After a brilliant start to June, it has been very wet for the last two weeks. Today we got a bit of sunshine and I saw this tattered Speckled Wood basking in the sunlight:
Suddenly it was dive-bombed by another that chased it off and then occupied the same basking spot. This one is in better condition, but I think it's a little early for second generation specimens.
I think that the best colour on our hedgerows is provided by the flower-buds of Greater Birds-foot Trefoil:
The red more-or-less dissappears when the flowers are mature. This flowerhead was juxtaposed with what looks like Melanoleuca melaleuca:
To finish off: The Meadowsweet leaf-miner - Agromyza filipendulae. It has had to backtrack when it inadvertently bumped into its old track. (The mine starts in the purple centre portion, then goes clockwise until it gets trapped above the purple portion, when it resumes its clockwise track onto a new portion of leaf. Exit hole is bottom left.)
2 comments:
1. That's a beautiful moth
2. You absolutely sure that's greater bf trefoil? I didn't know that had the red flower-buds (the common one often does).
3. Fascinating mine - would the larva have had to back out or would it have had rooom to turn around I wonder?
1) well named, indeed.
2) I used to think that I had both on my local patch, but now I'm pretty sure all mine are Greater (I don't check every single one). It's only starting to flower now, whereas the (generally smaller) one in other locations flowered weeks ago. My usual determination is the markedly hollow stems.
3) my instinct is that they would turn round, but I don't really know. Most corridor miners adopt strategies to avoid dead-ends and crossing mines, but this one clearly didn't, and some don't bother. I got some rather good pics of a Ragwort miner yesterday and I'll put them up once I have confirmed the id.
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