30 Days Wild – Day 5 (The Blues and more)

I was not working on Saturday and, as the sun was shining I wanted to go out, but at the end of half-term week where should I go? The New Forest would be busy, so I headed up onto the chalk, to Broughton Down, which turned out the be a good decision. It was alive with butterflies and especially with blues. Most frequent were common blue.

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There were also rather fewer Adonis blue, you can tell the difference by the little black lines that go through the white wing outline.

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A scatter of small blue gave me the run-around and it took a while to get any sort of picture of one.

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Although not actually blue, the brown argus is closely related to the common blue, in fact small female common blue can easily be confused with it.

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The last of the day’s blues was the holly blue, there were several females egg-laying on dogwood around the reserve.

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Not all the butterflies were blues, although almost all were small and often difficult to keep up with. I find green hairstreak especially difficult to find and follow, their erratic flight and green colouration mean they seem to just disappear. So I was pleased when this one landed right beside me, even if a bit of milkwort was rather in the way.

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Other small fast butterflies are available and skippers are certainly in this category, I saw both bare ground specialist skippers in good numbers, high on the down there were dingy skipper.

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Whilst in the valley there were several grizzled skipper.

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Other butterflies were rather few, with only brimstone frequent, a few speckled wood, green-veined white and a couple of rather late orange-tip finished off the list for the day.

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Not all insects are butterflies of course, there were quite a few green pot beetle.

Hoverflies were not abundant, despite the sunshine but I did see a Sceava pyrastri, typically a migrant species to the UK.

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Quiet a spectacular resident species typical of species rich grassland is Chrysotoxum festivum.

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I had hoped to be able to identify the rather brightly marked craneflies that were quiet abundant, I even got a fair picture of it, but it turns out there are several very, very similar species and a picture is just not enough.

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All of the species so far were ones I had seen before, but when I sat down for a drink I noticed several tiny moths on the germander speedwell flowers, these turned out to be Cauchas fibulella, whose caterpillars feed on…. germander speedwell!

A pretty good Wild Day on a great site, I will be back.

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30 Days Wild – Day 17 – Up on the Down

I had a day off and the weather was okay so I headed out for a visit to Broughton Down, a real gem of a reserve, a steep chalk down with a surprising variety of habitat, even the grazed down varies in character as you move around the site. I started at the furthest end of the reserve where the turf is short and covered in an abundance of fragrant orchids.

orchid bank

These come in various shades from quite dark to almost white.

Although the fragrant orchids were the most abundant there were patches of common spotted orchid, especially in the shade or where the soil was probably a bit deeper or less dry.

There are other species on site but the only other orchid I was were a few pyramidal.

pyramidal orchid

The other thing that immediately struck me was the super abundance of dark green fritillary, there must have been hundreds, they far outstripped all other species present and I have never seen so many anywhere before.

dark green fritillary

Downland is not just about orchids, there are lots of other plants to enjoy, such as greater knapweed, fairy flax, thyme and squinacywort.

squinancywort

The grassland has a good few anthills and the difference in the flora on these is very obvious, they tend to have thyme and often speedwell too, no doubt they benefit from the deeper soil and good drainage.

anthill

Thyme is a great nectar source an dis visited by lots of bees and a real favourite for a lot of butterflies too. It can be a good plant to grow if you have a very sunny dry area in the garden and of course it is a culinary herb.

thyme

The grassland on an unimproved down is the richest in terms of species that you can find anywhere in the UK and I could fill several blogs with flowers from this one visit. Even the plantains, usually a rather drab group of plants, look better on downland.

hoary plantain

The tall white stems of common valerian stand out well above the generally short vegetation.

common valerian

One of the shortest of all the plants is milkwort, common on downland, but also found in lots of other short grasslands, there are several species and forms found in different habitats.

milkwort

All these flowers feed lots of insects, including lots of butterflies apart from the fritillaries, one of the other common species was marbled white.

marbled white

A question I am sometime asked is what is the difference between butterflies and moths and the answer is that there is no clear answer! Butterflies fly in the daytime, but so do some moths. Although we recognise the general shape of a butterfly, there are moths with the same overall appearance. In fact what we conventionally call butterflies are actually just six of the families of Lepidoptera that we have chose to call butterflies, the rest we call moths.

I did see a few day-flying moths as well as butterflies, the best was a six-belted clearwing a moth that looks like a wasp.

six-belted clearwing

Lots of insects can feed lots of insect predators, some of them also insects, like this robberfly, a chalk downland species in S. England, but with an odd distribution nationally and elsewhere in quite different habitats.

Leptarthrus brevirostris with prey

On the way home we stopped to look at a field of poppies and looking at the hedgerow I spotted several tiny soldierflies walking about on the hazel leaves. I decided to try and get some pictures, not easy as they were very small and constantly on the move, but here are my best efforts.

Pachygaster atra

Pachygaster leachii

Both are common species, but very easily overlooked!

 

 

 

30 Days Wild – Day 21

I contrived to have the longest day off this year, the first day of my weekend, so I suppose it will also be the longest weekend, at least for daylight. Remarkably it was not raining so I took the opportunity to visit Broughton Down again, a gem of a site and for most of the time we had it to ourselves. It is proper downland as you imaging it should be, or at least some sections are, some still suffer from scrub encroachment, but a long term program of control is taking effect.

The top of the Down is especially good for fragrant orchid, of which there are literally thousands.

fragrant orchid

They come in varying shades.

very pale fragrant orchid

Usually as single flowering spikes, but sometimes in groups.

fragrant orchids

And to cap it all they are really fragrant too.

There were some other orchids, in the hollows especially, there were common spotted orchid.

common spotted orchid

And thinly scattered through the fragrant orchid were pyramidal orchid.

pyramidal orchid with hoverfly

There were good numbers of butterflies, perhaps commonest were small heath, impressive as they are seriously reduced in numbers at most sites. Perhaps next most frequent was dark green fritillary, then brimstone, meadow brown, marbled white and common blue. None of which I got pictures of, although as I staked out a group of large scabious flowers I did get a Conopid fly, probably Sicus ferrugineus.

Sicus ferrugineus (probably)

My other insect highlight remains unidentified, but is very smart, if anyone recognises it I would love to know.

Unidentified beetle

Back home in the garden I did manage to get a picture of a meadow brown, one of at least three in our mini-meadow.

meadow brown

I also got a shot of a leafcutter bee on a geranium.

Willughby’s Leafcutter Bee