Pond Dip - August 2010

Dad and I had fun dipping the pond last Sunday. I was very pleased to find around 20 southern hawker larvae - the most dragonfly larvae we've ever found at one time.

This one had recently shedded its skin - as the skin is normally hard they have to shed their skin to enable them to grow:


As usual we also found pond skaters, water slaters, leeches, newtpoles and a few tadpoles. It looks as though all the damselfly and mayfly larvae have now emerged.

August

Late summer at Frog End has brought an abundance of wildlife and the insect lists for the garden are growing rapidly. Unfortunately, even longer is the list of species I've yet to identify.

Speckled woods are only absent at night and when it rains:

We had a wall brown a couple of weeks ago, taking the butterfly species count up to 18, of which we've seen 17 in 2010:

After a poor mid-summer the dragonflies are about again and so far this last week we've had a golden-ringed dragonfly (that refused to be photographed), a common darter:

and a migrant hawker:


This large hoverfly Volucella inanis seems to like the buddleia flowers:

and the goldenrod is covered with green shield bugs of all sizes and stages of development:

More butterflies

Some more photos of the species currently in the garden:

Red admiral:


Holly blue:

Green-veined white:


Comma:

Just goes to show

To all those caterpillar squashers out there...

I left our big white verbascum (I don't know which species it is) to be decimated by the mullein moth caterpillars earlier in the year. They must have eaten about a third of the total leaf area and chewed through the central flower stem.

This is a close up of some of the leaves six weeks ago (a week or so before the worst damage was done):


one of the cute culprits:


and the verbascum today:

It's flowered better this year than any other - probably as a result of the main stalk being completely severed. Just goes to show that killing the little munchers isn't always in the best interests of the plant (though I admit our large white caterpillar vs Brussels sprouts episode a couple of years ago didn't go so well for the sprouts!)

Common blue

Half an hour after commenting that the local garden centre had common blue butterflies and we did not I spotted this one at Frog End:

Doing the rounds

(please ignore the sound of sawing in the background!!)

The Big Butterfly Count

Right on time for the Big Butterfly Count the garden is suddenly filled with them.

Our list for the 15 minutes included the following species:

small white
large white
holly blue
brimstone
peacock
comma
small tortoiseshell
speckled wood

No gatekeepers, skippers or meadow browns today, but given how few of them there are about I think that's pretty representative.

Brimstone on field scabious:

Peacock on buddleia:

Small tortoiseshell:

Holly blue on hemp agrimony:

You can submit your butterfly count here

Since we did the count this morning we've had a red admiral and our first ever common blue in the garden. Suddenly it's not seeming that bad a year for butterflies at Frog End.