Autumn on the Ivy

25 Saturday Oct 2025

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As soon as I get a whiff of the ‘wet flour’ smell of Ivy flowers, I know to keep an eye out for my first Ivy bees (Colletes hederae).

They appeared locally back in mid September – the Bumblebee Conservation Trust says they can be seen from late August through to early November – but, after a week of anti-cyclonic gloom when we didn’t see the sun at all, and then a week of mostly wet weather, I figured I probably wouldn’t see any more this year.

Fortunately for me, I was wrong. I happened to be in the right place at the right time earlier this week when the sun came out for a couple of hours and my walk had taken me past a row of old trees, all covered in Ivy whose flowers hadn’t yet begun to form fruit.

With its furry ginger thorax and ginger-and-black-striped abdomen, Colletes hederae is such an attractive little bee that is slowly colonising the British countryside, moving ever north, since its arrival here back in 2001.

Fungi: Black bulgar

24 Friday Oct 2025

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I went looking for Fly agaric, the mushroom everyone recognises but which is surprisingly uncommon where I live; I found none but, almost immediately on arrival at north Cardiff’s Cefn Onn Park, I did spot this large log covered in small black button-like fungi.

These are the fruit of the fungus Black bulgar (Bulgaria inquinans), also known as Rubber buttons and Bachelor’s buttons. According to the First Nature website, they are known as Black Jelly Drops or Poor Man’s Licorice in the United States, though the site also cautions readers not to be fooled by those names – these fungi are not edible and may, indeed, be toxic.

As you can see in the photo above, the fruit bodies look a bit like short tacks; they start out flat on top but come to resemble little cups. The outer surface is, initially, brown and scaly looking but, as they age, they become black, blobby when wet, but tougher and rubbery when dry. Black bulgar is described as common, and can be seen, mostly on fallen Oaks but also on a few other tree species, from autumn through to spring.

Lingering

23 Thursday Oct 2025

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Looking out the window now, as Storm Benjamin drenches us with heavy rain, it seems hard to believe there was some bright sunshine this morning. I happened to be at Lavernock Nature Reserve at exactly the right time to feel the warmth of that sun and I wasn’t the only one to enjoy the feeling. Although I haven’t seen any butterflies or dragonflies for at least a week, and thought I’d probably seen my last for the year, but it turns out they’re still lingering unseen, and out they popped to bask in the sun’s heat:

A Red admiral

A Common darter

And a Speckled wood.

Waxcaps, but fleeting

22 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Last week I went for a meander around Cathays Cemetery in Cardiff, looking for waxcaps. The cemetery is a SSSI (a Site of Special Scientific Interest) because of its waxcaps, and they are stunning. The SSSI designation is supposed to ensure the site is protected from environmental damage, and managed in a way that benefits the flora and/or fauna that resulted in its designation, but it doesn’t.

All of the beautiful waxcaps pictured in this post would have been destroyed by the end of that day because a council worker was cutting the grass. In fact, I only had time to check a couple of the uncut blocks within the grounds before they too were mown.

This is typical of Cardiff Council’s assault on the natural environment. They’ve been told by ecologists how the cemetery should be managed but they ignore that advice, cut when the waxcaps are fruiting, and leave the clippings.

This is a deliberate decision by the Council; and the situation could easily be remedied either by mowing the grass a little earlier or a little later in the year. And, if budget cuts mean they can’t afford to purchase a mower than removes the clippings, then they could co-ordinate the mowing with the cemetery Friends group and other voluntary groups to rake the clippings. But they don’t.

More herons at the lake

21 Tuesday Oct 2025

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Last week we had Grey herons at Cardiff’s Roath Park Lake; this week we have another member of the heron family, two of them in fact, gorgeous Little egrets (Egretta garzetta).

In Britain these days, if you’re lucky, you can see three white egrets, Cattle, Little and Great white, but I still find these birds exotic.

And, although I feature them here relatively frequently, I make no apology for that, as they are beautiful birds.

I find Little egrets quite mesmerising to watch, and I’m certainly not the only one. Despite these beauties being quite common at Roath Lake these days, several other people stopped to watch and pulled out their phones to take photos, so I imagine the egrets were featuring on social media that day.

