Wildlife in the garden, part 3

Tags

ants, badger, crabapple, dragonflies, ovipositor, Spiders, urban fox, wagtail, water lily

Some things old and some things new for this final post in the series. Here’s a small white butterfly on lavender.  Insects just love lavender.  I’m going ensure they have more next year.

A grasshopper on ground that ants have churned up a bit.

I think I can understand those who don’t like spiders, but for me they and their webs are beautiful…

This is a minuscule verbascum, and the fly is about 8 mm long.

Not a Gatekeeper on the Verbena, but a Meadow brown butterfly

It’s the spider season – or it’s the season when we notice them.

I confess that this was not taken in my garden, but from the window of my friend, Mary’s, house in inner London.  This fox was in her neighbour’s back garden.  I have seen cubs there too, but not on this occasion of a visit to her in late August.

Wagtails seem to prefer the roadway itself usually, where they seem to be able to find the tiny insects that nourish them.  But this one came on to my front lawn.

Goldfinch, great tit, and I think another goldfinch and a sparrow.  Even more difficult to get a decent picture on this furthest feeder in the shade of the summer leaves.

Blue tit and chaffinch

Holly blue butterfly. Some butterflies settle with wings open, and some don’t…

Papa (Mama?) wagtail brought juvenile this time.

I thought I was taking a photo of a fly about 10 mm long on this Evening primrose flower.  Only on seeing the result on the screen did I realise that there was also an almost invisibly small further creature in the image.

Badgers leave their mark where they pass regularly.  The cats also choose to use their path under the crab-apple.

Badgers dig for cockchafer larvae and other delights.  Even if I wanted a perfect lawn, it would be impossible here.

Views on ants are divided, but my wildlife friends say that they are great for breaking up the soil, distributing nutrients and bringing fertilising elements to the garden. (Here is an enthusiastic website.) My ‘meadow’ has many anthills, and here is the most impressive. It’s about 8 inches high.

I accidentally disturbed some ants recently, and watched as they hurried to save the eggs:

Penultimate spider:

I think this is a harmless solitary wasp, and that that fearful looking instrument at its rear is an ovipositor.

The water lily is sadly going to have to go next month.  It has totally taken over the pond, depriving it of light and oxygen.  The pond snails will have to find somehere else to perch when they want to take the air,

as will the fly when it wants to drink.

When the sun was out a few days ago, there were at last half a dozen dragonflies darting around at just above head height, presumably snatching minute insects.  I actually saw one take quite a sizeable midge.  Rarely do they settle, but when they do, they don’t seem to be too worried about the presence of a human nearby.

Sorry, this is the penultimate spider:

Early evening, the sunlight catches the midges near the hornbeam – when there’s any sun.  This is my best effort, from indoors, to capture them digitally.  I’ll hope to do better next year, perhaps from outside.

The sparrows don’t only line up in my neighbour’s garden, but in mine as well.

How’s this for a beauty on my garden rubbish?

Finally, this is how my crab-apple, flowering so gloriously in April, looks now, in a rare moment of sunshine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wildlife in the garden, part 1

Tags

backswimmer, badger, borage, crabapple, damselflies, gatekeeper, green woodpecker, holly blue, long-tailed tit, peacock butterfly, starling, tadpoles, tiger moth, wildlife garden

Preparing to depart for a wildlife trip to the wetlands of Brazil, the Pantanal, at the end of the week, I thought I would do a photoblog entry about the wildlife in my own garden since the beginning of the year.  Except that it turns out that it is going to have to be three days’ worth of entries.  It also turns out that I only got down to a serious photographic record in August, before then being very haphazard.

My bird seed disappears very rapidly in the winter, the most numerous commensals being chaffinches, goldfinches and above all starlings.

Starlings congregating in the hornbeam in January

They roost at night with millions of others, after spectacular murmurations if the conditions are right, in the reedbeds of the Somerset Levels – and at dawn scatter to the gardens and fields surrounding for miles around.  There can be as many as 30 or 40 in this tree and on the ground at one time. In summer though, I can go for weeks without seeing a single one.

Robins – not necessarily the same ones, since they also migrate to a certain extent – are here year round.

Enjoying the February sun

In the same month, the frogs start getting amorous. Here are a couple in amplexus in my pond, and the results of their amours.

You can just see the female

The next six pictures were taken in March.

Goldfinches

Tadpoles stay close together immediately after hatching, eating the remains of their glassy first homes

Small tortoiseshell butterfly on Lesser celandine

(Common?) wasp on Euphorbia characias

Until I saw this I did not realise that backswimmers (a.k.a., but not, water boatmen) could exist outside water. But I now know they can also fly.

April sees the arrival of many bees.  Here is a solitary (that is, not living in a community) bee.

I always feel guilty that the nail-holes in this summerhouse will not provide the sort of nests that they want, and that the bees waste their time trying.  I really will buy or make a bee house for them soon.

When I stand under my crab-apple tree in blossom-time, the humming of, mainly, honeybees is almost deafening.  Butterflies also enjoy the nectar.

Peacock butterfly

Here is a damselfly (wings closed behind it and much smaller than dragonfly) on a field maple.

Just one of many clumps of primroses

Signs of bluebells

Holly blue butterfly on, I think, pear blossom

Craneflies are just one of the many kinds of insects which love the long grass, (pretentiously called my meadow)

Lady’s smock, a.k.a. cuckoo flower, which arrived spontaneously when I started letting the meadow grow. (It had not been very cared for before.)

Crabapple tree in full glory, thought to be part of an ancient hedge, like the hornbeam

We’re into May now. Just one picture. I don’t know what this insect is, but it’s rather handsome in my view.

June

 I do know that this is definitely an adult male blackbird

Badgers use my garden most of the year, and I have seen, and been able to stand among – badgers’ sight is notoriously poor – as many as eight of them, including young, foraging for insects in, or rather within, the turf. They emerge from their setts as it is getting, or it has become, thoroughly dark.  However in the long days of June they are forced to come out while there is still a little daylight, and I was thrilled to get this picture from my kitchen window around 9 pm one evening.

Last year I saw – and have seen elsewhere this year – Jersey tiger moths.  In June I was delighted to see in my own garden Scarlet tiger moths, so-called for obvious reasons.

 

 

 

Gatekeeper butterfly

Small white butterfly on Verbena bonariensis

Great spotted woodpeckers are not unusual in my garden, but I’d never seen a green woodpecker here before. This juvenile by loud screeching was determined to let me know it was there, and I was able to take this photo just by swinging round at my desk. Sadly I was not able to get a picture of the never-before-seen Treecreeper the following day.

Bumblebee on lavender

Only the buddleia in this picture is in my garden. These sparrows wait in a neighbour’s garden taking their turn to raid my feeders. There are more than 30 of them in this picture.

Once the borage is out, honeybees have a clear preference for its flowers, while the bumblebees stay with the lavender.

I love it when long-tailed tits flit through the garden.

We’ve arrived at August.  More pictures from that month next time.