News about seasonal changes at Filnore Woods and how to get involved as a volunteer, if you want to. As well as things seen and done at FILNORE WOODS, THE BLOG WILL INCLUDE THINGS YOU CAN SEE IN YOUR STREET OR GARDEN. To get regular updates, you used to be able to enter your email address in "FOLLOW BY EMAIL" (just below on the right) But this seems to have stopped working so GOOGLE 'FILNORE WOODS BLOG' AND FOLLOW 'FILNORE WOODS' ON FACEBOOK
Thursday 30 June 2022
SMALL TORTOISE
Wednesday 29 June 2022
FLOWERS: MELLOW YELLOW
Tuesday 28 June 2022
LARGE SKIPPER
Monday 27 June 2022
SCARLET PIMPERNEL
Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell?
That dammed, elusive Pimpernel.
Sunday 26 June 2022
MOLE
Saturday 25 June 2022
HAZEL: TREE FROM A NUT
Friday 24 June 2022
RINGLET RETURNS
Thursday 23 June 2022
BEECH MAST
Wednesday 22 June 2022
ANTS IN A PANIC
Tuesday 21 June 2022
MORE HELP FOR THE HEDGE
Monday 20 June 2022
BLACK MEDICK
Sunday 19 June 2022
LESSER STITCHWORT
It only has five petals but these are so deeply divided it looks like ten. Notice the orange anthers on the lefthand flower; the two on the right are going over.
Monday 13 June 2022
MINI-WEBS
Sunday 12 June 2022
COMMON SNAILS
You can see the 'eyes on the ends of the long upper tentacles. They can't really 'see' but can detect light and dark. The lower tentacles are shorter and are organs of touch and smell.
Snails and slugs are gastropods which means tummy-foot. They travel along by muscular waves of this tummy-foot, secreting a thixotropic mucus to help them glide. Garden Snails can reach a top speed of 47mph (METRES per hour) or 1.3 cm per second.
They enjoy soft vegetation like new shoots and seedlings and often climb quite high up trees and walls in their search for food. Don't make the mistake of leaving your barbecue leftovers outside - they are quite partial to lamb chops too! They feed with a very rough tongue called a radula, scraping one layer off at a time.
Snails are hermaphrodite and use so called 'love darts' to turn each other on. If you want to know more check out this wikipedia link. Each snail can then produce about 80 spherical white eggs. They can lay 5 or 6 batches of eggs a year.
Predators include song thrushes, humans with beer traps, and glow worms, which inject the snail with venom to paralyse it and then feast as in the photo below.