22 Spot Ladybirds

About a month ago I was bemoaning the mildewy state of our courgette plants when I noticed a brilliant yellow speck moving about in the foliage. Upon taking a closer look I was happy to find this pair of 22 spot ladybirds taking advantage of the sunny weather by mating vigorously (and for ages!) on the chewed and greying leaves.

It was impossible to get a better photo without disturbing them, but as these  ladybirds are tiny – only 3 to 5 mm long, I was pleased to get any picture at all. All ladybirds are welcome in our garden – they are wonderful pest control – but I only found out how pleased I should have been on behalf of our courgettes yesterday when I read this post about ladybirds in Hagbourne Wildlife, which told me that the 22 spot eats mildew! I had no idea that there were any non-carnivorous ladybirds so I did a little bit of research.

Native to Europe, their latin name is Psyllobora vigintiduopunctata, often abbreviated to Psyllobora 22-punctata, and they can reliably be identified from their small size and uniformity of markings. Each wing case has 11 evenly spaced black spots. The pronotum (the section between the head and the abdomen) also has 5 black spots, which don’t seem to have been counted when this insect was given it’s name. You’ll find them on low growing mildewed (mouldy) plants, and a quick scout around wildlife forums also revealed fun informal accounts of them coming into utility rooms or living in house plant pots where the compost has become mouldy.

Alas my yellow spotted friends could do little for the courgettes – even if they bred a 22 spot army the mildew had already well and truly taken hold. I still like to think of their larvae munching bravely away – at least they won’t go hungry.

Summer on the wing

At the risk of being corny, I’m amazed at how time flies. Two weekends ago (it seems a lot longer somehow) I spent a perfect summer afternoon investigating a small bramble hedge in the middle of Hampshire. Who knows how long I spent there; I was utterly absorbed, but I do know that I could barely see past the butterflies. There were clouds of them! I was astonished at how intently they foraged, as many fiercely territorial species sat calmly together and drank deeply from the bramble flowers. Perhaps it was the heat, perhaps it was the end of the breeding season; maybe it was just that they were getting drunk on good nectar, but I’ve never had so many butterflies sit so patiently for me.

First up was Polygonia c-album, or the Comma, a lovely amber coloured creature with attractively raggedy wings. Wondering how it got that name? Look at the bright marking on the underwing in the picture below – you should be able to tell!

At first I thought this Argynnis paphia, or Silver Washed Fritillary was a Comma too, but its larger size and calligraphic markings gave it away. Although this particular individual is very much past its best you can still see what an impressive and beautiful creature it is.

Let’s take a closer look at its wonderful green and orange furred body and spotted eyes

A little further along I found a Pyronia tithonus, or Gatekeeper – these sprightly butterflies were very active and though I saw many in the hedgerow this was the only one that would sit for me. I think it’s a female.

Time passed, and I realised that most butterflies had drunk their fill and moved on. I stalked the perimeter of the field and found nothing else that would sit still for me. Time to try the garden (we were staying at R’s parents house) which has many plants beloved of butterflies. Sure enough, there was an Aglais urticae, or Small Tortoiseshell on the lavender.

And the Gonepteryx rhamni, or Brimstone butterfly looked well on this striking blue flowered shrub. They particularly liked this plant, which seemed quite poetic given how the fizzy yellow of the butterfly looked against the improbably blue flower.

I had been anxiously hoping to find some Inachis io, or Peacock butterflies, having seen a colony of their caterpillars on nettles much earlier in the summer. They couldn’t all have been killed, surely? It seemed wrong that I hadn’t found an adult yet. Then, on a trespassing bramble I saw this…

What a showstopper! It was worth a bit of mild anxiety just to see this glorious insect – a male, fresh and glossy and presumably just emerged from its pupa.  I intend to write a little more about peacock butterflies, but I’ll leave that till another time.

Cookham Idyll

A couple of weekends ago now (how quickly the summer goes) R and I caught the train to Cookham to spend an afternoon walking along the drowsy bank of the River Thames and climb Winter Hill, where we would picnic in honour of the fullness of summer. Follow the Thames west of London up towards it’s source and you will barely recognise it as the murky waterway that bisects the city’s heart; indeed, follow it as far west as Oxford and it has another name – the Isis.

The day was hot and sunny with a refreshing breeze as we approached the flank of the Hill along a towpath riotous with wildflowers. The breeze however kept dragonflies and damselflies to a minimum, though we did get to see this little marvel, a female Beautiful Damoiselle.

