Category Archives: insects

Black darter

23 Saturday Aug 2025

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Before Thursday’s trip to Maesteg, I’d only ever seen a Black darter (Sympetrum danae) once before, and that was a fluke sighting at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park back in 2017. I say fluke because, like yesterday’s Common hawker, the Black darter is a dragonfly that prefers the acidic conditions of peat bogs, moorland ponds and ditches. How one got to Cosmeston I have no idea.

I was lucky to find several male Black darters at Maesteg ponds and, as you can see, they really are almost entirely black, with just a few yellow markings on the sides of their thorax and abdomen, and on top of their lower abdomen.

I was also extremely lucky to find a single female, basking on a patch of grass. As the photo below shows, she looks very different from the male, with much more yellow than black. At around 30mm long, both of these darters are quite small, about 10mm smaller than the Common darters that most of us are very familiar with. Now that I know about this location, I’ll be back to visit them again next year.

Lifer: Common hawker

22 Friday Aug 2025

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Yesterday I took myself off on a little adventure, on an hour’s train journey from Cardiff to Maesteg, high up in the south Welsh valleys, a place I’d not been before. I decided to go after seeing a post on social media about some ponds in a Maesteg park that held dragonflies that thrive in acidic heathlands and bogs so these are not species I see in my coastal location.

Despite a favourable weather forecast, when I first arrived it was mostly overcast and there was a cool wind blowing – not ideal conditions for seeing dragonflies. Remaining hopeful, I thought I’d use the time until the clouds cleared to explore and try to find dragonflies that might be perched around the area.

Almost immediately I heard the tell-tale rustle of dragonfly wings and saw movement amongst the reeds in the nearest pond. Dragon! And not just any dragon – this was a female Common hawker (Aeshna juncea), and she was moving slowly around the ponds, stopping here and there to lay her eggs amongst the vegetation. She was my first ever Common hawker, so I was over the moon to have found her so quickly and easily.

Later, when the sun did come out and the dragonfly action got a bit frantic, I saw another large dragonfly cruising back and forth over the ponds. I think it was a male Common hawker but he wasn’t stopping for photos, and soon disappeared. Having enjoyed such excellent views of the female, I wasn’t too disappointed about missing him, and I saw several other dragon and damsel species, which I will feature in forthcoming blogs.

Leafhopper: Graphocephala fennahi

21 Thursday Aug 2025

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What a stunning leafhopper this is, don’t you think?

This is the Rhododendron leafhopper (Graphocephala fennahi), an immigrant from the USA. After being introduced to Europe in the early 1900s, it somehow made its way across the Channel to the UK (probably on plant matter, as the UK is exceedingly lax with its border controls), and can now be found throughout much of southern Britain.

The only colony I know of is in Cardiff’s Bute Park and, though I’ve looked for it since my interest in leafhoppers has been reignited, I’ve not managed to find it during the past few summers. I’m not sure why that is – the weather perhaps, though last week the day was occasionally overcast, with frequent drizzle, and I still saw them. The wrong time of year? I don’t think so as I had checked when I had seen them in the past and gone looking around the same time – the adults are active from around July through to the middle of autumn. Whatever the reasons for not having found them in the past, suffice to say I was very pleased to find them last week, and spent quite a bit of time watching their antics.

If you’re wondering about that last image, it appears the leafhopper has suffered some damage to its wing cases, which probably means it can’t fly but it certainly had no trouble leaping away when I got a little too close looking at the vibrant orange of its abdomen.

Three Ichneumon wasps

19 Tuesday Aug 2025

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Two things:
Firstly, my records of these three Ichneumon wasps have not yet been verified so, although I’m fairly confident of their identification, I’m not 100% certain.
And, secondly, I decided to write this blog after someone replied to one of my social media posts, saying – supposedly jokingly – that they had scurried away after seeing one of these creatures, a female with a prominent ‘stinger’ (the implication being that they were frightened of the wasp). So, just to be clear, these wasps will not harm humans; the ‘stinger’ is an ovipositor, for depositing eggs in to their hosts; and many Ichneumon wasps are large, colourful, and really quite beautiful creatures.

At 10-15mm, Ctenichneumon panzeri is a medium-sized Ichneumon that can often be found on umbellifer flowers, as you can see in my photo. As with all Ichneumon wasps, they are parasitoids; Ctenicheumon panzeri deposits its eggs in the larvae of moths of the Noctuidae family.

Heteropelma amictum is one of the larger (20-30mm) and more spectacular ichneumonids, with a long narrow body and equally long back legs, both of which are very prominent when it flies (my flight photo is blurry but I wanted to show you how it holds its body erect and dangles its legs below). Heteropelma amictum uses moth pupae, rather than larvae, as its larval hosts.

Ichneumon xanthorius is another medium-sized wasp, and one I see more often than other species, when it’s feeding on umbellifer flowers or perching on shrubs and bushes. Its larvae feed on the pupae of both moths and butterflies.

The British Natural History Museum has produced an excellent Beginner’s Guide to identifying British ichneumonids, which you can access and download by clicking on this link.

Leafmines: Stigmella viscerella

18 Monday Aug 2025

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I’m often surprised when I find a new leafmine: how is it that I’ve not noticed this one before, and how many different leafmines can there be? The answer to the first question has to be that I haven’t been paying enough attention, and to the second that there are probably hundreds that I haven’t yet found.

Today’s new leafmines were made by larvae of the moth Stigmella viscerella, and the mines can be found on the leaves of Elm trees, in this case Wych elm (Ulmus glabra), during August and September. Now that I’m aware of them, I’ve managed to find the mines in two different locations on two separate days, which is why the elm leaves in the two sets of images look different in colour (one day was brighter than the other).

