25th June

Only time to visit the Magic Garden today. There were two Sedge Warblers singing and I saw the Little Grebe for the first time in a while. It appears to have lost its only chick…

A Grey Heron was catching frogs in the shallows of the lake but also made an opportunistic attempt to catch a Large White butterfly as it flew past

I also thought I had seen my first distant Hobby of the year yesterday but it was just a wind-blown, aerobatic Kestrel which eventually flew right over to perch in the Garden…

Given yesterday’s conditions it wasn’t entirely inappropriate that a Hurricane also flew over…

Seven species of butterfly were seen. The first Ringlet was spotted on Monday…

And yesterday I ticked off my first Meadow Browns

There was also a ‘fall’ of Red Admirals. I hadn’t seen any as I walked around the village green and down Greenhills Lane but on the way back up (half an hour later) I tallied up 14 individuals.

Other insects included this hoverfly…

Which is distinctive enough to identify as chrysotoxum bicinctum (or at least distinctive enough for my youngest son to identify!). I was also trying to photograph another fly when this wasp flew in and made short work of it…

The more you look the more you see and there were about 50 of these tiny creatures on the surface of a beech tree. Not sure what they are…

And this caterpillar which, given its host plant might have been a Valerian Pug moth…

Actually turned out to be from a Valerian Sawfly. I didn’t even know that’s what sawfly larvae looked like but you can apparently tell by the number of prolegs, six for sawflys, never more than five for moths.

Finally, the talk on Wednesday went well and more than 50 people turned up, we almost ran out of chairs!