My Least Favourite Terrestrial Arthropod

Beetles, can't get enough of them, Bees and Wasps the same, Ants, not fot me even centipedes and woodlice hold a certain fascination, but ticks, they unsettle me like nothing else.  Plenty to be found on Budby Heath today.  Had an April sweep over the heath and along woodland edges to see what was out and about early,  Well Ixodes ricinus. the sheep tick seemed to turn up quite regularly in the net.  Good job I had long trousers on.  Not a lot else to find other than  the Oil beetle Meloe proscarabeus,  a single female minotaur beetle perambulating across the sand (usually these chaps don't come out until dark and several of my favourites the Tiger beetle Cicindela campestris.  Only beetle of note in the sweep net was the tiny red and black weevil Coeliodinus rubicundus (no picture provided as its a little too small to photograph clearly) 

Ixodes ricinus - Budby Heath 

Tiger Beetle - taking in the rays Budby Heath 26th April 2015

Sweet violets and the curious case of the lemming-like badger.

Woodlands in spring,  I probably don't need to say a lot more about them to those who read this blog, they're just the place to be, strong sunlight on the woodland floor and early spring flowers.  My local patch has quite an extensive covering of Viola odorata, the sweet violet at this time of year.  I know that they exist in purple and I know that they exist in white,  but it's the first time that I've noticed that they exist in intermediate colour forms as well, between the white and the purple.  Got me thinking of Mendelian genetics and co-dominance where both alleles contribute to the phenotype of their offspring, a trait shown by Red Campion, White Campion and the intermediate pink coloured variety. I'm just presuming that this is the case for the violet, I tried a bit of an internet search to discover flower colour inheritance but to no avail.  Photographs are shown to illustrate the varieties seen.

It's also the time of year for young badgers, and it was rather sad to see a rather small freshly dead fellow at the base of a steep clay cliff.  I can only speculate that this poor chap out on one of his first forays strayed a little to close to the edge and took a tumble. Not being a brock expert I don't even know when the young start to leave their sett so I might be spouting absolute tosh. This animal was about the size of a size 10 walking boot.

Viola odorata - normal purple form. 

V. odorata - white form 

V. odorata - intermediate form. 

Young dead badger, April 2015. 

Heavy Metal

I'm sure many of you have read about the effect mine spoil has on vegetation and the difficulty that some plants have in colonising spoil heaps. I've always enjoyed walking on spoil heaps as the plants that do manage to colonise are often rather scarce or not found in the surrounding countryside.  My local heap is the site of the old Gedling Colliery although Nottinghamshire is dotted with many similar sites and all of them if they haven't been capped by clay still show traces of mine spoil. The majority of Gedling has been capped but those areas still uncapped are pretty good floristically.  One of the major waste products discarded from coal mining are nodules of iron pyrites commonly known as fools gold, chemically Iron Sulphide. Iron pyrites occurs commonly in the carboniferous measures of Nottinghamshire and can be found on the spoil heaps if you keep a keen eye out.  I picked one such nodule up several years ago and brought it back to my garden and plonked it onto my rockery. This rockery is covered by Helxine soleirolii, "baby's tears" that creeps over and around the stones. As can be seen after a wet and damp winter it struggles where the Iron pyrites sits, in summer it manages to grow around and below the pyrites lump.  The reason for the dieback is the reaction between pyrites air and water,  the resultant products form both Iron oxides and Sulphuric acid. It's the sulphuric acid run off that's causing plant death.   I think the picture illustrates it rather well.

 Helxine damage caused by Iron pyrites derived sulphuric acid (10p for scale)

Salticus with prey

Sun is out, first bit of real warmth on my house wall whilst I'm at home and spiders are out and about on the hunt.  Salticus scenicus a beautiful little spider getting lucky with a nice juicy midge. Still very little about, had a fly past from a Hairy Footed Flower Bee and a brief stop over form the Tree Bumblebee Bombus hypnorum.  The hairy footed's will hang around a little longer in the garden once the Archangel is in full flower.  Not a lot else to say other than I hope the sun comes out for a little longer tomorrow.

Hibernation Over and Esox lucius

I don't like winter, I don't particularly like spring unless it turns nice and warm,  So this year hasn't been too exciting here in Nottinghamshire.  Any nice day appears to occur during the week, as I sit here writing this my first blog of 2015 its raining outside, when I went out for a few hours yesterday it was raining.  Although not a particularly severe winter I feel as if I've spent the last 5 months in the house getting rather bored. However I've started to step outside,  A couple of days fishing as there still isn't enough insect life out and about to get me going.   So I'll show a picture of my day yesterday, a nice little pike, the top predator of UK waters.

Many associated with wildlife and wildlife conservation don't think to highly of the fishing set. Obviously as a fisherman I would have to disagree with them. A conscientious fisherman is not the litter throwing bank vegetation destroying cruel bloodsport lover often portrayed.  I care about the fish I catch, I don't kill them, I can't say they don't feel pain, but I don't think it has an undue effect on the animal - I've even caught the same fish on the same day, so I don't feel as if it upset the fish too much. Good fisherman tune in to nature, they sit with nature, it comes to them, you don't go looking for it, yesterday was no exception.  Coots are already sitting on eggs,  I sat and watched lesser celandine open when the sun came out, I observed several metallic blue flea beetle Altica lythri sunning on a dried leaf, perfectly positioned to gain maximum warmth, where have they been hiding all winter?  More blogs to come, I'm out of hibernation.

Don't know what I'm doing with my eyes?  Esox lucius The Northern Pike. 

By The Wind Sailors.

Rather bored as its the middle of winter.  I'm spending Saturday afternoon wading through a store box full of staphylinidae (rove beetles) trying to put a name to them. Most are OK and straightforward to I'D but there are some really tricky species that can only be readily identified by extracting their genitalia.  The idea of taking the genital parts out of beetles makes a few of my non entomological friends (which is most of them bar one) chuckle at the thought.  If you did similar things with other animals I'm quite certain that you would be locked up, but somehow its perfectly normal when dealing with insects. I've also no new photographs to share but thought of a photograph taken this summer of a rather strange organism Veiella veiella, commonly known as the By The Wind Sailor.  A free floating Hydrozoan similar to the better known Portuguese man o' war.  There were plenty of these on a north Atlantic beach this August washed up in their thousands.  I didn't photograph them on the beach as it was rather windy and photographic equipment and sand don't mix very well.   A strange organism about 50 mm in length.  The photographed specimen, like most on the beach were a little past their best and a little desiccated.  

By The Wind Sailor - Benone, County Derry Northern Ireland. August 2014 

Too Busy to Blog

Apologies for lack of blog over the last couple of months, I've been rather busy at work. I'm in the process of changing career, moving away from teaching, my school is closing and I just have to see the current year 11 through to their GCSE's,  and moving onto a job that I should have pursued earlier in my life, namely a career that involves my true love of the natural world. I've also not blogged as I have hundreds of beetles to I'd from my son's summer of fieldwork on Bredon Hill.  He has cleared off back to University and left me with quite a lot to look at. He's gone back to undertake a 4 year PhD eventually aiming to call himself a plant molecular biologist.   I've currently listed over two hundred beetle records and still have many more to do.  I may even start on the hymenoptera during the Christmas holidays.  Anyway a photograph of my little place of work AKA the spare room, all beetles and books, heaven.