20 Sunday Sep 2020
Posted in autumn, plants, wildflowers
‘The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.’
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Chapter 6: Nature, Essays, Second Series, 1844.
19 Saturday Sep 2020
One of the highlights for me at this time of year is finding Ivy bees feasting, as you might expect, on the newly opened flowers of Ivy. I blog about these little beauties every year so I won’t go in to their details again, just share my latest photos.
16 Wednesday Sep 2020
Posted in insects, plants, wildflowers
Tags
bees on scabious, Bombus pascuorum, Bombus terrestris, British bees, British wildflowers, Buff-tailed bumblebee, Bull-headed furrow bee, Common carder bee, Devil's-bit scabious, Lasioglossum leucozonium, Lasioglossum zonulum, Megachile ligniseca, White-zoned furrow bee, Wood-carving leafcutter bee
In recent weeks, when the weather has been fine and the air relatively still, I’ve been spending time searching the Devil’s-bit scabious for bees. Not just any bees, but four scarce and endangered bees. This is part of Buglife’s ‘Searching for Scabious’ project, which
aims to improve our understanding of the distribution and conservation status of some of Wales’ rarest and most threatened solitary bees – the Large Scabious Mining Bee (Andrena hattorfiana) and its associated cuckoo, the Armed nomad bee (Nomada armata), and Small Scabious Mining Bee (Andrena marginata) and its cuckoo, the Silver-sided nomad bee (Nomada argentata).
I wasn’t familiar with these bees and am not very good at bee identification in general but Liam Olds, Buglife’s local conservation officer, has put together an excellent explainer video, which can be accessed on YouTube, so I thought I’d join the search.
Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to find any of the scarce bees at the two local sites where Devil’s-bit scabious grows in abundance (and neither has Liam, which was reassuring for me re my search skills but bad news for the bees). The bees I did find most commonly were the appropriately named Common carder (Bombus pascuorum) (below, left) and the Buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) (below, right).
Liam very kindly helped to identify the other small bees I found. These lovely little furrow bees are either the White-zoned furrow bee (Lasioglossum leucozonium) or the Bull-headed furrow bee (Lasioglossum zonulum) – the two species are too similar to tell them apart without closer examination.
I also found several of these more distinctive individuals, the Wood-carving leafcutter bee (Megachile ligniseca). You can find out more about them, and watch a little video of their nest-building skills, on the BWARS website. Meantime, I’m heading back to the scabious for another look.
07 Monday Sep 2020
Posted in insects, plants, wildflowers
Tags
Buff-tailed bumblebee, bumblebees, Burnet moth, Common carder bee, insects on teasels, Meadow Brown, Teasel
Bumblebees and Teasels – I’m not sure why but they seem to be a match made in heaven.
In fact, bumblebees are the insects I see most often nectaring on Teasels, though the Burnet moths also find Teasel to their taste, as did this Meadow brown butterfly yesterday.
06 Sunday Sep 2020
Posted in plants, wildflowers
Tags
British wildflowers, Common field-speedwell, Greater plantain, Persicaria maculosa, Plantago major, Redshank, Veronica persica
Earlier this year, when we were in full lockdown and our Council, in their stupidity, closed the spacious local country park even to local pedestrians, I was one of many who looked for alternative places, other than too-narrow pavements, to walk, and in the process discovered a disused lane that leads to farm fields, which, this year, have not been leased for crop growing. These fields are where, in recent months, I’ve seen many nice birds, and plants like the Musk thistle I blogged about in July and the Lesser burdock from August’s Burdock Beasties. These are a few more finds from those fields.
Redshank (Persicaria maculosa)
Of course, you can find Redshank in many diverse locations – it thrives along the lane behind my flat – but it seems to be doing particularly well in this arable landscape. You may notice that Redshank bears a strong resemblance to the Amphibious bistort I blogged about on Thursday – they are both from the genus Persicaria, and, if you want to know more about this fascinating plant, I recommend you read the entry on the Plant Lore website, which will explain why one East Anglian name for the plant is ‘devil’s arse-wipe’!
Greater plantain (Plantago major)
Its name may be Greater plantain but I think this is the Greatest plantain I’ve ever seen – it was huge. The Plantlife website has some fascinating information about this plant:
A common name is Rat’s tails which perfectly describes the plant’s flowering spike. Another vernacular name is Angels’ harps because when you pull the leaves apart you get the fibres showing between. This is also the likely explanation for the names Banjos and Beatles’ guitars.
Plantain has healing powers since the leaves contain tannins and astringent chemicals, which can make them useful styptics if crushed and applied to small cuts.
Common field-speedwell (Veronica persica)
I have trouble identifying the various members of the Speedwell family but I’m fairly confident about this one – it was low and sprawling and hairy, and its solitary flowers were on stems growing from the bases of the upper leaves. A check of its seed capsules would’ve clinched it but I forgot to look at those. As its name implies, Common field-speedwell is commonly found in fields – in fact, my footpath today took me along the edge of a field where the farmer is growing maize and the soil between the maize plants was completely covered by this lovely plant with its delicate blue flowers.
