Rare and less rare

It always amazes me what you find when you are not really expecting to see anything unusual.  Considering that our wildlife and their habitats are in such decline, we may get amazed far less often.  I photographed a couple of unusual flies recently and I thought one was a soldier fly and had no idea what the other one was.  It turns out that the soldier fly was indeed a soldier fly but not the common one I thought it was, in fact, though it is a European species it is very rare in the UK.  The other one that I thought was unusual was in fact fairly common.

Ornate Brigadier - Odontomyia ornata

The rare one was Odontomyia ornata or the ornate brigadier.  This one was sat on a yellow flag iris that a neighbour had given me and was just put in a corner of the pond waiting until I could plant it in its final position.  The most striking feature of the fly was the spotty face between the eyes.

Ornate Brigadier - Odontomyia ornata

Broad Centurion - Chloromyia formosa

The common one was on some wild forget-me-not in the tiny patch of garden that we like to call our annual meadow.  This too was a soldier fly - a broad centurion, Chloromyia formosa. This was a male.  The species is sexually dimorphic with the males having a bronze abdomen and the females a metallic green abdomen.  The most striking feature of this fly was the hairy eyes. a distinguishing feature of the species.

Knotted Hedge-parsley - Torilis nodosa

Yesterday, I was walking along the sea wall at Pett Level, doing a wildflower survey for the short-haired bumblebee reintroduction project.  This can get a bit tedious especially when you are seeing a lot of the same species time after time.  So I was delighted to notice a plant that I didn't recognize.  The flower looked a bit like an umbellifer, but instead of standing tall, it was in a low sprawling clump.  Despite the distinctive nature of the plant, it took me a long time to find it in the flower book because the illustration looked nothing like the plant, almost as though the illustrator had never seen one growing (maybe he hadn't).  It was knotted hedge-parsley, not a rarity but in decline.  The one thing that distinguished this umbellifer from others for me was not the small size but the way it has several flowers growing up the stem, each one opposite a single leaf.  I guess that's how it got it's 'knotted' name.

First post of the Year

It's time for the blog to come out of hibernation and shake a leg or six.  Spring caught me by surprise this year but I'll catch up eventually.

A couple of recent finds in the garden first - both lepidoptera, the first is a male orange-tip butterfly.  This species is the first to emerge from its chrysalis in spring, as opposed to those species that over winter as adults like small tortoiseshell, red admirals and peacocks which have been on the wing for a few weeks now.  This photo is also a first for me - the first time one has settled in the garden long enough for me to run and get the camera and do the necessary creeping up routine.

Orange-tip - Anthocharis cardamines

The second lepidopterous species was this moth that I disturbed from hibernation in our carport.  It is a nationally scarce species but is more common in the south-east thanks to the food plant of its caterpillars which is the common hop plant.  It is called a Buttoned snout.  The snout bit is obvious, but more imagination is needed to turn the markings on the wings into buttonholes.  This species is not often seen as it is rarely found in moth traps.

Buttoned Snout - Hypena rostralis

And just to show that the bumblebee season is now in full swing, I've got two species of bumblebee - the first one is the Early bumblebee (Bombus pratorum) that I found feeding on our dwarf comfrey.  This one is a worker - the tiniest (and cutest) first generation of the UK's smallest bumblebee.

A slightly blurred Early bumblebee - Bombus pratorum

The second is one of our biggest and rarest species the Ruderal bumblebee (Bombus ruderatus).  This one has been up and about long enough to find a nest and start to provision it with pollen as you can see from her shapely thigh.  This was found on a bumblebee survey in the back lanes of Romney Marsh.

Ruderal or Large Garden Bumblebee - Bombus ruderatus

Harlequin Ladybirds

It's that time of year again,  The warm south-west side of the house is full of harlequin ladybirds trying to find nooks and crannies in which to hibernate.  There's lots of Daily Mail fuelled controversy about whether or not they are harmful to our native ladybirds, or should I say harmful to our less recently introduced ladybirds.  (There were no ladybirds here during the ice age as far as we know.)

The latest nonsense (The Daily Mirror for a change, which I won't dignify with a link) is that they are infected by a sexually transmitted fungal disease.  It isn't nonsense that they have the disease, but the implication that they will somehow harm our native wildlife is nonsense.  It is nonsense because different species cannot mate with each other. That is the definition of a species, and is especially true of insects which have hard chitin parts that must fit exactly for insemination to be achieved.  There may be a danger of transmission by contact, but that's a contagious disease not an STD.

