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2017 in Invertebrates

Grantham Ecology4 Comments

Bees and butterflies have had a blog post to themselves, but here are a few other invertebrate encounters from 2017 I thought I’d share on the penultimate day of the year!

Wood Ants

These were taken in Great Wood in the Quantock Hills. We spent a while being amazed at the ability of these tiny creatures to pull twigs and other materials into position around their nests, joining others to give assistance where required or simply tugging with amazing tenacity until they got where they were going. Soon we also noticed the guard ants, who were trying their hardest to intimidate us into backing away and leaving the nest in peace!

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Great Diving Beetle – Dytiscus marginalis

We came across this beast when doing great crested newt surveys in the springtime – the bottle traps used to catch and count the courting newts also work for other species such as this, one of our largest beetles. They can have quite a nip, so I’m told, so this one was handled with care before being returned to its pond in a pasture field.

Great diving beetle - Dytiscus marginalis

Sawfly in a buttercup

I came across this little sawfly – its head dusted with pollen – settled in a buttercup flower in Muston Meadows in early summer. It didn’t move as I got into position to take a photo, and I could only assume it had settled there for the night.

Sawfly settled into a buttercup flower to spend the night

Wasp – Gasteruption jaculator

This amazing looking creature was feeding on the fool’s water cress flowering at the edge of our garden pond. The amazing ovipositor is so much larger than the wasp itself which made it look for all the world like a radio-controlled insect as it flew between flowers!

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Wasp – Ectemnius sp.

I came across this little wasp feeding on the hogweed flowers on a walk through Cheddar Gorge and thought it deserved a portrait – the rounded head with the eyes wrapped around looks as though it could have been the inspiration for a number of sci-fi aliens!

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Ornate-tailed digger wasp – Cerceris rybyensis

I was walking through the Hills and Hollows above Grantham one afternoon and came across a series of holes in the bare earth – I watched a while and saw several heads peeking out before one of the insects arrived from outside and I could get a proper view. This is a species of digger wasp whose prey is bees such as this solitary bee held beneath its body. The wasps bring the bees back and pull them underground to provide food for their larvae.

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Darter dragonfly – Sympetrum sp.

This dew-bejewelled dragonfly was resting on a flower stem in Muston Meadows in August. Taken just after sunrise, this shows the roosting behaviour where the dragonflies will find a safe place to spend the night, waiting for the sun to warm them in the morning and get them up to temperature so that they can take to the wing once more.

Snail

This little snail was crawling across the roof of my car when I got back from a dawn bat survey in late summer. I’m not sure how it made its way all the way there, but I liked the reflection in the early morning sunshine. I popped it back into the vegetation in the verge before heading home!

Wolf spider (Lycosidae)

This photograph was taken in the Grantham Hills and Hollows in late summer as the grasses were beginning to turn from greens to browns. I had bent down low to get a photograph of one of the wildflowers, and then my eye was caught by how many invertebrates were active just in the grasses beside it.

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Grasshopper

This grasshopper was taken on the same afternoon as the wolf spider above – I’m afraid I haven’t attempted an ID on this little character but would welcome any suggestions! The camouflage of this grasshopper amongst the greens and browns of the aging summer grassland meant I only spotted it when it hopped to another location.

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Minotaur beetle – Typhaeus typhoeus

This amazing beetle was trundling across a forest path in the Quantocks in autumn. Despite the fearsome looking horns, they are not predatory but are in fact a species of dung beetle which feeds on rabbit droppings amongst others. They nest in deep tunnels and will pull the dung back down with their powerful legs in order to provision the larvae.

 

 

 

 

2016 in trees

Grantham EcologyLeave a comment

Looking back through the photographs I’ve taken in 2016, it’s striking how many trees there are! As with the small things such as wildflower ‘weeds’, it’s easy to take for granted these enormous beings which grow amongst us. The sheer scale of a mature oak or beech is far beyond our magnitude of experience, as is the timescale they can span which numbers many of our lifetimes combined.