Bedellia somnulentella revisited

20 Monday Oct 2025

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Back in September, in my blog Leafmines: Bedellia somnulentella, I covered the mines of a moth whose larvae have some unusual habits, spinning hammocks outside their mines to rest and pupate in. Now that I’m aware of them, I’ve been seeing these mines almost everywhere I see Field bindweed. And, during last Tuesday’s walk, when I saw the plant and turned over a few leaves, I spotted two leaves that had a total of three pupae suspended beneath. I decided to bring them home so that I could, hopefully, see what the adult moth looked like.

In the intervening six days, another larva has pupated – I hadn’t even realised there was another larva in the leaves but, on Thursday, as the leaves began to dry and shrivel, it appeared, climbed up the side of the jar, spun a hammock under the lid, and pupated.

Then, yesterday, when the wild, wet, windy weather meant I spent a day at home – a rarity for me, two of the adult moths hatched from their pupae. I couldn’t get any decent images through the glass so decided to risk opening the jar to grab a few quick photos.

And today I released them into the wild. All going well, there should be two more moths to come.

The scabious and the bee

19 Sunday Oct 2025

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This has been such a strange year for flora and fauna. Usually, in mid autumn, I’d be checking what insects I could find on the Devil’s-bit scabious flowers, as they are one of the last sources of nourishment for many of our flying insects. Not this year. The summer drought seems to have led to a lot of our local insects either failing to breed second and third generations or, perhaps, just dying off earlier than usual due to a lack of food, and the Devil’s-bit scabious flowers are nowhere near as lush as they normally are. When I walked through a local nature reserve this week, I found just one Common carder bee on the scabious … just one! It will be very interesting to see what effect this changing climate has on next year’s flora and fauna when they begin to grow and emerge.

A wasp but which

18 Saturday Oct 2025

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Back in July, when the leaves were falling early from the trees due to the hot dry conditions, I noticed several ‘green islands’ in the Poplar leaves at a local park and, as I didn’t have my macro camera with me, brought a few home to photograph.

Once home I realised that two of the leaves still had live larvae in them, larvae of the moth Stigmella trimaculella, happily munching away within their green island homes (see Leafmines: Stigmella trimaculella, 21 October 2024).

Rather than return them to the park, I put the leaves in a jar to see whether the larvae would go on to pupate and hatch as adult moths. Though I checked the jar regularly, nothing seemed to be happening. The leaves had dried up as expected but, as the larvae usually pupate in leaf debris on the ground, I didn’t think that would be a problem. This week I decided to empty the jar so tipped everything out on to a sheet of white paper … and found this.

It appears that, although the two larvae seemed to be acting and eating as normal, at least one of them had been parasitised by a wasp, and this adult had emerged. It was miniscule, less than 2mms long, more like a speck of dust than a creature. I didn’t expect to get a decisive answer as to what it was but I took some photos and posted them online. Luckily for me, the wasp person I knew was able to connect me with a national parasitic wasp expert. He gave me a tentative identification based on what he could see and referred me to a document I could follow to try to key the wasp to species. The problem is that the key was very specific and, without a microscope, I simply couldn’t see the features clearly enough. So, this little creature would appear to belong to the family Braconidae, the subtribe Adeliinae, one of the Adelius species of parasitic wasp, but I can’t be 100% sure.

An inedible dessert

17 Friday Oct 2025

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When you read the name Plums and Custard, you might well think, as I always do, that it sound like a delicious dessert. If only!

In this instance, Plums and Custard is not your Friday night after-dinner delight but a fungus, also known as Tricholomopsis rutilans. The two parts of the name come from the cap, which starts off a rich plum colour but fades over time, and the custard yellow colour of the gills. And, no, you shouldn’t eat it, no matter how edible it looks.

Though you can’t always see this – and you certainly can’t in my photos, these fungi grow on wood, specifically decayed conifers, usually pine. They’re often found in large groups, and are common throughout the UK.

A drake Mandarin

16 Thursday Oct 2025

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I’ve been holding off posting about this handsome drake Mandarin duck, hoping to get better photos. He was first spotted on the River Ely in Cardiff a few days before the Hobbies appeared – I saw him on 25 September – but he has subsequently proved to be very elusive, frequently disappearing in amongst the reed beds, especially when there were quite a few birders on the opposite bank watching the Hobbies’ aerial displays.

Thinking he might reappear once the Hobbies flew south and activity in the area died down, I went for another look a couple of days ago, but failed to find him. He was associating with a group of Mallards, and his provenance may well be dubious – Mandarins often escape from wildfowl collections in parks – but he wasn’t ringed, and there is a wild population in the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire, not too far from Cardiff as the duck flies.