30 Days Wild – Day 28

A really blustery day spent at home, mainly in the garden. The conditions meant the moth trap had few visitors and photographing insects on waving flowers was a near impossibility.

The highlight was a male Cheilosia caerulescens, a hoverfly I first saw last year and which was only first found in the UK in 2006. It is one that probably came here in plants transported for the horticultural trade. The larvae mine the roots of house-leeks and were probably in the roots of imported plants. It was first found in Surrey and is now quite widespread in S. England.

Cheilosia caerulescens

Although this species may not do too much harm, unless you are an avid grower of house-leeks, it does illustrate how difficult it is to keep from inadvertently bringing species into the country. With increased travel and much more international trade the opportunities for stow-a-ways are many.

Introduced species can be a hot topic, with widely differing views about what controls there should be. My personal feeling is that wherever you stand on the rights or wrongs of controlling invasive species, bringing ever more in should be seen as a bad idea. Any newly arrived species is unlikely to be adapted to the environment and so most die out. If they don’t they will be competing with species already present, there are not generally lots of unused resources lying around, something will be using them and any arrivals will effectively be taking away resource from something else already using it. In the worst cases they thrive to the exclusion of lots of other species, especially if there is no local control by predators, parasites or disease to keep them in check as would be likely in the native range. The upshot of this is that we tend to gain widespread generalist species and lose localised specialist species, in short the species diversity is reduced and some of the variety that makes the world so interesting is lost. This is happening worldwide of course and the impact of introduced species is one of the greatest extinction threats to local wildlife faced across large areas of the world.

As I mentioned I spent most of the day in the garden and many of our garden plants are  a good fit for potentially invasive species. Most are not native to the UK and many not to Europe, but they are selected to be types that will grow here, and the ones we grow most often are the easiest to grow, which is to say they grow very well here. All characteristics that would make a successful invasive species. A lot don’t grow well from seed for one reason or another, but some will set viable seed and a good few will grow well from roots or rhizomes, which is why fly-tipping of garden waste can be sure a problem and  a major route out into the countryside for garden plants.

I have been refurbishing my pond over the lockdown period and it is beginning to look a lot better, with several plants coming into flower, including water forget-me-not and lesser water plantain.

water forget-me-not

lesser water plantain

Advertisement

30 Days Wild – Day 8

My day started with a rare sight from my kitchen window, a pheasant walking across the lawn.

cock pheasant

Pheasants are not native to the UK and owe their existence here to birds released by shoots. Millions are released in early autumn each year, most will die, either shot, starved, predated or in accidents, but perhaps 3 million will survive. They would probably die out within a few years without the constant introductions.

I was at Fishlake Meadows to help Jo with a few fallen trees over the fences before the cattle arrive next week. I know how much Jo likes her “Things on fence posts” so here is my contribution, a lesser stag beetle.

lesser stag beetle

I also saw a very smart five-spot burnet moth in Ashley Meadow.

five-spot burnet

Later at Blashford I had the butterfly transects to do, probably for the last time this year as the volunteers will be taking over again next. Still rather few butterflies, but I did see my first marbled white of the year. It was good fro longhorn beetles though.

black-and-yellow longhorn

It has been noticeable that rabbit numbers are increasing again, after several years of scarcity. I saw this one, very alert, as befits the times, on the Lichen Heath.

alert rabbit

Rabbits are another introduced species in the UK and were carefully looked after in special Warrens, but as they “breed like rabbits” over time they adapted to our landscape and became better at surviving here without help.

I ended my day back in the garden, this time seeing the first field scabious flower of the year open in the mini-meadow, a favourite with lots of insects.

field scabious

30 Days Wild – Day 5 – Saved by the Garden

My Wild Day really wasn’t today as I was wrestling with bandages and First Aid acronyms for the whole day until getting home this evening. On days like this having a wildlife garden allows me to get my infusion of the wild, luckily the sun came out this evening and brought out a few insects.

However I have got ahead of myself, I did get a little bit of wildlife in before I went out this morning, thanks to the moth trap. The night was quite warm and the moth catch included a good range of species, the pick being a figure of eighty, although in this picture it looks more like a figure of zero eight.

figure of eighty

Of course if it was pinned in a box as a specimen, as the moth collectors would have done, it would have looked like “80” on this, the left wing and “08” on the right.

Apart from a few swift that flew over when we were doing our outdoor practical first aid I saw almost no other wildlife until I got home. There are lots of flowers out now, both in the meadow and in the border and the evening sun brought out a variety of insects in search of food. There were a good few hoverflies including several Eupeodes corollae, one of the commonest black and yellow species.

Eupeodes corollae (male)

The males have rather square spots and the females comma shaped ones. In most hoverflies the males have much larger eyes that meet on the top of their heads, this gives them something close to all-round vision, no doubt helping them to find females.

I have several dame’s violet plants in the garden and they are popular with a lot of insects and attracted the evening’s only butterfly, a rather worn holly blue. Their larvae feed on holly as the name suggests, but also ivy and sometimes dogwood and have two broods each year.

worn holly blue on dame’s violet

All the rest of the evening’s wildlife was in the meadow so………………..

What’s in My Meadow Today?

The meadow is flowering well now and in the mix there are a few ox-eye daisy, not really a typical hay meadow plant, but it can be common in places such as road verges if the mowing regime is not too severe.

ox-eye daisy with a small beetle

I am pretty sure the tiny beetle is a varied carpet beetle, they do not always live in houses subsisting on best Wilton.

I also spotted a tiny hoverfly resting on the end of a grass stem, it was Syritta pipiens.

Syritta pipiens

Despite being very small it is distributed across virtually the entire northern temperate zone from Ireland to the far east and across North America, where it probably arrived as an accidental introduction.

Rather more striking was the single soldier-fly I saw, a common species but always nice to see, the broad centurion Chloromyia formosa.

broad centurion (male)

Again it is easy to see this is a male as almost the entire head is taken up with the eyes.