also included some photos of insects that I saw during June most of which were still about in July.  I will list the insects in the order in which I saw them or was able to photograph them.  I am not including the dragonfly, damselfly and butterfly photos that I have already posted but I may include different photos of the same type of insect.

The Speckled Wood shown above had a little bit of its wing missing but was quite a bright, new-looking insect.  The next photo is of something none of us want in our gardens.

A Red Lily Beetle grub – yeuch!

These nasties chomp their way through lilies and fritillaries and do it very quickly too.  They cover themselves in their own excrement.

A male Oedemera nobilis – only the males have the swollen hind-legs. They feed on pollen and this one is eyeing up his next meal

The next two photos are of the same unidentified insect and the photos aren’t that clear either.   Ichneumon wasp or sawfly?

Note the extremely long ovipositor!

A Small Wolf Spider carrying its eggs in a silk ball

I realise that spiders aren’t insects but I’m still including this one here nevertheless.  Because these spiders do not make webs and live a nomadic life, the female has to carry her eggs around with her.  Some wolf spiders even carry their spiderlings about with them too.  When the spiderlings are due to hatch, the female spins a large ‘nursery web’ in the vegetation and puts the egg sac there.  Wolf spiders run down their prey like their namesakes.

Greenbottle

Azure Damselfly

Azure Damselfly

Here are some more little insects that gardeners could do without.  This photo also shows how good feverfew is at attracting them.

Blackfly aphids on Feverfew

Spotted Cranefly

Unidentified insect (sawfly?) on a buttercup

Tortoiseshell butterfly sipping nectar

A Meadow Brown butterfly on a very windy day

A Ringlet butterfly on another windy day

A Ruddy Darter dragonfly

Rhagonycha fulva I thought at first that this was a Cardinal Beetle but they have different antennae and are much redder.

A Burnet Moth caught in a spider’s web

A Blue-tailed Damselfly

An unidentified fly (robber fly?) on a bindweed flower

A military helicopter It looks like an insect!

Another photo of a Ruddy darter

A Migrant Hawker dragonfly

 

Peacock butterfly on lobelia

Small or Essex Skipper on Common Bird’s-foot-trefoil

The Small and the Essex Skipper butterflies are very similar.  The difference is that the Essex Skipper is greyer underneath and its antennal tip is black underneath.  I don’t think I will ever be able to tell the difference.

Comma butterfly

Comma butterfly

Spot the dragonfly! I think this is a Brown Hawker

An unidentified white Butterfly. I am having a lot of trouble identifying the white buttterflies

There will be more insects in the next post.

High Summer Walk Part 1

Tags

agrimony, bindweed, common knapweed, common ragwort, Gatekeeper butterfly, hoary plantain, hogweed, hop trefoil, oil-seed rape, peas, pineapple weed, ploughing, poppy, Ringlet butterfly, seagulls, silverweed, thatched barn, thrips, thunder-flies, walking

I had been shopping in Norwich with E two weeks ago and the weather had just changed for the better.  We had had a lot of very humid weather, with heavy rain and thunder and lightening.  We had had the usual accompaniment to humid weather of flying and swarming ants and thunder-flies.  These are tiny little thrips with feathery wings; a millimetre long and thread-thin.  They get everywhere – in your ears and eyes, up your nose, in your hair, crawling on your skin until you feel like screaming. They come in the house and die in heaps on every surface; they even get behind the glass in your picture frames.  And then, after a storm at the weekend, we woke on the Monday to fresh air, warm sunshine and a gentle breeze. As we were driving home I had such a longing to be out of doors, walking in the fields that instead of having lunch I found the camera and my hat and went off down the lane.  The verge at the side of our lane had just been cut but there were still a few flowers hanging on there.

Beautiful pink and white bindweed.  The flowers are almond scented.

The harvesting had begun.

Oil-seed rape stubble.

The stubble is almost a foot high and so hard and sharp like knives; it is almost impossible to walk through.

You can see for miles from here

There is a UFO in this shot. Is it a bird?  Is it a plane? No!  It’s…. you tell me!

Ploughing had started in one of the fields.  Seagulls love to follow the plough as it turns up lots of worms and grubs.  Black-headed, herring and lesser black-backed gulls.

A rather tired and tatty ringlet butterfly

This is agrimony and there has been a lot of this about this year.  Apparently it has a scent reminiscent of apricots; I haven’t noticed this but then I don’t have a very good sense of smell – at least not for nice smells!  The ancients found this a very versatile plant as it was held to be a remedy against snake-bite, poor sight, loss of memory and liver complaints.

Silverweed leaves. Potentilla anserina

Common Knapweed buds. These plants have been flowering for many weeks now; and for many to come if these buds are anything to go by.  Also known as Hardheads.

We have had lots of hogweed too

Hoary plantain. This is an unusual plantain in that it produces a delicate scent which attracts bees and other insects.  All other British plantains are wind pollinated.

A field of peas.

For many years, peas were grown everywhere in this part of Suffolk as there was a frozen food factory in Lowestoft on the coast.  We were all used to the enormous pea harvesters and the smell of burnt peas wafting on the air.  Then the factory was closed.  Many people were made redundant and the farmers here had to find a different crop to grow and had to sell their harvesters.  In recent years peas have started to be grown again.  Some farmers are working together as a collective, sharing harvesters and have found other customers for their peas.  This field is being left until the peas have dried.  I don’t know if the plants will just be dug into the soil as a source of nitrogen or if the plants are used for animal feed or the dried peas sold to a processing factory.  Perhaps someone can tell me. Red is so difficult to photograph.  This photo looks as though I’ve done some careless ‘photoshopping’. You will recognise this photo from my previous post.  This works better as the poppies take up more of the photo but they still don’t look ‘real’.

A snail hiding in a hogweed seedhead

A female Gatekeeper butterfly

An enormous thatched barn

This is hop trefoil.  The stems are downy and the seed-heads are covered with dead petals making them look like hops.

There was a lot pink and yellow.

Pineapple Mayweed

This smells of pineapple when crushed.

This is Common Ragwort, a poisonous plant and the food plant of the Cinnabar Moth caterpillar.

I will continue this walk in Part 2.