30 Days Wild – Day 7

At home today and started with a short walk out onto the heath before breakfast and found several silver-studded blue taking advantage of the early sunshine. They seem to use two strategies to warm themselves. The first is to sit with wings closed turned an dangled to offer the greatest area facing towards the sun.

silver-studded blue male on cross-leaved heath

The other is to turn, head-down and three quarters open their wings to form a “dish” turned toward the sun.

basking silver-studded blue (male)

I spent a short time in the garden before I had to go out and in a few minutes saw four species of butterflies, as many as I saw in nearly two hours of butterfly survey last week! These were a fly through red admiral, probably a migrant, but could have been locally reared from an earlier arrival. Then the first two meadow brown of the year in our mini-meadow.

meadow brown

Next I spotted a female silver-studded blue, not a typical garden butterfly, but this is the fifth year we have seen them here, in fact it was soon apparent there were two.

silver-studded blue (female)

Then the excitement really kicked in, when a green hairstreak as found on an Allium, a completely new species for the garden and not a butterfly I see anywhere very often.

green hairstreak

All in all a very splendid butterfly day! I can’t wait to see what Day 8 brings, actually I start every day with the hope of seeing something exciting and I am often not disappointed.

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Butterflies and Beetles

Suddenly it seems to be summer. On Sunday I saw as many insects as I have seen for some years, the past couple of years have been poor ones for insects, so we are due a good season. Butterflies are at a low just now, most spring species have come to and end and summer ones have yet to get going. However I did see common blue, small copper, a few orange-tip, speckled wood, a few red admiral and peacock, small and green-veined white and most exciting of all, and a first for the reserve, a green hairstreak.

green hairstreak – a reserve first!

It was also good for beetles, including several brilliant common malachite beetle near the Centre pond.

common malachite beetle

Longhorn beetles are also starting to appear.

longhorn beetle pair

There are also huge numbers of damselflies all over the reserve now, but still rather few dragonflies, although I did manage to see a single hairy dragonfly perched near Ivy North hide, although I failed to get a picture of it.

These are the Days

There can be few things better than getting out into the countryside on a fine May day and this is exactly what I did over the weekend. On Sunday I was at Blashford and on Saturday, on something of a busman’s holiday, visiting another Trust reserve at Noar Hill.

Noar Hill is a well known site for  arrange of chalkland butterflies, at this time of year this especially means the Duke of Burgundy fritillary. They did not disappoint, with several dozen seen in fine, warm sunshine. Their caterpillars feed on cowslip and it was easy to see what they like about this site as there must be thousands of cowslip plants all over the hill.

Duke of Burgundy fritillary

There were also a fair few other butterflies, including green hairstreak and dingy skipper.

dingy skipper

For a single season we had a small colony of these skippers at Blashford, but they have not been seen since.

The weather was still very warm on Sunday and once again the insects were out in numbers. At last I saw some damselflies, in fact three species, the common blue, large red and blue-tailed. I visited the sandy bank where I saw the solitary bees nests a couple of weeks ago. The same species were there again along with some new ones, one of which was a tiny parasitic species, another nomad bee called the little nomad bee, if I have identified it correctly.

little nomad bee

Elsewhere on the reserve I found a lot of unidentified solitary bees feeding on the flowers of field maple, I had never before realised just how attractive these flowers are to bees.

flowering field maple

Some other trees have long finished flowering and are now in seed, none more obviously so than the willow, which spread seed on the wind making it fall like snow along the path edges.

seeding willow

The last couple of days have seen a few birds of note. On Saturday a sanderling and a little gull were seen on Ibsley Water and today there were four black tern reported there along with a little gull and a turnstone. On Sunday a hobby spent much of the day over the lake and a female marsh harrier flew north up the valley, whilst red kite and raven have been seen everyday recently. Unfortunately I managed to get pictures of none of these, all I can offer is a stock dove snapped in the shadow at the end of the day from the Woodland hide on Sunday.

stock dove on feeder