2022 A Pair of 'Garden Firsts'

 10th March was a good day for 'garden firsts' of the season:

* a Peacock butterfly (my first butterfly seen anywhere in 2022)

* a 7-spot Ladybird

First Butterfly Sighting and Other Insects in the Garden

 

At long last, the day finally arrived! I saw my first butterfly of the year, a smart male Brimstone, gracing our garden yesterday. 

But there were other sights to catch my attention as I took a careful look around this morning. One of these was the bee you see in the photo above and in the photo below. 

 

I watched as the bee squeezed herself in and out of the curled leaf. I know little about bees, but I am guessing she was a queen bumblebee, and that she had passed the winter hibernating in the patch of leaf litter. I spent several minutes watching her.

Something else 'bee-like' stopped me in my tracks. It was what I think may be a Red-mason bee, though, as ever, please correct me by leaving a comment. 

As you can see in the photo above, this little bee was soon joined by a much more ferocious-looking insect (is it a wasp or a wasp-mimic?). I waited to see what would happen next, and after just a few short seconds, the bee took off.

It seems to have been a good day for bees here. Look at the golden pollen in this Honeybee's 'saddlebags'! 

I have not been able to identify the fly in the  photo above yet, but wonder if it is a Soldier Fly. Update: it's hard to see what lies under the wings, but I'm wondering if this is more likely to be Meliscaeva auricollis.

Let's have a brief 'insect interlude' to make way for the cheering sight of this blossom. I love seeing the colourful flowers once again.

But, of course, it's not just the plants that bring colour. The photos below show the distinctive reds and oranges of our 7-spot Ladybirds. The one in the next photo has an unusual mark on its elytra. There are certainly two, and probably three, 7-spots in the second picture, along with a Pine Ladybird. 

I was delighted to discover more Violets in the garden this morning. And finally, what a joy it was to see the Brimstone, even if I was unable to take its photograph. I saw the one below in 2019. 

I see I have almost completed a year of the Butterfly Conservation Garden Butterfly Survey. Having failed to spot any butterflies in January and February a year ago, I began to log my sightings at end of March 2020.

Largely Ladybirds

There was a faint hint of hazy sunshine this morning, and over on the border covered in ivy, we found twelve tiny Pine Ladybirds and two 7-spots. Some were moving around; others were stationary. The ladybird in the top photo seems to have a significant dent on its elytra: I hope it can still fly. According to Bug Guide, this kind of damage usually occurs in the pupal phase of metamorphosis. I think you will be able to see the rim, so characteristic of Pine Ladybirds.

I think there may be at least one spider, probably four

I hope this means our Pine Ladybird population is on the increase!

Our first miniature Daffodil opened today!

We have had few birds at our feeders the last few days. We were having a mug of coffee this morning when I saw the reason why ... yes, a Sparrowhawk, perching on our back fence. We have sporadic visits (see here, for example), but this was a first sighting for 2021. Those of you who follow this blog will know that, unlike Chris Packham, these are not my favourite birds, though I acknowledge their highly efficient biological design! But I am really waiting for my first sighting of a butterfly ...

An Early Spring Morning in the Garden

 

 

 

We spent an hour in the garden this morning, enjoying some early spring sunshine and birdsong. These first two photographs, which were also the first two I uploaded, were actually taken on 12 February when the Fieldfares were still in our trees. All the other pictures were taken today.

We always enjoy seeing Goldfinches. This one was in the Silver Birch, which some of you may remember from the Tree Following meme.

 

This 'woody' corner of the old decking seems to suit these small Cyclamen. They don't seem to spread much, but are always a joy to see. But it was the miniature Iris reticulata in bloom that particularly caught my eye this morning. 

As you may know, we have been keeping an eye on four Wasp spider egg sacs over the winter. What you see in the photo below is, we can only think, the remains of one of them. The grassy area in which all four were last seen was under about 20cm of snow for almost a week earlier this month. All our snow has melted, but the long grass is bent over in swathes. 

Back in the summer, we were visited not only by Wasp spiders, but also by a couple of Common Lizards who, to our great excitement, were sighted on our patch for the first time. These 'firsts' may be totally unrelated, but it was nevertheless intriguing to read on @Tone_Killick's Twitter page for 15 December 2020 that it is extremely rare in the UK, there being probably only one instance, to find a photograph of a spider with vertebrate prey. It just made me wonder whether the spiders on our land were after the lizards, and not the other way round, as I might have supposed.

As for the egg sacs, well, time alone will tell whether the colony of Wasp spiders increases here or whether the wind and cold weather have killed off the overwintering eggs. 

On a more cheerful note, it was good to find two different kinds of ladybird making the most of the sunshine. The 7-spot emerged from a large pile of twigs, and what seems to be (the much smaller) Pine ladybird (Exochomus qadripustulatus), with its rim around the elytra, was perching on a leaf.

