Juvenile Black tern

27 Thursday Aug 2026

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It was first spotted on Monday morning, 24 August, and, fortunately, remained for at least a couple of days (I haven’t heard whether the bird is still there today), long enough for me to catch the train to north Cardiff’s Llanishen Reservoir Tuesday morning for a look.

The bird? A stunning little juvenile Black tern (Chlidonias niger), a bird that only rarely breeds in the UK and so is mostly seen during Spring and Autumn passage. In the 11 years I’ve lived here, we’ve been lucky to have these terns stop off in the Cardiff area at least twice before, at Lamby Lake in September 2022, and at this same reservoir in late September 2024.

Black terns are small; the RSPB website gives their length as 22 – 24cm and their wingspan as 64 – 68cm. I’ve included a couple of photos so you can see this bird’s size relative to the Carrion crow that harassed it as it was feeding over the water, and to a Black-headed gull, as the tern sat preening on the muddy edge of the reservoir (the mud exposed due to a lack of water, caused by this summer’s drought).

My camera was not good enough to capture clear, close photos of the Black tern in flight – a mesmerising sight! – as the camera has neither the zoom range nor the sophisticated focussing software of more expensive models. Fortunately, this Black tern was alternating its time between 15 minutes flying, plucking miniscule invertebrates from the surface of the water, and 10 minutes sitting on the mud right in front of the visitor centre, so I was able to get good views of the bird preening, and took a little video clip, which I’ve loaded on YouTube. Enjoy!

Hirsute

26 Wednesday Aug 2026

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Hirsute: adjective; covered with hair (from the Latin hirsūtus, meaning shaggy) (Collins Concise Dictionary).

Hirsute seems the perfect word to describe this little fellow, and its siblings. These are 1st instar nymphs (i.e. the first stage since hatching) of the Hairy shieldbug (Dolycoris baccarum), also known as the Sloe shieldbug, though I think you’ll agree that Hairy is the name that suits it best.

They become less hairy as they age, but even the adult bug is a little hairy. When I first spotted them, these tiny shieldbugs were staying very close to the eggs they had hatched from but, just a few days later, when I revisited, I found the eggs again but the bugs had all dispersed.

A surprise Black-tailed godwit

25 Tuesday Aug 2026

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Cardiff Bay Wetlands Reserve, Thursday 20 August. A Black-tailed godwit had been spotted at the reserve the previous day and remained on the morning of the 20th, as reported by the birders in my local WhatsApp group. I hadn’t seen any migrating birds during a couple of recent days’ looking, and this sighting was enough of a local rarity that I figured I’d walk that way.

When I got to the wetlands, there was no sign of the godwit, nowhere within the reserve boundary and not in the little bay (shown above) where it had previously been seen. I waited and watched, enjoying the other birds, noticing a female Shoveler – not particularly common here.

Suddenly, a small wader flew out from where the godwit was meant to be, and continued in panicked circles over the water. A Common sandpiper.

Next, the many Mallards that had been cruising about, washing, preening, all went a little crazy, swimming together in a group away from the reed beds. A couple of Moorhens and Little grebes joined them, clearly rattled about something. Then, the Black-tailed godwit flew out, also looking panicked, and put in a few circuits of the reserve before settling down amongst the ducks. I still don’t know what spooked them all but both Otters and Mink have been sighted at the reserve recently so it was probably one of those species.

Both the Common sandpiper and the Black-tailed godwit flew circuits of the reserve again before all the birds seemed to realise that the threat had gone, and calm returned to the flock. Recognising this, the godwit headed back in to its little hideaway, probably intending to snooze the afternoon away.

Bug: Stictopleurus species

24 Monday Aug 2026

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There’s one more bug I’ve spotted while out surveying all the Common fleabane flowers in my local vicinity that I want to talk about here. I didn’t include it in the more general bugs blog, On Common Fleabane: bugs and crickets, as I was hoping to get confirmation of its exact identity. It seems now that’s unlikely to happen and I will shortly explain why. But first, let me introduce Stictopleurus, of which I found both an adult (first photo) and a nymph (second photo).

There are only two Stictopleurus species in Britain, S. punctatonervosus and S. abutilon, but, like so many creatures, the two are not easy to distinguish one from the other. The British Bugs website explains:

The two species are very similar and best separated with reference to the fine detail of the pronotum. In S. abutilon, the dark marks behind the anterior margin take the form of two full circles (half circles in S. punctatonervosus). There is also a narrow impunctate band in front of these markings. Note that these characters are not always easy to discern [my emphasis].

That sounds relatively easy, right? The website pages for the two species even have sketches of those magic circles. But that last sentence is crucial: ‘these characters are not always easy to discern’. I fiddled with my clearest photo in Photoshop to try to see those full or half circles more clearly, and I think I see half circles (so Stictopleurus punctatonervosus). What do you think?

On Common fleabane: bees and flies

23 Sunday Aug 2026

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As I wrote in my blog last Sunday about the life-saving benefits to wildlife of Drought-tolerant Common fleabane, the sheer number of insects I’ve seen feeding on fleabane gives me hope for their survival of this summer’s heat and drought. And, fortunately, many locations in the UK have had some rain this week, easing the situation a little for both wildlife and humans. This final blog includes some of the bees and flies I’ve seen on Common fleabane. However, as I’m not very skilled at identifying either of these families, I’ve excluded several I wasn’t able to name. Bees first.

A worker Buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), out foraging for pollen to take home to its family, all the offspring of a single queen who mated at the end of last summer, hibernated through the winter and began a new family in the spring. That life cycle will soon begin again.

