EARWIG-O, EARWIG-O, EARWIG-O

When I took all the apples out of my bucket, behold!  Two fast-moving invertebrates.

Earwigs.  They like to eat windfall apples and also dahlia petals and chrysanthemums, so not very popular with gardeners.  

But I have a soft spot for them, especially the females, who are excellent mothers.  They stay with their eggs, tending them, protecting them and licking them clean to prevent fungal infection.. 

Photo: Tom Oates on wikipedia

 They continue to look after the 'nymphs' as the babies are called until they are big enough to fend for themselves.  If you disturb this little family when you lift a stone, they will scatter.  But they soon come back together again.

The two in my bucket were females.  You can tell from the pincers at the end of their bodies.  The females' pincers are straighter than the curved pincers of the males as you can see below in this image from the Guardian website.  Male and female have a pleasant conjugal life underground during the winter but in spring the male leaves or is chucked out by the female.

Male earwig with curve pincers

Earwigs like the dark.  That's probably why the ones in my bucket look so panicky.  They feed at night and spend the day under stones, loose tree bark or deep in flower heads.

There are more than 1000 species of earwig worldwide but this, the common earwig, is the commonest of our 6 or 7 species in Britain.

Rather sweet, I think.

 

ROBIN'S PIN CUSHION

On this wild rose stem I spotted a strange red whiskery ball growing.

It's a Bedeguar Gall or Robin's Pin Cushion.  A tiny gall wasp lays several eggs on the rose stem and the plant responds by producing a swelling with all these short growths.

Inside, each grub has its own chamber to develop in.  Other insects come and lay their eggs, and their grubs live alongside the original inhabitants.  The name for these is inquilines.  Yet more insects parasitize those already in residence so a whole community develops inside the gall.  The grubs pupate inside the gall and new adults emerge in spring.

 

Still flowering

Strolling through fields you can still see a few flowers in bloom; not so many as earlier but a modest reminder of summery days.

  

White Clover and Red Clover

  

Selfheal and Creeping Thistle

        

A Hawkbit, Meadow Buttercup and Ragwort 

And the glorious dandelion which flowers from March till October 

and sometimes all the year round.

 

AUTUMN FLUFF

Thistles are spreading their wings.  The mauve flowers have turned into clusters of thistle down, ready to carry thistle seeds far and wide.  

When the individual bits of fluff drifted by we used to call them fairies when I was small.

Another fluffy plant is the rosebay willowherb.

The long, pink seedpods split open and reveal the seed-bearing fluff within.  It can be really annoying the way it lands on the blackberries you want to pick.

 

DADDY-LONG-LEGS

 Two creatures are typically called daddy longlegs.  One is a spider and the other is this Cranefly, Tipula oleracea.

I found this one on the kitchen floor where it obligingly sat still, but on the previous day when I was blackberrying they were flying out of the grass in their hundreds.   This is the time of year when they emerge for a brief adult life after chomping away on plant roots all summer as grubs called leather jackets.

This one still has all six legs but they do lose them quite easily if you try to catch one.

.

Two things to point out:

1. It is a true fly, a member of the Diptera order.  Diptera means two-winged and as you can see it has only two wings instead of the four that most insects have.  The second pair of wings in all flies have developed into two drumstick-shaped organs called halteres or balancers.  These act like gyroscopes to help stabilise the insect in flight.  On Crane flies they show up really well and you can see one of them  just behind the left wing in my photo.

2. The other thing is that the female has a pointed tip to her abdomen so that she can lay her eggs in the soil.  Mummy longlegs, I suppose.  The male has a square end to his body as you can see in the individual above.

Every September people shriek and cower from these daddy long legses but they are totally harmless. As they fly around you in the fields be glad that at least some insects are still abundant.

MOTH-ERHOOD

"What is going on here ?"  you might well ask. 

Nothing untoward, I assure you.

While we were working on path maintenance, this keen photographer spotted an interesting moth on my jeans.

After consulting my Field Guide to the moths of Great Britain and Ireland, I worked out that it was a Small Emerald Moth,  Hemistola chrysoprasaria.  They are a bit greener when they first emerge but the shape of the white lines across the wings is diagnostic for identification.

The caterpillars feed on travellers' joy/wild clematis/old-man's-beard, which we have a lot of at Filnore Woods, and the adult moths like to hang around this foodplant.