If you want to get excited about dangers to our native ladybirds then maybe we should worry about them feeding on aphids, that in turn feed on plants treated with neonicotinoids, or worse, plants that haven't been treated with neonics but are growing in soil contaminated by neonics which accumulates in the soil and stays there for many years.

As the following photos show, there is considerable variation in the colours and patterns of harlequin ladybirds (probably nominative determinism - why else would they be called harlequins?).  The UK Ladybirds Survey website ( http://www.ladybird-survey.org/ladybirds.aspx - a great site for identification and ladybird information generally) says that harlequins are yellow-orange, orange-red, red or black with between 0 and 21 orange-red or black spots.  No problem with identification there then! But the best way of being sure that it is a harlequin is to look for brown legs.  Most of our other species have black legs.
No captions, every one a harlequin - Harmonia axyridis

Andromeda Lacebug

It's amazing the stuff you find out when you're not really looking.  I found this exquisite insect when I was wandering round the garden with my camera, just in case I found something interesting.  I posted the photo on Facebook for an identification (my insect book isn't that good on unusual stuff) and the response was a link to a website that showed it to be an andromeda lacebug.  On reading further it turns out that it was introduced to the UK around 1998 by the plant trade.  The plant that gives the bug its name is Pieris japponica which is the favoured host of the insect and I found the bug within inches of our Pieris.  The plant is native to Eastern Asia, Japan in particular where it grows in thickets on the mountains.  (Another good reason to visit Japan, as if I needed one.)  The common name for the Pieris is Japanese Andromeda.  All I need to know now is what it has got to do with a distant galaxy.  What an amazing bug though and only about 5-6mm long.

I hate leaving questions unanswered.  A quick trip round Wikipedia tells me that the Andromeda galaxy is named after the princess Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia in Greek mythology.  Her name means 'ruler of men' in ancient greek.  She was chained to a rock as bait for a sea monster and rescued by Perseus.  Sounds a bit of a character! 

The Pieris plant Japanese Andromeda, is named for its resemblance to Andromeda polifolia, otherwise known as bog rosemary.  Andromeda polifolia was named by Carl Linnaeus after the 'ruler of men' from Greek mythology.

Andromeda Lacebug - Stephanitis takeyai

Inula

Inula is a large plant that dominates any border it finds itself in.  But it is very attractive to pollinating insects, as the following photos show.

Very worn and faded but probably Common Carder - Bombus pascuorum

Common short-tongued species Buff-tailed bumblebee - Bombus terrestris

Possibly the lesser mason bee, a solitary bee - Osmia leaiana

Yellow-legged flower bee (solitary) possibly Andrena flavipes

Patchwork leaf-cutter bee (solitary) - Megachile centuncularis

Common long-tongued species Garden bumblebee - Bombus Hortorum

Common long-tongued species Garden bumblebee - Bombus Hortorum

Marmalade hover-fly - Episyrphus balteatus

Unusual Plants

Recently looking for bumblebees at Dungeness I came across a plant I'd never noticed before.  It looked like moss at first glance, but something about it made me look twice.  It was a very tiny plant with leaves only a couple of millimetres long with what looked like red flower buds.  I posted the photos on a Facebook group for wild flowers, and it was identified as Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis.

When I looked at sea-heath in my book it had mauve flowers which didn't seem to match with the red buds I thought I'd seen so I went back and found some in flower which were indeed mauve.  The red buds turned out to be natural colouration of some of the leaves.

Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis with rabbit dropping for scale

Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis

Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis

This plant that I found in a field near Boulderwall farm, Dungeness looked very much like tufted vetch except that if you look in the wildflower book tufted vetch is blue-violet.  Apparently white forms sometimes occur in most plants.  I could accept that but this specimen looks much blousier than normal tufted vetch.  However, there are no other vetches that match either, even the white flowered vetches have blue or red veins in the flower unlike this one.

Tufted vetch - Vicia cracca

Tufted vetch - Vicia cracca

Currant Clearwing

While collecting pollen at a comfrey patch near New Romney, I was delighted to find and partially recognize this, my first clearwing moth.  I say partially recognize, because I was fairly sure it was a clearwing moth, but I wasn't sure of the species.  All the clearwing moths are regarded as Nationally Scarce and this is no exception.  They are probably under recorded because they are not attracted to the normal lures that moth collectors use such as light traps or sugar and wine-soaked ropes.  They fly by day and are closely related to the more familiar burnet moths.

This one is female having 3 abdominal stripes, the male has 4.

Just waiting for confirmation having posted the image on iRecord.

Currant Clearwing moth - Synanthedon tipuliformis