300 species

This will never be a complete catalogue of the area’s wildlife, but even after 15 months or so I’m finding species that I haven’t identified before: partly I guess because I’m getting better at finding them, and partly because most species are seasonal, and you need a year or two to cover the ground. The 300th species is nothing exceptional – a Lesser Yellow Underwing moth – just one of the 74 different moths I’ve found in my small patch.

Over time the picture may change, and I hope to be able to report those changes. So far the Harlequin ladybird is here in large numbers, but hasn’t yet displaced the local 7-spot and 10-spot types; other species in national decline (hedgehog, starling, house-sparrow…) seem to be doing well locally. Climate change and introduced species will make their mark, but I can only hope that the impact on the diversity of local wildlife of human activity – like the expansion of Didcot – will be limited .

Here’s no. 300:

Cricket season

Last year I found a few speckled bush crickets, but this year we’ve been lucky to have two bush cricket species in the garden, and I’ve seen them develop from tiny aphid-sized nymphs to (almost) full size:

Here’s a (very) Speckled Bush Cricket nymph in May

and here’s what she’s grown into

Meanwhile, the Oak Bush Crickets (a new species to me) started out like this in May

and have become tree-dwelling aphid-hunting predators – we could do with a few of those!

Hunting beetles…

…and slugs. Every garden should have one: this looks like a youngster,  so I hope there are more around.

Moths

Late in the evening the air seems full of moths, especially round the nettles. Most of them are tiny “micro-moths” that you’d need to be a specialist to identify (and some of them are probably leaf miners and other pests, but since they or their larvae are also bird-food I’ll let that pass); here are some of the more interesting/colourful ones that I’ve seen in the last week or two:

Aphid control

This has been a great year for aphids, round here at least. In the nesting season that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as any small insect is potentially a useful source of protein for chicks, but sometimes the birds need some help. The larvae of the green lacewing  apparently have such an appetite for aphids that you can buy them from garden suppliers (I didn’t – this is a wild lacewing!)

Meanwhile, there are other aphid predators, notably ladybirds (ladybugs) both as adults and as larvae: here’s an indigenous 7-spot:

Trouble is, they are in danger of being replaced by the grey squirrel of ladybirds, the Harlequin:

a.k.a. Multicoloured Asian Ladybird (more info at Harlequin Ladybird Survey), so if you see the larvae of these, I recommend you squish them (maybe take a photo first!) – here’s what they look like:

Garden birds

This seems to have been a successful breeding season for many garden birds, and I’ve seen a variety of fledglings. Stars of the show – especially since this is the first year I’ve attracted them to a niger-seed feeder – are the goldfinches. Here’s a an adult diving onto the feeder in the rain (I’d need a better camera to get a faster exposure in poor light), and a youngster, perversely feasting on peanuts.

Welcome to the WWW

Wonderful World of Weevils, that is. The trouble with the pesticide-free wildlife garden is that some of the resulting wildlife has a destructive tendency; luckily, most weevils are limited in the range of plants they attack, and several of these seem to prefer nettles to anything else. And they are quite cute, really.

Bzzzzz

What else can you say? It’s a cockchafer beetle (aka May bug).

Holes in the walls too?

After mining bees in the lawn, how about mason bees in the walls? In fact they don’t make holes in your walls, but nest in existing holes in brickwork or timber, or for that matter in the stems of dead plants. Like mining bees, red mason bees are great pollinators (did I spell it right this time?) and a welcome addition to the wildlife garden.

Bees and lawn aeration

I found quite a few of these in the garden a day or two ago:

It turned out they are a solitary bee – the Tawny Mining Bee, Andrena fulva – which explained the half-dozen or so mini-volcanoes in the lawn

It seems Andrena fulva are completely harmless; in fact they aerate the lawn and pollenate everything in sight, so they are very welcome here. There’s a good article about them at kendall-bioresearch.co.uk.