Leafmines: Stigmella lemniscella

25 Monday Aug 2025

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I discovered today’s new leafmines the same day as I found last week’s (Leafmines: Stigmella viscerella) and, considering how much time I spend leaf-fossicking and simply staring at trees, was also amazed I’d not noticed these very distinctive mines before.

The larvae of the moth Stigmella lemniscella munch away within the leaves of Elm trees (Ulmus species), in this case Wych elms (Ulmus glabra), and their galleries often follow the edge of the leaves, looking like a zigzag pattern. These moths are bivoltine so are active during July, and again in September – October. The adult moth is a pretty little thing – there’s a photo on the UK Moths website, which has the common name of Beautiful elm dot.

Soapwort and smut

24 Sunday Aug 2025

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During a walk around Cardiff’s Bute Park last week, I spotted a wildflower growing alongside my path that I couldn’t ever recall seeing before. It had pink flowers and looked a lot like Red campion so I wondered if it might be a cultivated variety of campion that had escaped from someone’s garden.

A look through the appropriate section of my wildflower guide when I got home proved me half right and half wrong. It was definitely a member of the campion family but this was Soapwort (Saponaria officinalis), no garden escape but not native either. It’s classified as an archaeophyte, which means this extremely useful detergent-plant was introduced to Britain in ancient times, prior to 1500 AD.

A few snippets from Flora Britannica:

Simply rubbing a leaf between the fingers will produce a slight, slippery froth. Boiled in water, the plant produces a green lather with the power to lift grease and dirt, especially from fabrics. … due to the presence of saponins – chemicals which, like inorganic soaps, appear to ‘lubricate’ and absorb dirt particles.
… cultivated for laundering woollens in Syria … and in Britain employed as a soaping agent by medieval fullers … because vegetable saponins are so much gentler than soaps, Saponaria has been used much more recently for washing ancient tapestries … Victoria &Albert Museum it was last used for cleaning fragile fabrics in the 1970s. The National Trust have also used it, for bringing up the colours in antique curtains.

Now, the keen-eyed amongst you may have noticed something a little odd about the flowers in some of my photos; the centres of the flower heads look black. This is because many of the plants I found were suffering from anther smut, in this case caused by the fungus Microbotryum saponariae. The pollen in the flowers’ anthers has been replaced with fungal spores, meaning the plant is unable to reproduce. This may be a recent infestation as I found plenty of plants growing along the path as I walked further. I often see something similar on Red campion flowers, though that is caused by a different fungal species, Microbotryum silenes-dioicae. So, two for the price of one today: a fascinating plant and an equally fascinating fungus.

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.

Five in one day

20 Wednesday Aug 2025

Posted by in autumn, birds

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We may still be complaining about – or enjoying, if you like the hot temperatures – this summer’s heatwaves but, for our local birds, autumn migration is already well underway. I haven’t seen a Swift for a couple of weeks, most of the Sand martins have already left, and a lot of the local House martin nests are empty now too.

The birds that nest further north of my locale have also begun to head south; last Monday, 11 August, I saw my first Redstart of the season and my first Spotted flycatcher. And, amazingly, my new garden held a Spotted flycatcher the following day; I had the joy of watching it from my flat window for at least a couple of hours as it was flitting out and back from the trees and shrubs.

My best day of watching the migration in action so far this season was last Friday, the 15th, when I saw not one, not two, but a terrific total of five Spotted flycatchers during my walk around the paddocks at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park. This is a magical time of year for those of us who love birds, as you neither know which species, nor how many birds, you might see, so there’s always a sense of expectation and excitement every time you go for a walk. I hope all of you get to experience these magical migration moments as well.

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.

White melilot

17 Sunday Aug 2025

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When I first saw this plant, I thought it was some weird variation on a vetch. I was wrong – I frequently am! – but I did have the correct family. This is White melilot (Melilotus albus), a member of the pea family, the Fabaceae (or Leguminosae).

I’ve only ever seen it growing in this one location, an area of waste ground on the western side of Cardiff Bay, which leads me to wonder how it arrived there. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey writes that it was ‘originally introduced to this country from Europe as fodder plants’ and is ‘now well naturalised at the edges of arable fields, on roadsides and in waste places’. That’s certainly one explanation but I wonder if this particular colony has a different origin.

I know from my time volunteering on the Mary Gilham Archive Project that, in the days of sail and the once very active docks that flourished around the Bay, ships often used sand as ballast. When they arrived at Cardiff, the ships offloaded their sand before loading up with a cargo of coal, and the sand was often dumped or used to reclaim land. That sand contained a huge variety of dormant seeds, which is why the land around Cardiff Bay – and the ports of other cities – often contain alien plant species. Whatever the truth of its arrival, White melilot is an attractive, if straggly little plant, which, I think, deserves to grow more widely.

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. 🙂