A Common carder bumblebee (Bombus pascuorum), hard at work just like its Buff-tailed cousin.

A Honey bee (Apis mellifera) – I think we all know about Honey bees, their hives, their delicious product.

And now the flies I’ve been able to identify. Firstly, the very distinctive Red-sided parasite fly (Eriothrix rufomaculata). I spotted a few of these, which appeared to be feeding on the flowers but may also have been looking for moth larvae to parasitise.

This splendid metallic green fly is Lucilia sericata. Although there are several similar green flies, by zooming in on my image I was able to confirm that this one has ‘one anterior-dorsal bristle on the mid-tibia’, which is one of the main identification features for this species.

On Common fleabane: spiders and wasps

22 Saturday Aug 2026

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This is the penultimate blog about the creatures I’ve been seeing feeding on Drought-tolerant Common fleabane, aiding their survival during this summer of record-breaking heatwaves and drought. Today’s post features both spiders and wasps, starting with the spiders.

This first little cutie is a Flower crab spider, Misumena vatia, one of several of these sneaky creatures I found, not actually feeding on the fleabane but lurking around the edges of the flowers, ready to pounce on anything unsuspecting and tasty looking that was unfortunate enough to perch too close.

Nursery web spider (Pisaura mirabilis), quite a small specimen so perhaps one of this year’s brood.

Xysticus lanio is another crab spider, one that’s actually quite difficult to identify so I’m not 100% sure of this one.

These last two are Ichneumon wasps, not identifiable from these images but possibly from the subfamily Pimplinae. The one in the second photo is munching on a very tiny creature. There were also lots of common wasp species but they rarely stopped still so I didn’t manage any photos of them on flowers.

On Common fleabane: bugs and crickets

21 Friday Aug 2026

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The subjects of today’s blog about those insects managing to survive this over-heated summer by feeding on Drought-tolerant Common fleabane are bugs, and two examples of one cricket species, because I managed to find both male and female. Let’s begin with bugs …

Two Lucerne bugs (Adelphocoris lineolatus), pretty little things but both trying to hide from me.

I actually saw quite a few Common froghoppers (Philaenus spumarius), and in several of their wonderful variety of brown-and-cream pattern variations.

Clad in its brown armour-like skin and looking ready for a fight, a Dock bug (Coreus marginatus).

An adult Hairy shieldbug (Dolycoris baccarum). (I’ve found quite a lot of nymphs of this species recently and feel they deserve their own blog – you’ll see why soon.)

And now for the crickets. These are Long-winged cone-heads (Conocephalus fuscus), a type of bush-cricket. I’ve just realised that this species has only featured on this blog once before, in July 2020, when I included a photo of a nymph in the post 202/366 More misc minis. The first photo shows a female, though, unfortunately, her impressive ovipositor is mostly obscured; the second image is the male, with a much smaller appendage.

On Common fleabane: hoverflies

20 Thursday Aug 2026

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Here’s the second of my more general blogs about the insects I’ve been finding in the past week that are managing to survive the season’s destructive heatwaves and drought by feeding on the flowers of Drought-tolerant Common fleabane. Today we have some of the many species of hoverflies I’ve noticed and managed to photograph.

First up, two different Eristalis species – I included the first image just because I liked it.

Episyrphus balteatus, aka Marmalade hoverfly, one I’m sure most people will have seen.

The Footballer, Helophilus pendulus, which gets its common name from the resemblance of its stripy thorax to a football strip.

The Sphaerophoria species of hoverfly were probably the most common in my favourite wildflower field, but they can be tricky to name precisely.

There were also a lot of these Syritta pipiens, but they were very wary of me getting close enough for photos so I was pleased to snap this one.

On Common fleabane: Lepidoptera

19 Wednesday Aug 2026

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As I wrote in Sunday’s blog about Drought-tolerant Common fleabane, the number of insects I’ve been seeing feeding on these plants gives me hope for their survival of this summer’s heat and drought. These are some of the Lepidoptera species I’ve seen, starting with the butterflies.

As well as these Common blue, Small white, Clouded yellow f. helice (my first of this pale colouration this year), and Brown argus, I’ve also spotted Meadow brown on the local fleabane flowers.

Next, the moths, both larvae and adults. The first is a caterpillar of one of the Pug moths (Eupithecia sp.), and the second, hiding in its self-made case, is Coleophora conyzae, a new species for me and a rare moth in Wales, with only 15 records to date.

The dark moth is Apodia bifractella, another that was new to me, though a moth that’s listed as common on the UK Moths website (n.b. it seems to have had a very recent name change to Apodia martinii). The final moth is the stunning Common purple & gold (Pyrausta purpuralis) – I’ve seen several of these enjoying the nutrients provided by Common fleabane flowers.

Fruitfly: Myopites inulaedyssentericae

18 Tuesday Aug 2026

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This was the second new species I found last Sunday when walking around a local wildflower field, staring intently at all the Common fleabane (Pulicaria dysenterica). Despite all that staring, I’m amazed I noticed these, as they’re tiny. But, having said that, I was checking out fleabane on today’s walk and found another of these at a different location – and that really did amaze me as there are only three records of these in the Welsh national biodiversity database. Perhaps their tiny size means they’re easily overlooked.

As the blog name indicates, these are fruitflies, of the species Myopites inulaedyssentericae, which is a bit of a mouthful so perhaps you’d prefer their common name of Fleabane gall-fly, so called because their larvae create galls inside Common fleabane flowers. They can be identified by the pattern on their wings, and are on the wing during July and August.