Here are just a few of my favourite encounters from 2016.

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These snow-lined branches were in the mountains above Freiburg at the beginning of the year – we took the cablecar from the grey countryside below up into a winter wonderland of freshly fallen snow. I liked the way that the snow outlines the curved architecture of the branches.
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Part of my job involes climbing trees to inspect them for roosting bat potential. On my way up this field-edge tree, the sun came out and I couldn’t resist a quick shadow-selfie!
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This photograph was taken for the Woodland Trust – this is one of the Verdun Oaks which grew from acorns brought back from Verdun after the First World War and planted in towns and cities as a commemoration to the fallen. In the background is Lichfield Cathedral. The Woodland Trust are tracing these trees as part of the commemoration of the First World War – you can read more about these pieces of living history on their website here.
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I spotted this tree sillouetted against the sunrise on a drive across to Norfolk one morning and had to stop off to get a photograph. The tree was in the middle of a field which was not publically accessible, so I only have the shape to go off but this looks like a poplar tree to me – perhaps a black poplar?
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This is the view up to the canopy at Treswell Wood in North Nottinghamshire. This is a Notts Wildlife Trust site which has a precominantly ash canopy. Unfortunately, Ash Dieback was confirmed in one corner of the woodland and targetted trees were felled in an effort to stop the disease spreading. Ash trees are a characteristic part of the British Countryside and one of the most common species in our landscape – it would be a tragedy if they were to go the way of the English Elm.
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I love being out in the countryside at night – we spent much of the summer watching trees to survey for emerging bats so this scene feels very familiar to me. I took a walk out past this tree near Harlaxton one night when the skies were very clear to capture a starlapse with the North Star centred above the dead crown of this oak.
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This is a slightly boosted photograph in terms of colour saturation, but is otherwise untouched. This was a starlapse of a meadow oak but the quirks of lighting led to this rather psycadelic image. The tree and the hillside to the left were occasionally lit by car headlights from the road behind me, and the background cloud was illuminated by the light pollution of Nottingham in the distance. Not your typical tree image but I rather liked the effect!
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These beautiful old beech trees line a trackway which forms part of the Laurie Lee Wildlife Way in Slad. I love trackways which are overarched by tree canopies, and I especially like the idea that Laurie would have walked these tracks. The book Cider with Rosie is a favourite of mine, especially the descriptions of the Gloucestershire vally in which he grew up, so there is a real feeling of walking somewhere familiar, even when exploring this landscape for the first time.
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This is a photograph taken in Wyndham Park in Grantham. The autumn leaves of a beech provide a frame for the Hand and Apple sculpture which commemorates Isaac Newton’s connection with the town of Grantham – he went to school at King’s Grammar which is just beside Wyndham Park, and lived at Woolesthorpe Manor just down the A1 from the town, where the famous apple tree can still be seen today.
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These two majestic field trees stood like sentries on either side of the gateway. This was on a walk in Somerset which explored an ancient landscape full of both recent history – including an old lead working now rewilded as a nature reserve – and ancient history including a number of monuments, burial mounds and barrows.
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This photograph was taken on a farm track footpath which leads to Muston Meadows, an old haymeadow now designated as an NNR. I wanted to try to capture the essence of mid-December in the Midlands – to me that is muddy walks, early sunsets and skeletal trees.
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This photograph was one of several I took of bark patterns in a veteran oak we were climbing to look for potential evidence of bats. This deadwood can be very stable, remaining as a component of the tree for decades after the wood has died, and the patterns etched into the wood represent to the various conditions and experiences which the tree has gone through.
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This photograph neatly finishes where this summary started – back in the mountains above Freiburg. This was taken just before Christmas where we had the magical opportunity to rise up above the clouds and see the sun setting. The fog and cloud was rolling up the valleys, obscuring and revealing treelines, and the sunset coloured the fog in pinks and oranges.