Making hay

On Thursday I began cutting the mini meadow by the Welcome Hut to hopefully keep or increase the flower species present and keep the surrounding grasses under control. Without this the grasses can form an impenetrable thatch which which the wildflowers struggle to grow through.

Mini meadow by the Welcome Hut

Mini meadow

This little patch of ground by the Welcome Hut was laid with wildflower turf last year and has looked fabulous this spring and summer, with ragged robin, marjoram, yarrow, clover, selfheal, wild carrot and bird’s foot trefoil flowering, to name just a few. The wild carrot may have been a later addition, planted by Bob, along with some scabious and I think he also added some yellow rattle seed…

The meadow in May, full of ragged robin

Over the summer it has been alive with grasshoppers, crickets, butterflies, beetles, bees and more: 

Skipper sp. resting on a blade of grass, taken in June

Small copper, taken in July

Although many of the flowers and grasses have now died back, whilst cutting the vegetation I watched a number of spiders scurrying about and disturbed this very smart looking caterpillar:

Ruby tiger caterpillar

At first the garden tiger moth sprang to mind, its caterpillars are also known as the woolly bear, but it didn’t look big enough or quite right, so after a bit of searching I think it is the fully grown caterpillar of the ruby tiger moth:

Ruby tiger moth

The caterpillars feed on a variety of herbaceous plants including ragwort, plantain, dock and dandelion. This caterpillar is probably from a second brood and will overwinter as a caterpillar, emerging during early spring: I relocated it to a safer spot away from my shears. 

I have quite a bit more cutting to do, but it is good to cut a meadow in sections and to leave some sections untouched. I might wait for some nicer weather before carrying on!

Whilst outside the front of the Education Centre I also saw this common carder bee enjoying the Inula hookerii which is still flowering:

Common carder bee

The light trap only contained two moths, the highlight for me being this frosted orange:

Frosted orange

The last few days have not been so pleasant, although the original dipping pond I imagine is grateful for the rain. This morning I spied this very bedraggled looking bumblebee on one of the planters outside the front of the Centre. Despite looking very sorry for itself it was moving around, so I attempted to warm it up slightly, gave it some sugar water (which it literally lapped up) and released it somewhere hopefully more sheltered as it had become very active. My good deed for the day, fingers crossed it survives the night…

Soggy bumblebee

 

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30 Days Wild – Day 3 – A Herd of Elephants

I was at Blashford Lakes Nature Reserve today after a couple of days off. We had a volunteer work party in the morning but before we started I checked through the moth trap, although the catch was quiet good there was nothing too surprising, although I was pleased to see my first peach blossom of the year, no picture though as it flew off. There were several hawk-moths including a group of three elephant hawk-moth on one egg box.

a herd of elephant hawk-moth

There were also a few species of prominents including a pale prominent, they all get their name from the small raised point on the folded wing, presumably an adaptation to break up their outline and make them look less like moths. For a moth, not looking like a moth is very useful as birds love to eat moths, so lots of moths either hide away or just try to look not like moths. The pale prominent does this rather well.

pale prominent looking like a dead bit of plant stem

Our volunteer tasks were giving the outside of the Education Centre a was down and having a clear-out of the tool store, both much needed tasks, if not exactly conservation work. At least we should be able to find most of the tools and equipment now and the building does look a lot smarter for a wash.

I checked the hemlock water dropwort around the centre pond at lunchtime for visiting insects, the flowers are a very good nectar source. There were lots of hoverflies and a few beetles including a wasp beetle, a yellow-and-black longhorn beetle and a red-headed cardinal beetle.

red-headed cardinal beetle

What’s in My Meadow Today?

By the time I got home most of the meadow in my garden was in shade, but it was still making its presence felt. The grasses are flowering and their pollen is blowing in the wind as every hayfever sufferer will know. Grasses do not rely on insects to carry their pollen from one flower to another to achieve fertilisation, they just release huge clouds of pollen into the air to be carried to another flower. This saves on the need to produce nectar as an inducement to insects, but does mean that a lot of pollen has to be produced.

flowering grasses – much of it Yorkshire fog

Many trees use the same method, resulting in allergic reactions for many in spring.  Pollen deposited in peat and similar wet habitats has allowed us to look back in time and work out what the dominant vegetation cover was in the distant past. It turns out that although there was rapid colonisation of the UK by tree after the end of the last Ice Age the nature of the cover changed over time. One tree now generally rare, the small-leaved lime, was abundant at one time and it turns out that elm have seen several rises and falls in abundance, perhaps indicating previous outbreaks of “Dutch” elm disease.

The tiny garden pond does not have many plants, but one it does have is lesser reedmace and it is now flowering and also sheds pollen into the wind, the pollen is produced by the male part of the plant, which here is the upper part of the flowering stem.

lesser reedmace flower