A warm damp autumn has extended the bug season and produced interesting crops of fungi:

Red kites can be quite alarming when they hop over the hedge and look at you.

Here are a few things I’ve encountered for the first time in the last few days:
The caterpillar of the Grey Dagger Moth – along with a photo from last year of the moth itself. The moth could be a Grey Dagger or Dark Dagger – they are almost indistinguishable, but the caterpillars are very different.

A caterpillar of the Bright-line brown-eye moth (and a photo of the moth from earlier in the year)

A Hazel leaf-roller weevil – if you like numbers, after “09/09/09″, this is the 333rd species I’ve identified. It doesn’t seem to have done any harm, as the hedge is full of ripe hazel nuts: I’m just expecting a plague of grey squirrels soon!

Not a lot in the garden last night (except the usual spiders, slugs, snails…) – but I couldn’t miss such a supposedly-auspicious date, so here’s what I found in the moonlight:

I like shield bugs, and I’m pretty sure most of them are harmless (though I haven’t tried picking any of them up, just in case!). Recently there seem to be lots of Forest Bugs around, but over the last few weeks the local patch has produced several others:

Forest Bug

Some more Forest Bugs (lots more, soon)

A Parent Bug – which apparently gets its name from the fact that the nymphs stay with the adult for a few weeks after hatching

A nymph of the common Green Shield Bug

and a procession of what I think are Hawthorn Shield Bug nymphs

According to UK Moths, there are at least 2400 moth species in the UK; I guess I’ve only scratched the surface, but with a lot of help from friends on Flickr I’ve found and identified 80 of them around here – all “wild”, without using moth traps etc. Click the thumbnails for a bigger picture and more info:

A few weeks ago I commented that we didn’t seem to have as many butterflies as usual. Perhaps I was unduly pessimistic – things seem to have picked up, with large numbers of Peacocks, a few Red Admirals, the odd Comma (but never when I’ve got the camera!) and – a special delight as I haven’t seen them here for several years – quite a few Small Tortoiseshells:

What could be better than not mowing the lawn? The Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust have some advice on turning a grassy area into a wildflower meadow, starting with “Let it grow during the summer to see what turns up”, so I stopped mowing at the end of May and waited to see what happened. The results were not too encouraging: several ant-hills, a lot of white clover (great for bumble-bees), daisies, buttercups, numerous tall yellow-flowered weeds (with hundreds of hover-flies), quite a lot of Self-heal. There were a couple of surprises – Ragwort (I hoped that this would bring Cinnabar moths, but so far it’s only produced tiny Ragwort flea beetles), and Sea Holly (full of pollen beetles) – presumably a garden escape. Still, at least I don’t have to mow it again until September.

The hedges are doing better, with White Bryony and Woody Nightshade making an appearance,


along with Dwarf Mallow on the path

…don’t like rain, so I haven’t seen many – but the sun shone for a while today, and here’s what I found:

Painted Lady. A migratory species I’ve never seen before, but here in large numbers this year:

Gatekeeper

Speckled Wood. Loads of these around earlier in the year – I guess this is a second brood:

Peacock. There are usually dozens now the Buddleia is in flower; today I saw 2:

Cabbage White, laying eggs on “wild” oilseed rape. Hard to tell whether it’s a small or large white, but I’ll see what the eggs hatch into:

No sign of the usual Commas or Red Admirals, but here’s a Holly Blue I spotted earlier in the week (frustratingly they always seem to settle with their wings closed, so no chance of a photo of the bright blue seen in flight):

And, just for completeness, a Ringlet that I saw a couple of weeks ago:

I was hoping for some butterflies this week, but it’s been raining most of the time and I’ve only seen a few; perhaps we’ll get Summer sometime. Meanwhile, I’ve found a wide variety of ladybirds, most of which I’d never seen before (info from UK Ladybird Survey)

Ask a child to draw a ladybird, and you’ll probably get something like this: up to 8mm long (as big as a Harlequin), found just about everywhere, eats aphids: the 7-spot. My favourite.

Here are some of the many variations of the 10-spot: half the size of the 7-spot, and seems to have any number of spots except 10. Lives mostly in trees and hedgerows, eats aphids.

This should be called the red-nosed ladybird; it’s a Cream-spot – lives in trees and hedges, and eats (you guessed it) aphids.

This one – the 14-spot – can be found just about anywhere (they say – I had never seen one before). Another aphid-eater

And here’s one I found last year: the tiny 22-spot. Lives in low vegetation and, unlike the others, eats mildew.