Cookham is famous as the home of the visionary artist Stanley Spencer, who painted biblical scenes as if they had occurred in his native village. After viewing some of his oddly hallucinatory work in the Stanley Spencer Museum the landscape, already vivid in the summer heat took on a strange intensity as if I were looking directly through the artists eyes. Cookham is also a home to the arcane practice of Swan Upping, the ceremonial rounding up of mute swans by the Queen’s Swan Markers, the Worshipful Company of Vintners and the Worshipful Company of Dyers. Cookham, in short,  is as beautifully English as it gets, and more than mildly eccentric to boot.

One of the best reasons to visit this part of the world (apart from it’s singular beauty) is the chance to see Red Kites. Once almost extinct in the UK and still globally threatened, these spectacular birds ride the skies like no other bird I’ve ever seen, and around Cookham and Winter Hill there is a sizeable local population. On a previous visit we’d been startled by a tawny flash erupting from a wheat field right in front of us as one of these birds shot into the sky, leaving us gasping with disbelief. On that occasion we didn’t know that these birds were locally common, and while eating our picnic on the hill’s crest we shook our heads in wonder while watching more than one bird flirting with the breeze at eye level no more than twenty yards away. On this visit we got our first sighting while in the beer garden of the Bounty Pub,  taking turns with the binoculars to watch a soaring pair while we slapped on sun cream, drank a sustaining coffee and prepared for our climb.

Don’t get me wrong; the climb is hardly arduous – I don’t know for sure but I’d be surprised if Winter Hill tops two hundred feet. It’s steep though, and the sun was bright and harsh. Lush vivid green meadows nodding with wildflowers clung to the slope and as we climbed it’s steepest point our hot faces drew level with Harebells, Clustered Bellflowers,  Scabious. Butterflies commute busily between patches of flowers and at the top rabbits, unafraid, graze near the sheltering brambles.

The view from the top of Winter Hill on a beautiful late summer day repays the modest effort a thousandfold – the flat lands of the Thames roll out like a richly patterned carpet, and in the dancing shade of oak and ash we sat down to drink it all in.

No picture could do justice to the panorama of many coloured patchwork fields, the toy like train on it’s track, the subtle glint of the Thames below. We unpacked our picnic of strawberries and wine and toasted the sun dazed landscape.

Exploring the crest of the hill I was delighted to find some fat new Parasol Mushrooms growing up through dried out cow pats – Parasol mushrooms are good eating, but I’m always a little nervous about id’ing mushrooms in the field so we left them unmolested.

Further along I found this beastie gorging it’s-self on Ragwort. It’s the gaudy caterpillar of the just as gaudy Cinnabar moth, and it’s football jersey colouration serves as a warning to predators – keep away, I taste bad, I will make you very sick! It’s food plant – Ragwort – is full of poisonous alkaloids which the caterpillar stores safely in it’s body, rendering it, too, poisonous. They have a voracious appetite and will completely devour their host plant down to the ground, which will sometimes result in the caterpillars turning cannibal in the absence of anything else to eat. As this was the only Ragwort plant to be seen, and as it had already been quite comprehensively munched, and as there was only one caterpillar doing the munching… well I have to come to the conclusion that this greedy creature may well have been the sole survivor of a cannibal feast.  Enough of the grisly nature lesson – don’t you think our stripy friend would look well sitting on a fully opened parasol mushroom – just like the caterpillar in Alice In Wonderland? The landscape may be full of gentle beauty, but just a quick glimpse of it at a different scale reveals a strangeness to match anything Lewis Carrol dreamed up.

Eventually it was time to dawdle our way back down and catch the train back to London. We thought we’d seen everything we could possibly want to see as we strolled along the river, scanning the waters with our binoculars for nothing in particular. Then I spotted this Great Crested Grebe diving, and soon it had a plump fish in it’s beak. Curious as to why it did not eat it’s prize immediately I kept the binoculars trained on the bird and was lucky to see it swim to it’s mate and give the fish to her – she could not dive for her own dinner because their chicks were riding upon her back, their fuzzy grey heads peeking out between her wings.

Work Day On The Marshes

Last Sunday I took part in my first volunteer work day for the Friends of Tottenham Marshes – clearing an area of scrub to make space for beehives. I barely knew a soul, so it was a confusing day of forgetting peoples names, not knowing where to sit for lunch and generally being the one constantly having to play catch-up. To add to the confusion it was a shared work day with Lea Bridge Conservation Volunteers, who seemed to completely outnumber the Tottenham lot and who I constantly mistook for them. The confusion didn’t matter one bit though as LBCV were a friendly bunch and I think I’ll be joining in with some of their work days in the future.

