As I’m stubborn and won’t use apps to help identify the things I find, it took me two and a half weeks to work out what these creatures are and then, truth be told, I only worked it out by using an app, Google lens, once I’d posted some images on Twitter and cried ‘help!’.

I saw the tiny bugs first on this Pendulous sedge on 6 May, lots of them, mostly mating. After that sighting, I tried trawling through the images on the British Bugs website but couldn’t narrow down an identification. My excuse is that I focussed on checking through all the plant bugs, whereas this is actually a member of the Lygaeidae groundbug family.

After seeing these little bugs on the exact same sedge (but not on other sedge plants nearby), still mostly mating, on 23 May, I decided to try again to find their name. And so, thanks to Google lens, I can at last introduce you to Cymus glandicolor, a lover of the damp places where sedges like to grow, mostly in England and Wales, though recently recorded also in Scotland according to the British Bugs website.