07 Wednesday May 2025
Posted in insects
I’m not a coffee drinker but perhaps the person who gave this moth its common name was. Meet The Mocha (Cyclophora annularia), a gorgeous moth that’s described as scarce on the UK Moths website, though it seems from looking at the NBN Atlas for this species that sightings are concentrated in southern Britain so scarce the further north you go. Perhaps surprisingly, I found this one sitting on a house wall as I walked past this morning.
06 Tuesday May 2025
Posted in spiders
When I got my new guide book*, I very naively assumed it would help me identify all the spiders I saw. I should have known from tackling all the other types of creatures I’ve been trying to put names to that nothing is ever that easy.
These three spiders are a case in point. They all belong to the Philodromidae, the running crab spiders, of which, in Britain, there are 17 eight-eyed species in four genera.
Though they share a similar crab-like body structure, the three shown here all look quite different to my eye, and I thought I would be able to identify them but no! Highlighted in red in my book are those words I never like to read: ‘Microscopic examination of the genitalia is necessary to confirm identification of all species in these genera.’
* Lawrence Bee, Geoff Oxford and Helen Smith, Britain’s Spiders: a field guide, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2020.
05 Monday May 2025
Posted in insects
Tags
British cicadellidae, British leafhoppers, Issus coleoptratus, Issus nymph, Issus species, leafhopper, leafhopper nymph
I’ve found two of these little leafhopper nymphs recently but was waiting for verification from the national recorder before posting about them. I recorded them as Issus coleoptratus but the recorder has changed them to Issus species.
The recorder is the expert, I certainly am not an expert but, in this case, I do think these are Issus coleoptratus, and here’s why. According to the Naturespot website entry for this species, there is only one confusion species, which is the much rarer Issus muscaeformis. Naturespot also includes excellent macro photographs of the identification features to look for on a nymph, which are more than 7 sensory pits on its back and pale horizontal bands on the frons (face), both of which I can see in my photos.
I will just have to look for the adult leafhoppers when they appear between June and November and hope that they will convince the national recorder. Meantime, I’m still really pleased to have found a new-to-me leafhopper species.
04 Sunday May 2025
Posted in plants, spring, wildflowers
Tags
British wildflowers, Cwm George, Herb Paris, Herb-Paris, Paris quadrifolia, wildflower, woodland wildflowers
I’ve written about Herb-Paris (Paris quadrifolia) a couple of times before (Herb-Paris, May 2017 and Devil-in-a-bush, April 2021) but it’s such a lovely and unusual plant that I feel it deserves another post, this time primarily of images that I captured when I went on my annual Herb-Paris pilgrimage to Cwm George woodland, in Dinas Powys, earlier this week.
03 Saturday May 2025
Posted in insects
Some of the creatures I encounter when leaf fossicking are off in the blink of an eye and I get no more than a tantalising glimpse of something intriguingly colourful disappearing into the undergrowth. For a horrible moment this morning, I thought that was going to be the case when I spotted the stripey underbelly of this Wasp beetle (Clytus arietis) heading behind a leaf.
Luckily for me, it re-emerged on the other side, then proved remarkably tolerant of me and my camera as I took lots of photos. I’ve only seen this wasp-mimicking beetle once before and that was back in 2016, so I was particularly pleased it proved co-operative for me today.
02 Friday May 2025
Tags
British butterflies, butterfly, Common blue, Common blue butterfly, Dingy Skipper, Large white, Small copper, Spring colour
Just as it’s always magical to see my first butterfly of the year, so is it just as special each time I see the first of each new species. These are the four most recent beauties that have made me smile.
On 25 April my first Large white of 2025 flitted along the footpath next to me, sipped on a Dandelion, then settled on a Bramble leaf long enough for me to photograph.
The next butterfly species to appear for me locally, on 27 April, was this lovely Dingy skipper at an unexpected location – a bonus!
The last few days of hotter than usual temperatures have presumably triggered the early emergence of some species. This stunning male Common blue popped up on 28 April, five days earlier than my previous earliest date.
And, this very morning, eight days earlier than I’ve ever seen one before, I caught a flash of brilliant orange and there sat this gorgeous Small copper, always a treat to see.