04 Friday Sep 2020
Tags
autumn berries, birding, birdwatching, blackberries, bramble, British birds, Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, Pheasant, pheasant eating blackberries
A rustle of vegetation … an eye … who’s this lurking behind the ‘snipe paddock’ fence at Cosmeston?
A female Pheasant? A common enough bird in the local countryside but not normally seen here in this dog-full park. She has quite short tail feathers and she’s not too bothered about my presence so I presume she’s a juvenile.
It seems she’s quite partial to blackberries.
Are there more of those delicious treats?
Aha, yes, another ripe one.
And, after scoffing those couple of berries, she wanders off in search of more.
03 Thursday Sep 2020
Posted in nature, plants, wildflowers
Tags
Amphibious bistort, amphibious wildflower, British flora, British wildflowers, Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, Persicaria amphibia
Initially, I doubted my identification of this plant – I’d seen it growing in clumps in the waters of Cosmeston Country Park’s west lake, so how could this be the same plant growing in a section of meadow, albeit a damp area where reeds are abundant?
The Great crested grebes like to park themselves amongst the plant, perhaps to stop them drifting while they snooze.
The clue, of course, is in its name: amphibious, ‘relating to, living in, or suited for both land and water’ (Oxford Dictionary). Amphibious bistort (Persicaria amphibia) has two forms, one that resembles a water lily, floating its leaves upon the water surface, and another that lives quite happily on land that can be quite a distance from water, as long as that land is moist.
This second type also shows the somewhat more elongated leaves that its generic name refers to – persicaria ‘relates the shape of leaves of this group of plants to those of a peach tree’ (First Nature) – and the land-based form has hairy leaves, which the water-growing form does not. To clinch the identification, my book (The Wild Flower Key) says to look for two stigmas in most flowers, which Amphibious bistort has but similar species do not. And very pretty flowers they are too!
29 Saturday Aug 2020
I don’t know about you but, when I’m out walking at this time of year, I’m often tempted to pluck and devour one of the luscious-looking blackberries growing on the bramble-covered fences and hedgerows.
Well, not any more. Not now I’ve seen how many flies like to suck at them and run their dirty little feet all over them. Just look at all those fly bottoms!
And let’s not even mention the very real possibility of getting stung by a wasp that’s jealously guarding ‘its’ berries. From now on, the berries are all for the beasties!
26 Wednesday Aug 2020
Posted in nature, plants, wildflowers
Tags
British wildflowers, Cypress spurge, Euphorbia cyparissias, Euphorbia helioscopia, Euphorbia peplus, Petty spurge, spurge, Sun spurge
The Oxford Dictionary tells me that the word spurge was first used in Late Middle English and is a ‘shortening of Old French espurge, from espurgier, from Latin expurgare “cleanse” (because of the purgative properties of the milky latex)’. If you have sensitive skin, you may want to be wary of touching that latex, which both the stem and leaves will exude if broken, as it can irritate.
In fact, the latex in Petty spurge (Euphorbia peplus) is so caustic that it’s used in medications for the removal of warts and veruccas. This is the spurge I see most often, as it seems to enjoy the edges of pavements and lanes, road verges and waste ground and, though an annual, it can be seen over a long period, from April right through to October.
Sun spurge (Euphorbia helioscopia) is superficially similar to Petty spurge but is slightly larger and has a shorter growing period, from May to August. The easiest way to tell one spurge from the other is by counting the rays in the umbel: Petty spurge has three rays while Sun spurge has five. Although Sun spurge supposedly enjoys a similar growing environment to Petty spurge, I don’t see it very often in my urban area: as the photo below indicates, my find was growing in an arable field (where no crops were sown this season, but some residue crops have sprouted).
Perhaps because of its irritant sap, Sun spurge has a wealth of interesting common names. These are from the Royal Horticultural Society’s website: cat’s milk, churn staff, little good, little goody, mad woman’s milk, mare’s milk, mouse milk, wart grass and wartwort.
Cypress spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias) is the most unusual and intriguing of today’s spurges. I found a large area of this very attractive plant growing on top of the Aberbargoed coal spoil tip on 29 July but it’s taken a couple of weeks to get the identification confirmed. I’m not sure how the plant came to be on the tip – my guide book says Cypress spurge is ‘possibly native’ in southern Britain but a probable garden escape elsewhere (The Wild Flower Key).
25 Tuesday Aug 2020
Posted in autumn, insects, nature, plants, wildflowers
Tags
British galls, British insects, British wildflowers, Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, galls on wild carrot, Kiefferia pericarpiicola, midge gall, Wild carrot
I was looking around at the various wildflowers yesterday at Cosmeston, seeing what insects might be about, when I noticed these odd growths on some of the Wild carrot flower heads. I split one open with my finger nail and a miniscule orange blob fell out; turns out that was the larva of a midge with the long-winded name of Kiefferia pericarpiicola.
The galls start off green (below left), before turning pinkish and eventually brown. According to the Nature Spot website, these galls can be seen from late summer through to autumn, after which the larvae will leave the gall and drop down to the soil to pupate. The midge only occurs in southern parts of Britain at the moment – and I only found two previous records in the Welsh biodiversity database – but perhaps that will change as our climate continues to warm and the midge flies further afield. It’s also possible, of course, that this insect is under-recorded – it seems the midge itself is almost never seen, only its gall creations.