 

There were a couple of (?Nursery web) spiders running about on the relative warmth of the old tray. 

It was a delight to find two Daisies in the grass.

Here's a close-up of our first Iris . . .

. . . and photos of our first Crocuses.

This is our new feeding pole, which although empty in this picture, has already attracted Long-tailed tits, Great tits, a Robin, a Pigeon, Blue tits and Starlings. There is plenty of food for all comers, and yet the Blue tits, in particular, insist on dive-bombing their fellow Blue tits and also the Long-tailed tits. 

We have never had an Aconite in the garden before. There is just the one, in a very scruffy old pot, so I am intrigued whether perhaps we planted a few bulbs last autumn.

And finally, do let me know your thoughts on the (pretty shy) bird above. I thought it was a Sparrow, until I took the photo below, which is certainly one. The two bills don't look the same shape to me, but I am really pleased to find a House Sparrow in our garden. There was a little colony down the road, but it dispersed last summer when one of the houses had building work which interfered with a particular hedge. 

The last House Sparrow record for our garden is June 2020. These once-common birds are now categorised as Red in terms of conservation on the RSPB site. I hope we will see more of them in the days to come.

Day 14 #30DaysWild and #30DaysWildCreativity: Our Micro-Meadow

Dr Miriam Darlington's #30DaysWildCreativity for today addresses the matter of 'how people and nature weave together and cohabit'. I decided my response, and I fear it's not as 'creative' as I would like it to be, would be to show some of the ways in which we have turned our 'lawn' of last year into a micro-meadow, as a result of a pledge we made at the 2019 Suffolk Wildlife Trust Summit. 

Already we have reaped the benefit of new butterflies to the 'garden', notably the Green Hairstreak...

... and the Small Heath. 

We quite often have perhaps one sighting a year of a Stag Beetle in the air, and, indeed I watched one last night, just as it was getting dark; but yesterday afternoon we also found this female climbing our wall...

This afternoon we had what I'm guessing is a Blue-tailed Damselfly in the long grass along with a variety of bees and a few 7-spot ladybirds. 

I have been keeping a species list for some years of the wild species who share our suburban Suffolk garden with us. I am so nearly up to 100 in the insect section. I hope to reach that target, probably with the help of the kind folk at iSpot, in the next few days.

Day 5 of #30DaysWild: my response to Dr Miriam Darlington's 'Being close to the grass' Prompt

I don't find it easy to reach the grass on account of my mobility issues, but during the last few days the grass in our garden has practically reached me, particularly when I am sitting down. This extra growth is because we attended last year's Suffolk Wildlife Trust Nature Summit and made a pledge to 'say no to the mow', with the exception of a walk-through trail, which has been invaluable during lockdown for my shielded exercise. 

A couple of days ago I was sitting outside, scanning the blades of grass for signs of ladybirds as we have more blackfly than ever. I was not exactly richly rewarded, but I did find a couple of 7-spots, like the one in the photo above and below. 

We often imagine a bird's eye-view, but what would it be like to be half a centimetre long and surrounded by a green jungle of stalks? Authors like Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, 'B.B', Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson, Richard Adams, Kenneth Grahame and numerous others have, to one degree or another, given this question some kind of thought. A number of these writers were creating imaginary landscapes: others had political messages to impart. Some have helped us to adjust our outlook and perspective, enabling us, in Blake's familiar words, to see 'a World in a Grain of Sand'.

Would I write a poem myself to explore the nature of the ladybird's grassy wilderness? Well, I might, but I haven't just yet. Instead I decided to have a play with one or two of the Photoshop and Photoshop Elements filters, bearing this thought in my head. These are a few of my resulting images, some more fantastical than others. I hope they will make you smile, but perhaps they will also help you to share my ponderings...

This last ladybird, the one above in a mosaic-filter style, is possibly my favourite of the experimental images. I think this is because it reminds me of an exquisite stained-glass window in Alloway Parish Church in Scotland, Alloway being the birthplace of Robbie Burns. The text accompanying the image is from verse 22 of the eighth chapter of Genesis.

You can see these Alloway stained glass ladybirds above and below. They are part of the Four Seasons Window, designed by Susan Bradbury.  

Next time you see a ladybird in the long grass, why not take a moment to wonder what its world must be like. 

Grass features in a surprising number of poems. I am posting links to three that you might enjoy...

• A Blade of Grass by Brian Patten
• In Tall Grass by Carl Sandburg (beautiful, and elegiac in tone)
• On Not Mowing The Lawn by Mary Oliver

* * * 

This post was written in response to Dr Miriam Darlington's #30DaysWildCreativity Facebook prompt. You can find Miriam on Twitter: @MimDarling