Best Plant
Provence in May was just a great place for flowers. I claimed on Twitter to have seen nine or ten species of orchid, although it’s entirely possibly I over-claimed, since there tend to be lots of very similar species, some of them are quite variable, and I didn’t have a book with me. Still, [...]
Posts tagged with ‘insects’
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Bird of the Year 2009: best performances in a supporting role
23 January 2010 – 3:37 pm
Links
26 September 2009 – 11:00 pm
CABINET // Artist Project / Trichopterae
'The images above illustrate the results of an unusual artistic collaboration between the French artist Hubert Duprat and a group of caddis fly larvae.'
(del.icio.us tags: insects art )
Links
15 July 2009 – 11:00 pm
BBC – Earth News – Longest insect migration revealed
‘Every year, millions of dragonflies fly thousands of kilometres across the sea from southern India to Africa. So says a biologist in the Maldives, who claims to have discovered the longest migration of any insect.’
(del.icio.us tags: insects dragonflies migration )
Summer Chafer
29 June 2009 – 11:19 am
The summer chafer, Amphimallon solstitialis, is a hairy beetle:
I’d never heard of this species before, but I saw one on Wandsworth Common yesterday and looked it up. Not quite as exciting as its friends the cockchafer and rose chafer, but still one of the more interesting beetles I’ve seen in the UK.
Incidentally, Wikipedia tells me that [...]
Dancing flies
23 June 2009 – 4:56 pm
Flies doing a little mating dance on our lily pads. I think they might be a species called Poecilobothrus nobilitatus, but that’s a provisional ID for the moment. Sorry for the camera-shake.
Butterfly update
29 May 2009 – 1:09 pm
Butterfly Conservation are holding an organised Painted Lady count this Saturday when they’re asking people to count passing butterflies for two hours and post their sightings online. I thought I’d do a little preliminary count of my own.
Ladies, stags and owls
28 May 2009 – 3:24 pm
Last week — last Thursday, I think? — I was walking along the road and saw a butterfly go past which I thought was maybe a Painted Lady. Not actually my first of the year, because I’d only recently returned from Provence where I saw *thousands* of ‘em, but still quite pleasing because they’re a migrant [...]
Exciting wildlife update
12 May 2009 – 7:32 pm
The wildlife picked up a bit today: some very camouflaged geckos on the walls of the house (I’ll post a pic when I get back to England), a raven flying over, bee-eaters heard but not seen.
And the treecreepers nesting in the roof, which I think I mentioned on Twitter but not here, turned out [...]
Glow-worms
28 June 2008 – 10:07 am
I have returned. Not that I went very far: my sister lured me to Hampshire with the promise of glow-worms. Wikipedia tells me that the glow worm we have in the UK is a species of firefly, but they don’t fly, or flash; the females are wingless, and sit in the grass glowing to attract [...]
Napowrimo #28: bees and wasps
29 April 2008 – 5:03 am
Honey, of course, is made by bees
but some may not have heard
about the hives of Cornish wasps
that make the lemon curd.
~~~
a bit late, but at least I’m back to only one behind schedule.
Bird of the Year 2007: best performances in a supporting role
5 January 2008 – 4:22 pm
Best Plant
There’s lots of choice here; I’ll just give a hat-tip to the big trees of Kew Gardens and Greenwich Park which I got over excited about in the autumn.
But most of the possibilities were in Crete. Crete has more species of plant than the UK, and a bundle of them are endemics. In spring, [...]
Well, it amused *me*.
5 September 2007 – 7:55 am
There’s a species of moth called a Lettuce Shark.
That is all.
Moths and meteorites
13 August 2007 – 2:12 pm
With National Moth Night and the Perseids, it should have been a good weekend for night-time stuff.
I didn’t have a lot of luck on either front. Really of course you need a moth trap to count moths effectively. I had a go at treacling—spreading a mix of treacle, brown sugar and rum on tree trunks [...]
Exciting moth news!
8 August 2007 – 4:32 pm
The moth in this picture isn’t particularly exciting, it’s just a rather scruffy Pyrausta aurata, sometimes called the mint moth. Mint is one of their foodplants, but so are its relatives like the oregano (or is that marjoram?) in the picture:
I didn’t get a picture of my exciting moth, which was a Jersey Tiger. Exciting [...]
Some local insects
2 August 2007 – 2:55 pm
Earlier in the season, most of the damselflies were blue ones; now they’re all blue-tailed:
This bit of south London is, slightly unexpectedly, a stronghold for the increasingly rare stag beetle. At this time of year you tend to see them flying overhead in the evening; but the weather has been so miserable that I haven’t [...]
Butterflies
15 April 2007 – 12:48 pm
There’s a peacock butterfly flying around outside the front of the house this morning in pretty much exactly the same place it was yesterday. Buterflies tend to be used as the epitome of aimless, carefree wandering, so it might come as a surprise to a lot of people to know that they are often highly [...]
Wildlife round-up
11 April 2007 – 1:45 pm
I was pruning back a rosemary bush to get rid of what I vaguely thought were frost damaged leaves left over from winter, so I’d have some less manky rosemary to cook with, and found these:
Which I immediately recognised from a photo in the London Wildlife Trust newsletter, though I couldn’t remember what they were [...]
Steinbeck on lice
25 January 2007 – 3:28 pm
Rob posting Burns’s To a Louse reminded me of this passage. It’s from a John Steinbeck letter, but I encountered it in John Carey’s brilliant anthology, The Faber Book of Science.
The Morgan Library has a very fine 11th-century Launcelot in perfect condition. I was going over it one day and turned to the rubric of [...]
bird of the year 2006: best performances in a supporting role
6 January 2007 – 12:53 am
Best Plant
All those rainforest plants were nice, and I enjoyed taking wildflower photos while I was in Spain. But, not least because it’s nice to pick a winner that I can actually identify, I’m going for the Galapagos Prickly Pear, Opuntia echios. On islands where there are giant tortoises and land iguanas, they’ve evolved woody [...]
Rainforest
4 November 2006 – 10:16 pm
Having said that I recommend the Galapagos, I have to say that equatorial lowland rainforest may not be for everyone. With the temperature in the 30s and 80% humidity, it’s hard work just walking around. Particularly, once you do get hot, it takes for ever to cool down again because your basic thermal regulation system [...]
Modigliani at the RA
29 September 2006 – 10:37 pm
I went to see Modigliani and his models at the Royal Academy today. In a sense, there was nothing very surprising about the exhibition since Amedeo Modigliani only really seems to have painted rather stylised portaits and very pink nudes, including this one of Joan Collins from 1917:
It (she?) looked pinker in real life.
The stylised [...]
FSotW: Backyard Biodiversity: Bichos
5 August 2006 – 10:45 am
Flickr set of the week is Backyard Biodiversity: Bichos by Crfullmoon, which is “A species survey in progress of “little beasts” on my property in Massachusetts in North America.” Here’s just a couple of the 307 photos.
Those are available under a by:nc:nd Creative Commons license, but most of the set seems to be fully ©.
More vespal entertainment
17 July 2006 – 11:18 am
Sherry mentioned my wasp nest on her blog and via the comments was revealed this hand-made hornet’s nest by papermaker Gin Petty. You can read her full account of making it here.
And browsing around Flickr I found these pictures by Andrew Dill of a wasp nest built on a window:
Here’s something I learned today. ‘Hymenoptera’ [...]