JULY
Firstly I would like to talk about the Great Diving Beetle and its apparent eagerness to seek an early death ... a most bizarre experience. It entails my car which I leave parked outside and do not drive often. Some 3 years ago I was lifting the boot lid to find some chairs and found a line of large belly up .. head to toe .. beetles in the rubber lined boot edge at the bottom of the boot lid.... an area where any rainwater gathers before evaporating slowly. In the early part of the month it has happened again .. just unbelievable. There were a total of eleven beetles all sadly dead in the rubber lining .. still in traces of some water that had not dried up. I recognised the beetle as a Great Diving Beetle (Dytiscus Marginalis) as I have seen them before on Thompson Common in Norfolk where they are found in the pingos (Ice-age deep ponds) but what were they doing in my boot lid?? This is a large majestic beetle .. 32 mm in length and 15 mm at its widest body part. They were all males with beautiful black "polished" wing cases. My neighbour has a stagnant water ditch .. originally the line of the Blackbourne River... and the present river line is only 100 metres away. They breed in still water conditions and are obviously much more common than I thought; research tells me that the young males will fly off to find other areas of water. Sadly their choices are disastrous and "Lemming like" they do a follow my leader to their inevitable demise in a space hardly big enough to squeeze into safely. Has any other reader experienced a similar event ?
click on picture to enlarge
On a happier note there has been a marked uptick in butterfly numbers this month with lots of Meadow Brown, Large Whites and Gatekeepers with numbers of Peacocks, Red Admirals, Small Tortoishelles, Brimstone, Comma and two firsts for the garden list .. Small Copper and Small Skipper .. the latter on Nepeta (Cat Mint). Nepeta is a great very hardy border plant which thrives even in crazy temperatures. Butterflies love them and all you do is cut them down hard at the end of the growing season. Again we had yet another Hummingbird Hawk Moth on a line of lavender .. the sixth this year .. and a new apparently rare moth .. a Marbled Clover (Heliothis Viripaca) feeding voraciously with the Hawk Moth and possibly swept up from southern Europe but found only in June/July in our Breckland region where it likes to feed on Vipers Bugloss plants.. readily found in the county. I had no clue as to it's identity and needed help from an expert friend in Norfolk. If this is climate change summer .. bring it on. Not to everyone's taste but I love it. I even managed to get a better shot of the Hummingbird Hawk Moth showing the extraordinary long feeding proboscis which when fully unfurled is almost as long as the body ! This allows the insect to take nectar with a hovering action without ever landing on the actual flower head. Have a search on Google ... quite amazing.. and unlike the hundreds of species of moths recorded in the UK they are active in the day in full sun.
I mentioned Meadow Brown and Gatekeeper above and seen flitting around at speed are quite difficult to separate. The Gatekeeper gives the impression of an orange colour even in flight whilst the Meadow Brown looks darker and larger in size. They do land to feed or rest and if you look closely you will see a black apical eye-spot near the top corner of the forewing and hindwing. The Meadow Brown has only a single white dot. The Gatekeeper has two white spots set within the black spot. I hope you can see them clearly in the attached photos.
Late in the month a decent amount of rain at last and the veg patch has responded accordingly. This year I netted the gooseberries and thwarted the muntjac .. last year the whole crop stripped in one night of carnage... I hope he/she had a nasty belly ache! As I write, the Swallows are gathering on the overhead power lines prior to their departure out towards the coast and Red Kites are beginning to appear again in numbers after a highly successful breeding period .. particularly in the Great Livermere area. An early morning chill feel says that Autumn is on the way; Jays are busy burying acorns (and likely forgetting where come next Spring!) and so the year moves gently on.
Late in the month a decent amount of rain at last and the veg patch has responded accordingly. This year I netted the gooseberries and thwarted the muntjac .. last year the whole crop stripped in one night of carnage... I hope he/she had a nasty belly ache! As I write, the Swallows are gathering on the overhead power lines prior to their departure out towards the coast and Red Kites are beginning to appear again in numbers after a highly successful breeding period .. particularly in the Great Livermere area. An early morning chill feel says that Autumn is on the way; Jays are busy burying acorns (and likely forgetting where come next Spring!) and so the year moves gently on.