Must have thought I was a traveller - or perhaps just an old man!

 

Path clearing

At the top of Vilner Lane there is a post welcoming you to Filnore Woods.  It is at post 13, part way along the self-guided trail shown in the leaflet.  

  

The path from here to post 14 was getting overwhelmed by vegetation.

So the Friends of Filnore Woods Volunteers got stuck in

Scything and raking up the cut material.

The path is now much more accessible for visitors.

 

BERRY NICE

Seems to be a good year for blackberries.  Very nice stewed with apple and served with yoghurt hot or cold.  They also make a delicious bramble jelly to spread on your toast.  A gift from nature.

' What else can you offer the earth, which has everything.  What else can you give but something of yourself ' (from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer)

And a bumper year for sloes, the astringent fruit of the blackthorn.  

Sloe gin is rather overrated in my opinion but they do look tempting.  Offer one to a friend ! !

Some of the other berries adorning the hedgerows and woodland edges are haws on hawthorn . . . . .

  

  

. . . . . and hips on roses.

  

 

GUELDER ROSE

Late summer and autumn deliver lots of hedgerow berries, some blue, some black and many red, but the brightest of all are the waxy berries of the guelder rose.  

It is a shrubby plant rather than a tree, rarely getting more than three metres in height

The leaves look almost like maple leaves but the plant is actually one of our two native Viburnums.

 CAUTION:  the uncooked berries can cause vomiting and diarrhoea if eaten so don't be tempted by their resemblance to red currants.

OAK POWDERY MILDEW

Oak powdery mildew is a fungus that grows on young leaves of common oak trees.  There has been a lot of it this year, probably because of favourable weather.

It shows up from a distance but close to you can see the granular nature of the fungus.

It affects the tree in three ways:

1. it stops sunlight getting to the leaves so that the plant can't photosynthesise so well - the leaves cannot feed the rest of the shoot and the tree as a whole
2. the fungus continues to transpire in hot weather when an unaffected leaf would close up its pores to retain moisture
3. without viable leaves the whole shoot can die-back

Heavily affected leaves can lead to shoot die-back

Although young leaves are colonised by the fungus, especially the second flush of leaves round about June through July and August, by September some oaks are trying again to produce new leaves which the fungus doesn't seem to be attacking.  

See the young leaves opening at the end of the shoot in the photo below.

Photos: Alan Watts

KNOPPER GALLS & SPANGLES

Knopper galls are knobbly growths on acorns.  They almost look like some kind of pine cone.

Now is the season for them.  Having ripened on the tree they fall off and you may first notice them on the ground beneath a mature oak tree.  Here the grubs pupate and spend the winter inside the fallen galls waiting for spring.

The tiny gall wasps that emerge from these fallen galls are, strangely, all female and their job is to seek out a Turkey Oak and lay their eggs on the catkins, where a less obvious gall develops.

The Turkey Oak (Quercus cerris) is taller and straighter than our native oaks (Quercus robur and Quercus petraea) and the leaves, as shown in the photo below, are narrower and less symmetrical than the natives.

The knopper gall wasp was first recorded in Britain in the 1950s.  It spread so that in 1979 there was a population explosion followed by a panic that our oak trees would never grow viable acorns again.  

This did not happen and there is no need to worry or try to get rid of the galls.

There are several galls that grow on oak trees and many of them have this two-generation life cycle.  You may be familiar with the marble galls that frequently occur on younger trees and the larger, softer oak apples on mature trees.

At this time of year if you notice small yellow blotches on oak leaves . . . . 

 

. . . . turn them over and you will find spangle galls.  There are three sorts, resulting from the egg-laying activity of three different tiny gall wasps.  The common spangle galls have a little pimple in the middle; silk button spangle galls have a dimple in the middle like a minute ring doughnut, and smooth spangle galls are - well,  smooth - with neither a pimple nor a dimple.

  

 Miniature wonders.

REDSHANK BUT NOT THE BIRD

Redleg or Redshank (Persicaria maculosa) is inconspicuous but quite pretty when growing in a mass

  

There's a lot of it just above the footbridge at Filnore Woods but hurry up if you want to see it as we are intending to clear it along with all the other vegetation encroaching on to the path here.

Extra photo from Alan Watts