The weather may be grotty today, but on Sunday it was sunny and the damselfly larvae in the pond decided it was time to crawl out and turn into their adult selves.
Just yesterday I watched frogs big and small enjoying the garden pond. One in particular was very fat. Today – frogspawn! It being a new pond that I built last year, this is the first opportunity so it’s great to see nature moving in fully.
But will it survive the renewed cold that we’re promised is coming, and the predators that would presumably like to gobble it up? I hope so. Tiny frogs are just so cute.
I’ve been in the new house for over a year now and have become familiar with the visitors to the garden. Inspired by this weekend’s Big Garden Birdwatch and also by this BBC article on increasing and declining species since 1979, I thought I’d try to list all the different birds I’ve seen so far in the garden.
- Great tit
- Blue tit
- Coal tit
- Nuthatch (a very regular visitor I’m pleased to say)
- Long-tailed tit
- Chaffinch
- Goldfinch
- Magpie
- Jay
- Jackdaw
- Wood pigeon
- Rose-ringed parakeet
- Great spotted woodpecker
- Dunnock
- House sparrow
- Heron (looking rather ungainly in a tree, peering at my pond)
It’s been a while, but I’m back, with a fresh house and garden to provide new nature opportunities. That’s not why I moved of course, but all the same…
I’ve already dug a pond, and seen a fair few things. Notably the following.
- A fox, bold as brass on the lawn in the middle of the day.
- A nuthatch on a couple of occasions, which I think comes down from the woodland I can see from the garden.
- A hedgehog, just the once so far.
- A muntjac deer walking down the street and into the pub car park. Quite surreal.
- Pond life: dragonflies, frogs by the bucketload, including one that hopped into the house, pond skaters, water boatmen etc.
- Lots of jackdaws and parakeets. They roost in the woods – an incredible noise as they return each evening.
- Just the one smooth newt, under a rock.
I will be blogging about the pond build soon.
UPDATE: at least one person was wondering where in the country my garden is. It is in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
Veronica sent in some picture that she speculated were green shield bugs. She’s right, but they are the juvenile “nymphs” which lack wings, hence the slightly different rear ends to the adults that most people would recognise.
Who needs a guard dog, or guard goose, when you can have a guard spider? I have two good examples above my front door: a large false widow, and a house spider living just a couple of inches from it.
The false widow (Steatoda nobilis) got a lot of bad press over the last couple of years, as a relative of the infamous Black widow, and being an ‘immigrant’ the papers love to demonise them. An immigrant from over 100 years ago mind you. Still, if that keeps tabloid-rading miscreants from my door, then all the better! Still, I doubt those miscreants are well informed in spider identification.
It does surprise me that two large spiders can live so very close to one another without any aggro. Their webs literally intermingle, and I’ve seen them sitting within an inch of each other.
This bee paused for a breather on my brick path, and was good enough to stick around for a few photos. I assume it’s a mining bee of some sort, though I’m not going to try to identify exactly which one. This is about the extent of what a plain iPhone 6 can manage for close-up work.
Time to emerge from winter hibernation, somewhat belatedly, as it’s already been a warm, dry spring in the UK, hitting 25c at one point and doing a passable impression of summer.
This is the most exciting time of the year for nature lovers, at least in my opinion, as new life bursts all around. Also, I find myself spending a lot of time in the garden, and so I’m well placed to notice what’s going on outside.
- A wasp started building a nest on the ceiling of my shed, which was fascinating to watch, but realistically couldn’t be allowed to continue as I use the shed a lot. You can see it pictured above, with the beginnings of the central set of hexagonal cells handing from the centre of the outer shell.
- Plenty of butterflies are about, with the bright yellow/green Brimstones being particularly noticeable.
- Ants never seem to let up. How can there be about 3 nests (all different colours and sizes) per square metre in my garden! Do they all survive the winter or have they grown up from nothing in just a very short time? A little reading suggests they just go deeper underground below the frost line.
- Jays and Magpies are everywhere and very noticeable. Just that time of year.
A blast from the recent past here – September of last year. My own dear father sent this picture of fine, dense webs on gorse bushes. If you look closely you can see that there are multiple layers.
I had assumed that these must be the work of caterpillars, like the webs that sometimes enshroud whole trees and cars. But a little research suggests they might be the work of tiny red Gorse spider mites. Apparently it is damaging to the plant and is even used as a biological control in some parts of the worlds, to keep Gorse down.
Thanks to Peter Hunt for sending in these marvellous images of a beetle I didn’t know about before now. In his own words:
“It may be of interest to your readers to see The Cliff Tiger Beetle, Cylindera germanica, that is found along the south west coast of the Isle of Wight, on our crumbling cliffs.
In July I came across this beetle as it scurries around after prey. It has a formidable pair of jaws and tends to pursue its quarry on foot rather than taking flight. A magnificent beast and a rare one in the UK too.”
It’s perhaps no surprise I’ve not heard of it, as apparently it has only been found in Dorset and on the Isle of Wight since 1970. Peter has blogged about it on his own excellent site, with more local wonders.
