A poor year for dragonflies and damselflies

I'm afraid that I've neglected this blog terribly this year, but of late the garden has become full of lots of exciting little critters so I can't keep from posting any longer.

It's been a very poor year so far for dragonflies at Frog End. Although lots of damselflies emerged several weeks ago we haven't seen one for over a month and this female southern hawker is the only dragonfly we've had so far this year

I wonder if the harsh winter killed off a lot of larvae. Certainly the drought earlier in the year would have done - we were very sad to find that one of our favourite nature reserves for odonata - the Old Sludge Beds in Exeter had dried up almost completely by early summer.

I was very pleased that the hawker chose to land on the native flowers in our garden (this one's hemp agrimony) - whilst I do have hundreds and hundreds of southern hawker photos most show them perched on trees or bushes rather than flowers.

Newts

Another warm sunny day in Exeter and the frogs were joined in their spawning by some of the newts, two of which were very close to the surface. I also saw a dragonfly larva close to the surface yesterday - hopefully it wasn't considering emerging in February.

Apologies if you're already getting sick of frog photos, but I can't get enough of them at the moment!

The garden is alive with the sound of croaking

The larger of our two ponds has been wriggling for the last few hours - literally wriggling due to all the frogs. I had been trying to count the number of new clumps of spawn each day, but with over 30 frogs in the pond today I've had to give up. As usual when I tried to get close most of the frogs dived under the surface, but this shot, rather blurred and taken at a distance should give you an idea of what it was like:

The croaking was so loud it could be heard in the kitchen (the pond is at the bottom of the garden, several metres away). I took some videos with my camera to record the sound of croaking, but the images are terribly poor so I switched to a video camera after lunch. Hopefully I'll figure out how to edit a bit of the video and post it here in a few days.

Frogs at Frog End

The clumps of frog spawn in the ponds are growing rapidly in number (totalling over 20 so far) and today I finally managed to sneak a look at the frogs. For some reason frogs at Frog End are incredibly shy and once I'd got closer than 2 metres from the pond they dived under the surface to hide amongst the plants and leaves.


Although there are plenty of crocus and snowdrops flowering in other gardens near here this primula is the only Spring flower to have come out in our garden so far:

Signs of life

After several months of only the usual birds we finally have some new life in the garden - frog spawn. It's a warm sunny day here in Exeter and the frogs have obviously decided that it's Spring - exactly two weeks earlier than last year. Hopefully they're right.

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: