Category Archives: spring

124/366 Ragged robin

03 Sunday May 2020

Posted by in nature, spring, wildflowers

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At Grangemoor Park on Friday, I spotted my first flowering Ragged robin for the year.

200503 ragged robin (1)

This gorgeous wildflower was formerly known as Lychnis flos-cuculi, but is now Silene flos-cuculi – from a scientific article I browsed, this seems a complicated story of almost constant reclassification of the species! You will still see both names used in books and on line, which is why I’ve mentioned both here.

200503 ragged robin (2)

According to a couple of books I discovered on the ‘language of flowers’, Ragged robin’s symbolic meaning is ‘wit’, and it is dedicated to Saint Barnabas. The ever-informative First Nature website says:

Lychnis, the genus name, comes from the Greek noun lychnos, meaning lamp; it refers to the use of a plant in this genus as the wick of an oil lamp. The specific epithet flos-cuculi means ‘flower of the cuckoo’ and was probably chosen because the first flowers of Ragged Robin appear just as the first cuckoos are being heard (in Britain and Ireland at least) in May.

200503 ragged robin (3)

A special moment: to try to stop it swaying in the breeze so I could get a sharp photo, I was holding one of the blooms when a bee-fly decided to zoom in for a feed of nectar. That super long proboscis comes in handy for long narrow flowers like these.

200503 ragged robin (4)

117/366 It’s Pea time

26 Sunday Apr 2020

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You know the summer’s not far away when members of the extensive Pea family start to flower and, during this week’s exercise walks, I’ve spotted four Pea species newly come in to flower. The first were three of the vetches …

200426 Bush vetch

Bush vetch (Vicia sepium)

200426 Common vetch

Common vetch (Vicia sativa) … and friends.

200426 Grass vetchling

Grass vetchling (Lathyrus nissolia)

200426 bird's-foot trefoil

And, also, one of my all-time favourites – possibly because it’s also a favourite with a lot of the butterflies and day-flying moths I adore so much, Common bird’s-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus).

200426 Red campion

Oh, and this week’s new blooms also included one not-a-pea wildflower, the always lovely Red campion (Silene dioica).

110/366 Even earlier purples

19 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in flowers, nature, spring, wildflowers

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I spotted 8 flower spikes of Early-purple orchid (Orchis macula) during my walk last Wednesday, 15 April, though not all the flowers were yet open.

200419 early-purple orchids (1)

This sighting was earlier than last year’s, which was on 23 April and which the locals told me was earlier than usual. It seems like climate change keeps changing the goal posts for these orchids.

200419 early-purple orchids (4)

109/366 Speckled Spring

18 Saturday Apr 2020

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We’ve had much-needed rain and low-cloud gloom for the past two days but, earlier in the week, when the sun was warm and glorious and my walk took me along the coastal path, it felt like proper Spring. The bird song was almost deafening and – what clinched the Spring-ness for me – I counted 12 Speckled wood butterflies along the path, either perched sun-basking or patrolling their patch of scrub or – the males – engaged in spiralling dogfights over territory. Springtime magic!

108/366 Tawny miners

17 Friday Apr 2020

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Another day, another mining bee. You’ll recall we had the grey-haired Ashy mining bee on Tuesday; well, today we have the Tawny mining bee (Andrena fulva). And what a cracking colour it is! I’d love to have hair like this.

200417 Tawny mining bee (1)

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust website says these bees ‘can be found nesting in large groups and can be common in urban environments and garden lawns’ but I think that depends on location as the bees I see locally are usually singles, in less urban environments and, sadly, not as common as I’d like them to be, as their rich vibrant colour is very cheering.

200417 Tawny mining bee (2)

Unfortunately, just like the Ashy mining bees, the Tawnies can also fall victim to bee-fly predation. You can read more about that and the bees themselves on the BCT website here.

107/366 In my tree

16 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in birds, nature, spring, trees

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It’s amazing how much time you can ‘waste’ trying to take photos of all the birds that spend time in a tree. I know because I’ve spent several hours doing just that. I can watch the tree as I sit at my desk/dining table or on my living room sofa (my kitchen/dining/living room is just one big room) so it’s easy to spot birds arriving or to hear them singing and calling, but it’s not so easy to sneak over to the open window to take photos because, obviously, if I can see the birds, they can also see me! So, my clothes drying rack was moved in to service as a not-very-effective bird hide.

200416 1 bird hide

First up was a Blue tit – always cute and very chirpy. As the tree – some kind of ornamental cherry – is now quite leafy, it’s hard to get a clear shot and, of course, the birds don’t exactly pose for me.

200416 2 blue tit

Next, and returning continuously throughout the day, a couple of Goldfinches. Their cheerful twittering has been a joy in recent days.

200416 3 goldfinch

Surprise of the day was this Willow warbler, a real rarity in my urban setting. It visited on and off for a couple of hours then, presumably, continued its migration path, heading north to the Welsh Valleys to find a spot to breed.

200416 4 willow warbler

And so to bed … this Woodpigeon had obviously had a hard day.

200416 5 woodpigeon

106/366 The ostentatious Orange-tip

15 Wednesday Apr 2020

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If there is one butterfly whose male makes a truly conspicuous effort to impress the female of the species, then it must surely be the Orange-tip (Anthocharis cardamines). Those vivid orange wing tips are hard to miss, even when the males are speeding past at a hundred miles an hour. Today, at last, I saw my first Orange-tip for 2020 – in fact, I spotted four of these handsome chaps and, after following a couple back and forth along their chosen territories, I finally managed a single photo of one as it was refuelling.

200415 orange-tip

105/366 A colony of miners

14 Tuesday Apr 2020

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I’d forgotten about this little colony of Ashy mining bees (Andrena cineraria) until I walked past on today’s exercise walk, saw their buzz of spring activity, remembered them at this location last summer. The female bees have set up home – a series of individual nests, accessed by the small holes you can see in my photos – in a sandy bank near the entrance to one of the few local parks that’s still open.

200414 ashy mining bee male (1)200414 ashy mining bee male (2)

The males in this group (2 of perhaps 20 shown above) were particularly active, sometimes fighting each other for access to the larger females (the two photos immediately below), sometimes battling with the females as they tried to mate with them.

200414 ashy mining bees

Unfortunately, I was not the only creature watching the bees’ activity – a Dark-edged bee-fly (Bombylius major) was also hovering nearby, waiting to roll its eggs into the bees’ tunnels so its larvae could predate the bees’ offspring. Not surprisingly, the bees were dive-bombing, trying to make it flee.

200414 dark-edged bee-fly