01 Thursday May 2025
The Moorhens that make their home in the dipping pond at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park are prolific breeders, producing on average three broods of between 5 and 7 chicks each year. The little cutie pictured here is one of this year’s first brood and, though one parent was keeping an eye on this one and its siblings, the other adult was already preparing their next nest. According to the BTO, though the record for Moorhen survival currently stands at over 11 years, their average lifespan is just 3 years, and they begin breeding at age one. With statistics like that, you’d think our waterways would be overrun by Moorhens but their predation rate is high, with both wild and domestic mammals taking their toll, as well as birds like Grey herons and the large gull species feasting on the smaller chicks. This Moorhen chick may be a little sweetie but its life will almost certainly be a tough one.
30 Wednesday Apr 2025
I have one of you to thank for the inspiration for this post; through his comments on my recent post about Wild garlic, Philip Strange (who, if you don’t already know and follow him, produces a really interesting science and nature blog) reminded me to look for the hoverfly associated with that plant. And so I did. And here it is.
For those of you who don’t live in Britain, we are currently experiencing a week of high (for us) temperatures (this is probably our summer, and normal conditions will resume shortly), so, yesterday, a walk through a shady woodland seemed like a good plan. When I arrived at Cwm George, in the nearby town of Dinas Powys, I was delighted to find it was peak garlic time and, when I stood watching those patches of flowering Wild garlic on which sunshine streamed through the tree canopy, I was even more delighted to spot several small grey-patterned hoverflies, both perched on and hovering around the plants.
These are Portevinia maculata hoverflies, and they have a very strong association with Wild garlic (aka Ramsons), as their larvae mine the bulbs and stem bases of those plants. My guide book says that ‘Where Ramsons is abundant, this hoverfly is usually also abundant’ but Philip and I might both dispute that statement. In my local park, where I took the photos for my recent blog and where Wild garlic is prolific, I’ve never seen this hoverfly. So, I was really pleased to find it in good numbers at Cwm George.
29 Tuesday Apr 2025
Tags
bugs on Stinging nettle, Common nettle bug, insect on Stinging nettle, Liocoris tripustulatus, Miridae, plant bugs
I’ve been finding a few new insects recently and this is one of them, the supposedly common Common nettle bug (Liocoris tripustulatus). Perhaps I’ve never noticed them because they tend to live mainly on Stinging nettle (and you know by now that I find nettles challenging – those stings!). This month I’ve seen them twice and they can, apparently, be seen all year round. And, fortunately, with their three yellow dots, these little (4 to 5 mm long) plant bugs are easy to identify.
28 Monday Apr 2025
Tags
British leafmines, British weevils, leaf-mining weevil larvae, leafmines on Wych elm, Orchestes alni, weevil leafmines, weevils on Elm species
It seems, from my online research, that some of my North American readers may consider today’s creature a pest (see, for example, this web page from The Morton Arboretum in Illinois) but, here in Britain, sightings are few and far between; my find was the first in my local 10km area since 1916, and only 20 records are showing in the Welsh biodiversity database.
Making a change from the usual moth and fly larvae leafminers, today’s mines were made by the larvae of a weevil, Orchestes alni, also known as the European elm flea weevil. The adult female weevil lays her eggs inside the midrib of a leaf on one of the Elm species, in this case on Wych elm (Ulmus glabra); you might just be able to make out the scar in the midrib of the underside of the leaf, shown in the photo on the right above. Once hatched, the tiny larva burrows into the leaf, initially creating a gallery mine running towards the leaf edge, then the mine widens out to a blotch. When it’s eaten its fill and the time is right, the larva spins itself a cocoon and pupates within the mine. The hole in the leaf shown above indicates that the adult weevil has emerged from its cocoon and exited the mine.
I found several mines on this one Wych elm, and most were already empty – this leafminer starts early in the season – but a couple were still occupied. As I didn’t think I would be damaging the weevil population and, yes, I was curious – I’d never seen a weevil larva before – I opened one of the mines. So, now you get to see a tiny weevil larva as well.
There is another weevil that also mines the leaves of Elm species, Orchestes betuleti, but, as I wrote above, Orchestes alni starts early in the season, whereas O. betuleti doesn’t usually begin egg-laying until May.
earthstar 
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