30 Days Wild – Day 7

Not a lot of wildlife seen today as I was mainly driving around collecting materials. Along the way I dropped into Fishlake Meadows to drop off some posts and pick up the Blashford ladder, the purple heron that has been there for a few days had been seen, but I never made it out of the car park!

I did run the moth trap at Blashford overnight, there were not a great many moths but this little Tinea semifulvella was new for the year. The larvae feed on fur and feathers, often in old bird’s nests.

Tinea semifulvella

When I finally got back to Blashford at the end of the day it seemed it had been another big day for emerging dragonflies, with lots more emperors and some small species too. They usually emerge pre-dawn and make their first flight in the early morning, as they ar every vulnerable to predation by birds when they first emerge. However one had emerged and was still inflating its wings, not an emperor I think, perhaps a black-tailed skimmer, but I am not at all sure.

emerging dragonfly

We occasionally get involved in larger projects and one such is the search for the elusive noble chafer beetle. This big green beetle is known to be in the New Forest, but is regarded as rare, but how rare is not known. It is similar the the much commoner rose chafer, so maybe some get passed off as that species. A project has been set up to try and answer the questions around just where it is and how frequent. It turns out they find one another by use of a pheromone which ha snow been synthesised, meaning they can be attracted to a lure and counted before being released. We are helping out, or trying to, so far we have attracted no beetles, but of course negative data is valuable data, so we are contributing.

noble chafer lure

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30 Days Wild – Day 23 – Unexpectedly Clear

They say “You should always expect the unexpected” and it seems I should. Today, at lunchtime I decided to deploy the pheromone lures for clearwing moths, these are artificial chemicals that mimic those released by female moths to attract the males. They have been synthesised for most of the clearwing moths, a strange group of day-flying moths that look like wasps and are usually very rarely seen. The use of pheromone lures has made finding them somewhat easier, but they are still not that readily seen.

At Blashford we could have several species of these moths, but I have only ever seen and attracted to a lure, the red-tipped clearwing. Today I tried four lures for a range of species including yellow-legged clearwing, whose larvae feed on oak, of which we have lots. I sat back an ate lunch whilst keeping an eye on the lures. I expected to see something at the red-tipped lure, but there was no luck. Then at the yellow-legged lure there was a moth, hovering continuously around the lure, I grabbed the camera and got the best flight shots I could at 1/1000th of a second.

clearwing

However this was not the expected yellow-legged clearwing, but the other species that can come to the same lure, the orange-tipped clearwing, in Hampshire a moth of the chalk downs where the larvae feed on wayfaring-tree. Blashford is not on the downs and does not have wayfaring-tree, however we do have a few guelder-rose a less frequently used food-plant and I assume this must be what they are feeding on.

orange-tailed clearwing

orange-tailed clearwing coming to the lure

30 Days Wild – Day 30 – Things Ain’t Always What They Seem

Yet another hot day and another spent mostly at home, I am working tomorrow at Blashford when we have a volunteer task, although what we will do in this heat I am not sure just yet. The day started with a check thought the moth trap, it had caught 26 species including a few first for the year, these were buff footman, grey/dark dagger (another species pair that cannot be separated on sight alone), bird’s wing and a waved black.

waved black

The waved black is a relatively scarce and rather strange Noctuid moth, it looks like a Geometrid, sitting with wings flat and out to the sides. The larvae eat damp fungi and even lichens and slime moulds.

The hot sun meant the garden was full of insects throughout the day, generally we do not associate moths with hot sunny days but there is one group that only seem to fly in such conditions, the clearwings. The day was ideal for them and I managed to find one species new to the garden, the large red-belted clearwing.

large red-belted clearwing (male)

Clearwings are very odd moths, they not only fly in bright sunshine, they don’t really look like moths with their largely scaleless wings and in flight they look more like wasps than moths. The larvae feed under the bark of coppiced birch and alder and pupate there also. At this stage I will confess that I did not just look for the moth, I used a pheromone lure. This is an artificially produced chemical that mimics that produced by the female moth to attract the males.

large red-belted clearwing being lured in

To give an idea of the speed of flight the picture above was taken at 1/1250 sec. The moth flew in and circling the lure before landing.

large red-belted clearwing at lure

After a couple of minutes the fact that there is no female present seems to sink in and they leave, I managed to attract at least three males in about 45 minutes. The lures are usually specific to certain species, I tried five different lures today and only this one attracted any moths. Without the use of lures I have seen only a handful of clearwings in forty years or so of looking for them, use a lure of the right sort on the right day and they just appear.