The epithet viscerella may seem odd – it comes from the Latin viscera, plural of viscus, and refers to the human body’s internal organs – but when I look at these mines, the twisting shapes of the frass-filled galleries do, indeed, remind me of human intestines. I presume that the adult moth is not often seen as the UK Moths website doesn’t have its photo but, if you’re curious to see what emerged from these ‘intestines’, I managed to find an image on the German Lepiforum website.

Coleophora argentula

16 Saturday Aug 2025

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These may not look like much – in fact, when looking at these images, you might struggle to see anything but fading flower heads of Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) – but I’ve been checking almost every Yarrow flower I see, looking for these, since I first saw them mentioned on social media a few years ago.

These tiny brown tubes, camouflaged with a plant material covering, are the larval cases of the moth Coleophora argentula. From within their home-made protective covering, the little larvae poke their heads out to munch on the Yarrow flowers and on the seeds when they begin to develop.

According to the British Leafminers website entry on this species, the larvae are usually active from September through to May, so these are a little early; I’m finding many things are early this year, presumably due to the continuing warm weather. You can see the adult moth, a very pretty little thing, with pale brown and white stripes, over on the UK Moths website.

And now, have another look at the first photo. How many of the little brown cases can you find? Answers on a postcard. 🙂

Red-veined darter

14 Thursday Aug 2025

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Last week I celebrated my tenth anniversary of life in Wales with a lovely long walk around the local areas I’ve come to know so well. And, almost as if Nature was gifting me an anniversary present, this gorgeous creature flitted up from the grass next to the path in front of me, before settling again very near to me. I knew immediately, from the half blue eyes, that this was something special.

This is a Red-veined darter (Sympetrum fonscolombii). As you can see, it’s neither red, nor does it have red veins in its wings. The dragonfly is named for the colouring of a mature male but this golden beauty is an immature dragonfly, which you can tell from the black collar across the front of its thorax. I think it’s a male but my photos don’t show enough detail to be sure.

Red-veined darters are migrants from southern Europe. They are reasonably common in southern Britain but the numbers vary from year to year, presumably depending on conditions in Europe and on the weather conditions – warm southerlies or sou’easterlies would help them fly our way. I saw three in 2019, and, when I was comparing notes with one of my birding friends who also likes dragonflies, he agreed that, for some reason, that had been a bumper year for them. Neither of us has seen one locally in the six years since them, until now. I am, of course, hoping for more, especially as I’ve yet to see a strikingly vibrant male Red-veined darter.

Three shieldbug nymphs

13 Wednesday Aug 2025

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I’ve found some nice nymphs of our various shieldbug species during recent walks so thought I’d share a few of them. The nymphs almost always look quite different to the adults of the same species; if you’re unsure which shieldbug or which stage (instar) of nymph you’ve found, the British Bugs website has a page full of excellent drawings showing the various instars of all the British shieldbug species.

As this was only my fourth ever sighting of this species, I was particularly pleased to spot this Bronze shieldbug nymph (Troilus luridus), though it would have been difficult to miss as its metallic colours sparkled in the sunshine.

To illustrate how much these bugs change as they grow, I’ve included two photos of Hawthorn shieldbug (Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale), the top image shows early instar nymphs and below that is a mid instar nymph.

It was just a couple of months ago that I saw my first Juniper shieldbug (Cyphostethus tristriatus) and I wrote then (Juniper shieldbug, 3 June) that I was intending to return to the site to look for more, adults and nymphs. I did, and I have; this is one of two nymphs I found recently, a bug that’s just a stunning as the adult, in my humble opinion.

White grasshopper

12 Tuesday Aug 2025

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Except, perhaps, for a post about local flora, this will be the last of my blogs about what delights of Nature I discovered during my recent visit to Weymouth, and this is definitely my most unexpected find, an all-white grasshopper. It didn’t have pink eyes so I don’t think it qualifies as albino but it was certainly unusual.

I wasn’t sure what type of grasshopper it was, as it’s a nymph not an adult, and they can be tricky to identify, but I received some valuable assistance from the National iRecord verifier for Orthopteroid insects when I posted a photo on social media. David wasn’t sure either at first but I used Photoshop to fiddle with the light and contrast in my image so as to show the features a little more clearly and, from that, David could tell: ‘There is a fair amount of kink in the side keel, shown pretty clearly … Given that it actually looks most like Field GH, that they are the ones likeliest to be nymphs now & that they are also one of the most variable spp, the chances of it being anything else are slim.’ So, Field grasshopper it is!

Just to illustrate how very unusual this creature was, here’s a photo of a normal Field grasshopper that I took just a few days ago.

Adonis blues

11 Monday Aug 2025

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In classical antiquity, Adonis was celebrated as the epitome of male beauty. I presume, when writing in his publication British Butterflies in 1860, W. S. Coleman named this striking butterfly the Adonis blue, he considered it was the epitome of male beauty in the world of British butterflies. Though lacking the elaborate patterning of many British butterflies, the sheer brilliance of the colour of the male Adonis blue (Polyommatus bellargus) is breathtaking.

Fortunately for me, this butterfly has two broods each year so, though I missed the first in May-June, I timed my visit to Weymouth perfectly for the very start of the emergence of the second brood in August-September. I only managed to see two males, no females (which have chocolate brown upper wings, tinged with varying amounts of blue) but, as these sightings were only the third time I’d seen any Adonis blues, I was very happy indeed!