The area of wooded scrub we were working in was chest deep in nettles and brambles which we mainly cut down using tools with the satisfying name of slashers. The work was sweaty, stingy and thorny but with about a dozen of us working it wasn’t so bad. The picture above shows the area I was working in – wish I’d taken a “before” picture as you can’t really tell from this how much vegetation we shifted. Blackcaps sang all around us as we worked, and not long after we started someone found a nest with two blue eggs in it. It was a blackbird nest, possibly already deserted as it is so late in the year – the eggs were cold. We left it and it’s tree untouched though, just in case.

The day was hot and sunny and I was glad to be working under the shade of Hawthorn and Elder scrub. Out in the bright sunshine a small work party dug over and prepared a flower bed outside the meeting rooms, and there in the fresh turned soil was a tiny newt.

After a leisurely lunch by the banks of the river we went back to the clearing and worked with pitchforks to pile up the vegetation we had cut back. Those tall compost piles will provide a wonderful invertebrate habitat, quickly rotting down to take up less and less space, until it is time to put in the bee hives. We’d got most of the work done before lunch so there was a chance to lean on our tools and look around, a few of us discussing wildlife on the marshes and identifying trees and shrubs in the clearing. Many were laden with fruit, like this bird cherry.

The bank I had been working on was smothered with cascades of fat, sweet sunwarmed brambles which I had spent the morning eating greedily before cutting the thorny branches back. Before calling it a day we combed the remaining bramble thickets and were rewarded with a tasty wild grown treat.

The elusive Bee Orchid shows itself

It’s high time I continued the story begun in last week’s post Here Be Dragons. Did I find any Bee Orchids? I hadn’t meant to tease but yes, yes I did! As you can see from the pictures here, I saw some beauties.

To recap… after bumping into wildlife photographer David Cottridge beside the pond on Tottenham Marshes, he offered to show me where the rumoured  Ophrys apiphera, or Bee Orchid, was flowering. I had been there once before on a fruitless search so I was thrilled to bits that this time I would not be disappointed! I was led to a small area of open meadow which had obviously been mown at some point; the grass was shorter and the undergrowth sparser in general – perfect Orchid habitat. How had I not spotted this admittedly modest clearing before? And there they were. I didn’t spot the first one; not knowing quite what to expect David had to point it out to me.

The flowers are a little bit smaller than I’d imagined, about the size of a thumbnail. It doesn’t matter that I have a field guide, somehow the measurements never sink in when I read them and taking the name of the plant literally, I’d been on the lookout for something perhaps the size of a large bumblebee. There is a fairly good reason why I made this error though, and it has to do with this plant’s fascinating and bizarre method of reproduction.

The Bee Orchid is a shameless mimic, and what it mimics as you might guess is bees. It imitates female bees of a particular species right down to the scent it gives off, which to a male bee is as convincing and seductive as his intended mate would be. The Bee Orchid’s flower also looks, to a bee at least, very much like a prospective female. Sadly the Bee Orchid which is native to the UK mostly flaunts it’s flowers and scent in vain; it is thought that the original bee which it was trying to seduce is extinct, but I’ve read that bees of a different species will occasionally be mistaken. But why is the plant bothering to do this in the first place?

Take a look at the above picture. The bloom on the left has what looks like a little yellow ball hanging from it’s hood, in fact there are two of these and they are called pollinia. Pollinia are dense packages of pollen, and to set seed the orchid needs some way of transmitting their pollinia to other plants. So imagine – the excited bee lands on the flower and attempts to mate with it, at which point

“a curved column that houses both male and female plant organs descends from the top of the orchid and glues a pair of pollinia to his head. If the next orchid he visits has already dispatched it’s pollinia, then the column will pick up the one he carries and the orchid is fertilised” (pg 126, The Private Life Of Plants, David Attenborough)

This little plant is luring the hapless bee on a false promise of sexual bliss in order to have it’s own reproductive needs met. Or it would be, if  any bees were answering it’s scented call. UK bee orchids, bereft of their original pollinator are luckily able to pollinate themselves so it’s a good job I hadn’t sat down in the grass expecting to see this drama enacted, because I’d have been there still.

Back to the little clearing, and David and I were tiptoeing about in the grass trying to find the perfect angle for a picture. There were several flower spikes and each spike had flowers slightly different from the others – it seems they are vary variable. David pointed out the one pictured above as being particularly striking. The area the orchids were flowering in has been mown for the last couple of years as a traditional hay meadow by Friends Of Tottenham Marshes in an attempt to encourage wildflowers; apparently these orchids had shown their heads the very first year this was done.

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