Spotted flycatchers in the garden

02 Wednesday Sep 2026

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It happened in August 2025, and again in May this year so, whenever I’ve been home lately, I’ve been keeping a keen eye on the garden. And last Sunday, 30 August, it happened again, not one but two hungry Spotted flycatchers feeding very actively along the woodland edge. They were entrancing to watch.

I took these photos from my living room and bedroom windows as there’s no real cover in the garden and I didn’t want to disturb their fly-catching – they needed the food for their migration journey more than I needed closer photos. And, after grabbing a few images, I put the camera down and just enjoyed their aerial prowess until the growing dusk made viewing difficult and the birds disappeared to roost a while in the vegetation, before they flew onwards during the dark of the night.

A Brown argus pair

01 Tuesday Sep 2026

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The Brown argus butterflies seem to be having a very good second brood locally, at least in those places where the habitat has survived the heatwaves and drought. Lavernock Nature Reserve is one such place, very wet and muddy underfoot in the winter months and still remarkably lush despite this summer’s weather.

I can’t remember ever having seen a mating pair so, when I saw these two, I waited and hoped they might get together. The male didn’t move from where he had been perched when the female flew in and landed further up the plant stem. She fluttered her wings a lot and came flouncing down the stem towards the male. He still didn’t move. The next thing, the female was pointing her abdomen stiffly upwards, the standard indication that a female butterfly doesn’t want to mate. Why she bothered to approach him at all, I have no idea, but it was still lovely to see the two so close together.

A very pale buzzard

31 Monday Aug 2026

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After my visit to Lavernock Nature Reserve last Wednesday, I walked the coastal path that runs along the cliff tops to the seaside town of Penarth. I was mostly looking down and around at eye level but noisy gulls and corvids encouraged me to look skywards, where five buzzards were gliding northwards along the coast. There followed a brief heart-thumping couple of minutes when I spotted this very pale buzzard among them, until I realised it was just a very pale Common buzzard. In case, that last sentence doesn’t make much sense to you, let me explain; this is the time of year when Honey buzzards, rare birds of prey that I’ve not yet seen, are migrating, so it’s always worth taking a thorough look at pale buzzards, just in case.

On Devil’s-bit scabious

30 Sunday Aug 2026

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I mentioned in yesterday’s blog about my first Whinchat of the year that one of the fields at Lavernock Nature Reserve is currently full of blooming Devil’s-bit scabious that is feeding many hungry insects. These are some of them …

A surprise Box-tree moth

Couldn’t resist including a Clouded yellow

The second brood of Common blue is doing well

Meadow brown

Lots of Painted ladies

Lots of bees that wouldn’t keep still so I was pleased to get this Red-tailed bumblebee

Six-spot burnet moth

Small white

One of the larger hoverflies, Volucella zonaria

The first Whinchat

29 Saturday Aug 2026

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I’d just spent a wonderful 30 minutes wandering slowly around one of the fields at Lavernock Nature Reserve, enjoying the beautiful butterflies and other insects feasting on the lush Devil’s-bit scabious and other wildflowers, and had moved through to the neighbouring field when, out of the corner of my eye, I became aware of a movement. A small bird was flying up from its perch on a tall bare branch, catching flies or tiny insects too small for me to see.

At first, based on its behaviour, I thought it was a Spotted flycatcher but the sun was behind the bird so I couldn’t get a proper look at it and looking at the couple of photos I took didn’t help. So, I walked slowly up the sloping path at the edge of the field, trying not to spook the bird but wanting to get a better view of it. A Whinchat! My first Whinchat of the year. The first Whinchat seen locally as this autumn migration season really gets underway.

Torymidae parasitic wasps

28 Friday Aug 2026

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This stunning little creature was another find from my favourite fleabane field last Sunday. I’m fairly sure she’s one of the Torymidae, a large and diverse family of parasitic wasps that are characterised by the metallic sheen of their bodies, the long ovipositors of the females, and the large size of their hind coxae (the first segment of their legs). They are also very small, ranging between 1 and 7mm in length.

As I watched, this particular wasp probed the Common fleabane seed head, searching with her ovipositor for gall-fly larvae to parasitise. On Monday, at a different location, I found another female, pictured in the two images below, who was also probing fleabane flowers.

From what I’ve been reading, the many Torymus species use different forms of parasitism but the majority are ‘ectoparasitic idiobionts of various concealed hosts’, meaning they first paralyse or kill their hosts to prevent them escaping, then lay their eggs on the outside of the host’s body, so that, once the wasp’s eggs hatch, they consume their host from the outside, rather than living within it. From a human perspective, it’s a very unpleasant practice but parasitism is quite common in the insect world.

In this particular case, I assume the hosts are the larvae of gall-causing fruitfly species like Myopites inulaedyssentericae that I blogged about last week, and I had hoped that might narrow down the possibilities for the Torymus species I’ve found, but I haven’t yet managed to put an exact name to them.

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?