Natural highs and lows

What's this, NaHaL, surely you should be pootling about in the wilderness looking for insects, not blogging? Sadly, after watching the roller coaster ride of a constantly changing weather forecast for a week, the decision was taken to postpone the walk until the end of the month. Hopefully, it will be warmer and drier by then. In contrast, yesterday was glorious, so here are some photos from our garden. I was talking about habitats to one of the builders from the site next door and he was showing me photos of his pond. The conversation moved on to butterfly banks and as I airily waved towards where we are thinking of creating one, this Common Blue appeared. Some sawfly larvae chomping away on our cuttings of Tea-leaved Willow. Using the internet, I managed to come up with the correct genus for them, Euura . However, the local recorder pointed me in the right direction of the species,  E. ferruginea or Rusty Willow Nematine. When Megan had finished work, she took a turn around the g...

Next weekend, Megan and I are leading a walk for the Orkney Field Club. During the Winter, we had blithely volunteered to put on some events looking for hairy caterpillars, and this will be the first one. This walk will be on the island of Hoy, between Lyness and Wee Fea, a gentle uphill climb with several different habitats en route.  Last weekend, we thought that we had better carry out a recce to see if there was any of our target species to be found.  Well, we did find a few caterpillars but, wow, we found a lot of everything else. Bees and Wasps A male Tormentil Mining Bee, Adrena tarsata (thanks to JW for the ID) Also a Tormentil Mining Bee, possibly a female A Spider-hunting wasp with prey A Mason Wasp Ancistrocerus oviventris busy building pots to house its larvae A Ruby-tailed Wasp which parasitises the larvae of Mason Bees Beetles A Green Tiger Beetle A small hole in the ground was the only clue that here is the burrow of a Green Tiger Beetle larva. Like its parents,...

We need very little excuse to enjoy the garden, rather than slaving away in it. So with the arrival of a warm, calm and sunny day, the ideal opportunity presented itself for a wander through the weeds. Megan has spent the last month or so planting up a rockery, which is the only bit of the garden that is designated as off limits to wildflowers. In the remainder of the garden, more often than not, we're removing cultivated flowers to make room for more wildness. One upshot of this is that occasionally there's a vista that is a blend of the formal and informal. Yellow Rattle in the "meadow" Red Hot Poker Primula in the rockery Geranium sp. in the rockery Oxalis sp. in the rockery Geranium sp. and Creeping Buttercup in a border Red Clover and Creeping Buttercup in the front lawn Mocha and friend (at the base of the right hand pot)... ... a Cabbage Moth A hoverfly on Armeria. ID'd by UK Hoverflies as Scaeva selenitica Back in the "meadow", these are the basa...

At the end of March, work finally began on creating a pond in the back garden at Burnbank. Over the course of the five years since I bought the pond liner, the idea in my head was that it would be a rectangular shape. Recently, I managed to find a scrap of paper from 2020 which intimated that the liner measurements were 8m by 6m. So let's crack on! In the interests of completing the project before climate change renders water even more of a luxury, a local gardening business was recommended to me, and so it was that VB duly arrived, full of enthusiasm and seemingly undeterred by my cautionary tales of tough ground to dig.  VB is very much on board with the whole wildlife gardening malarkey. Indeed, he is an interesting chap with whom to discuss environmental matters, not least because he has his own manifesto available on Amazon. And so it was that we broke ground, although not exactly in a classical rectangular shape.  By the end of the afternoon, VB was coming around to the ...