Philosophising…

Palmate Newt, early April 2020.

Earlier this week we spotted our palmate newt, who’d taken it upon himself to shimmy up the plastic lining of the pond to catch some sun.

Percival seems to have grown and is now about 3 inches long, with a handsome long and dare I say, muscular, handsome tail.

The pond is a peaceful spot.   And nice to know that he enjoys a little sun – we liberated the witch hazel from a huge patch of ivy which had completely overtaken the tree.

We’d bagged up the ivy remains and were going to dispose, but then I had a flash that they could quite possibly be full of future bug life – butterfly eggs and more.

So in the end the cuttings were placed over on H’s spot, chopped-up but in open air to rot down as all things in nature do…**

But removing the ivy from the hazel, though life-saving for the tree, radically changed the overall ambiance of the pond area.  Where once was damp and cool and dark now sparkled with the heat of daylight.

Glad to see he likes the light and that all in all he’s a happy little newt!

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Radish seedlings emerge to life Easter Monday (13 April 2020)

Happy days indeed – despite the quiet covid apocalypse most of us are living through as if through a dream…  

The Easter weekend was a scorcher and the days felt more like June than early April, with temperatures in the 20s every day.   So no wonder that the first seedlings have started to emerge.  The radish seeded into terracotta planters showed signs of life for the first time today.   These are our first seeds to sprout!  Yipee!  

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We’ve been getting pretty buzzy ’bout bees too!  The super-dude picked up a postcard that identifies the ‘Bees of Kew’.  Using this (and the internet) we tried to identify some of the various bees we’ve been spotting up at the allotment.  Who knew there were so many bees about!

Red Tail Bumblebee on Vinca (Bombus lapidarius) (Photo by G, April 2020)

This photo shows what we think is a worker Red Tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius). 

This worker was a big handsome chap, mainly black bodied with a bit of a red tail. He’s gorging on nectar with his face pushed right into the centre of the flower, which pushed his arms and antennae outwards.

Super-G watched this super-bee gather nectar, and mentioned it was a highly methodical process – moving from flower to flower in straight efficient lines, with no wandering or buzzing aimlessly about.  Systematic.  Targeted.  Logical.  Just like a Ford assembly line.

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So I kept at it.  Curious.  In other days I might have skipped over the passing query and simply let it drop into that pile of things you wonder about but never quite check up on.  But these strange coronavirus days, with so much time on our hands, I found myself unwilling to let the question of the sex lives of butterflies go just like that.   Sadly the butterfly movie didn’t have the answers, though I did give it the full 45 minutes viewing time.  After which, a bit more nosing around online revealed some astonishing finds!

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Male Orange Tip Butterfly.  (8 April 2020)

We spotted this little beauty this morning – hanging around H’s plot near the damask, supping on the nectar in vinca flowers.

White wings with yellow tips – darker at the ends and points marked with lighter dots.  Blackish grey body, and white antennae.  Very pretty!

The big guy took a photo so we could do some identification back at home – and even though it’s a little blurry you can see the distinctive markings.

It took a little trawling as this one doesn’t tend to make the top 10 list for UK butterflies (whereas comma butterflies and peacock butterflies do feature in such lists).  Nevertheless, I finally found a great web resource that lists all known UK butterflies (called – surprise surprise: UK Butterflies), and after a little more scanning through photo bank pages found him!

He’s an Orange Tip Butterfly.  (Anthocharis cardamines – first defined in Linneaus 1758, in the Pieridae family.) And in case you’re wondering, the females tend to be more white and not as distinctively coloured as the males, so it’s definitely a ‘he’.

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