It was a good day for looking int he meadow so, for the last time….

What’s in My Meadow Today?

Butterflies were very much in evidence with, appropriately enough, meadow brown being one of the most abundant.

meadow brown on field scabious

Small white, large white and small skipper were also much in evidence and there were also a couple of large skipper, a species I have only very occasionally seen in the garden in previous years.

large skipper on field scabious

Field scabious is a great nectar source for insects and a great plant for a back garden meadow, it has bright showy flowers and a very long flowering season too. The picture shows the incredibly long tongue of the large skipper really well too, their tongues are more feeding tubes really, they reach to the nectar source and suck up the energy rich sugars.

Another great nectar plant is knapweed and these were alive with bees today, including lots of green-eyed flower bee, a small dumpy species with a very high pitched “buzz” that never seems to sit still for a picture.

green-eyed flower bee on knapweed

Where there are bees there are their followers, one such is the Conopid fly, there are several species and they intercept bees in flight and lay an egg that hooks between the bees abdominal segments, eventually hatching into a parasitic larva, not a pleasant story but it is extraordinary. There are several common species and the one I found was Sicus ferrugineus.

Sicus ferrugineus

Juts as there are moths that fly in the daytime and pretend to be wasps there are also flies that pretend to be bees and wasps, some more convincingly than others. Most of the hoverflies in the garden are the various dronefly species that are fairly general bee mimics, but I also spotted one that was definitely more of a wasp mimic.

Xanthogramma pedissequum

So this is the end of the 30 Days for another year, although I try to get a bit of “Wild” everyday, I may not get around to blogging about it daily. Thanks for your comments and if you have a garden try a mini-meadow, they are great fun and pretty good for wildlife too. Whatever you do, try to have as many Wild Days as you can!

30 Days Wild – Day 7: Top Tips

Up and out early, relatively early anyway, to do a bird survey at our Linwood reserve this morning. Many species now have fledged young so the trees were full of birds, the highlight was probably a redstart at a probable nest site on the reserve edge.

Then on to Blashford where I was pleased to see the three small lapwing chicks and at least one of the larger ones still surviving along with both oystercatcher youngsters, all from Tern hide. I had to remove a fallen branch from the roof of Ivy North hide, luckily it had not damaged the roof itself, I hope the winds have now abated and we won’t have any more down for a while.

I then went to do some nettle control on the shore of Ibsley Water, we are making great progress removing the large nettle beds and establishing a grassland sward with a good scatter of ox-eye daisy and other flowers. I did have to check first so as to avoid the patches with peacock and small tortoiseshell larvae. The western shore is usually well sheltered from the prevailing winds and so it was today. I saw a fair few meadow brown butterflies and a lot of damselflies and dragonflies including banded demoiselle and three species of chasers, four-spotted, broad-bodied and scarce, all making the most of the windbreak provided by the roadside trees. Scarce chaser used to be very rare but seems to have benefited from climate change and is now more widely seen, it has also   moved from breeding only in rivers and now uses lakes and gravel pits as well.

scarce chaser

Both the females and recently emerged males look like the one above, but the males develop blue abdomens with age.

At lunchtime I tried out a lure for clearwing moths outside the Centre whilst I ate my lunch. These moths are rarely seen as they do not come to light and are very fast flying. The lures are artificial chemicals that mimic the pheromones produced by female moths. Each species has a unique chemical signal and I tried the one for red-tipped clearwing today and had immediate success!

red-tipped clearwing attracted to a pheromone lure

In a short time I saw perhaps six individuals, with up to three at one time. The lure only attracted them for a few tens of seconds before they seemed to become aware they had been duped. They are very fast and even at a high shutter speed I could still not stop the wing beats. As you can see they do not really look like moths and it would be easy to pass it off as a wasp. Eventually one did land on a nearby bramble allowing me to get a somewhat better picture.

red-tipped clearwing

Red-tipped clearwing caterpillars feed on willows feeding on stems rather than leaves, most clearwings caterpillars feed by tunnelling into wood and roots, making them even harder to find that the adults. A great bit of “Wild” to go with my lunch!