SMALL TORTOISE

Small tortoiseshell butterfly on flowers of creeping thistle.  Butterflies are like flying flowers.

Photo: Alan Watts

Some butterflies lay eggs singly but others, like the large and small whites and this character, the Small Tortoiseshell, lay their eggs in large clusters.  The caterpillars start eating the nettle leaves in a group, inside a tent made of silk.  They are easy to spot but not easy to get to, so the tent gives them some protection from birds and the parasitic wasps that attack them.  When they are teenagers they split up and feed on their own.  

Stinging nettles are food plants for three other butterflies too: - peacocks, red admirals and commas.

FLOWERS: MELLOW YELLOW

    

Alan Watts                                                               Alan Watts

Filnore Friends volunteers are currently scything the top meadow at Filnore Woods. By cutting and removing the vigorous grasses we are reducing the fertility which will give the less vigorous wild flowers a chance.  

Yesterday (Tuesday) a dozen or so meadow flowers were in bloom.  Here are three yellow ones.

   

Hop Trefoil has globular flower heads and the brown seed pods are a bit like hops.  Black medick (see my post on 20th June) has black seed pods.  You can also tell hop trefoil from black medick, which has smaller flowers, by looking at the trifoliate leaves: black medick has a minute point at the tip of each leaflet while Hop Trefoil's leaves are usually indented at the end of each leaflet.

Next yellow flower is the Yellow Vetchling, a bright yellow pea flower.

   

Agrimony or Aaron's Rod flowers in tall spikes with the five-petalled flowers opening in succession up the stem.

   

LARGE SKIPPER

This large skipper butterfly is feeding on bramble nectar.  Then she will be off to lay some more eggs singly, each one on a blade of grass.

Photo: Alan Watts

 You can see her eyes, her antennae and her long tongue or proboscis, looking like a whip coming out of the front of her head as she sucks the sweet juices from the flower.

SCARLET PIMPERNEL

We seek him here, we seek him there,

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell?
That dammed, elusive Pimpernel.

From The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy 1905

This tiny red flower was chosen by Sir Percy Blakeney, hero of the above novel, as his symbol and nom de guerre.

It's rather a sprawling plant with trailing, square stems and leaves in pairs, growing on disturbed ground.

The tiny scarlet flowers with a purple centre have no nectar to attract insects and only open in sunny weather between 8.00 am and 3.00 pm.

This it is why it got its other names like poorman's-weather-glass and shepherd's-sundial.

 

MOLE

Moles don't often venture above ground but this one met with some unfortunate circumstance, possibly a mowing machine, and was discovered when the cut grass was raked up.

Photo: Alan Watts

You can see the shovel-like front feet with sharp claws for digging and the short fur which can brush both ways so that the mole can go backwards or forwards in its underground tunnel.  

Moles feed almost exclusively on earthworms.  If they find a lot, they paralyse some with a bite and store them for later consumption in a 'larder' underground.

 

HAZEL: TREE FROM A NUT

There is a tiny hole in the outer skin or shell of most seeds, to let water in.  If there is a warm enough temperature, which varies from species to species, and some oxygen for the seed to breathe, the first part of the seedling will grow.

This is the radicle, a single root, which grows downwards.

Once the radicle is growing a little shoot, the plumule, grows upwards, with its head bent over to help it push through the soil until it emerges into the light.  This is a hazel nut beginning its journey into the world.

And so life begins again.  The roots proliferate from the radicle to draw up water and nutrients from the soil, and above ground the shoot develops leaves and starts to feed the plant by photosynthesis, using light and carbon dioxide to manufacture more plant material.

The seedling is now well established

Hair-like roots are growing not only from the radicle but even from the buried part of the main shoot.

RINGLET RETURNS

 Alan spotted this Ringlet at Filnore Woods on 16th June.  Hopefully there will be many more of this summer butterfly in the next couple of months.

When newly emerged they are almost black, with a white fringe round the edge of their wings, but they soon fade to dark brown.  The distinguishing feature is the row of  small ringed spots on the wings, which gave them their name.

Ringlets like lush grass and their pupae (chrysalises) overwinter in grass tussocks so we need some grass left uncut for them.  They, like many insects, enjoy bramble and thistle flowers, so we need some bramble and thistle, but for the sake of biodiversity we need to stop these plants invading all the grassland.  

Managing for wildlife requires a balanced approach.  Nothing too drastic.  Whenever you help one plant or creature you are probably disadvantaging another.

Update: there are now quite a lot of ringlets up at Filnore.

When one of them obligingly perched, Alan took this photo.

BEECH MAST

Looks like a good year for beech nuts - a mast year as foresters call it.

Beech mast is the nuts and the shells, which were formerly eaten by pigs.  Where land owners granted the right of pannage to  villagers, they wee allowed to take their pigs into the woodland to feast on the beech mast.

The nuts are ripening now inside the shells which are currently soft and green but will be hard and brown by autumn.

 

ANTS IN A PANIC

Black garden ants (Lasius niger) often nest under pavements, garden paths and house walls.  Unfortunately a stone slab left in one place for a week may be used as a roof for an extension to the nest.  I moved one such slab and panic broke out.  The main task for the little workers was to save the pupae (often referred to as 'ants eggs') which had been up near the surface ready to emerge as the familiar flying ants.

Although they were eventually effective in carrying the pupae underground, there was a lot of rushing about and getting in each other's way.

I had a really good video of this but it was too large a file to put on the blog.  

But you get the idea.

When the flying ants appear in the next few weeks, be merciful.  It's the one day of the year when male and female ants from different nests meet up in the 'nuptial flight'.  They mate, after which the females remove their wings and crawl underground to start laying eggs to form a new colony.  The males wander about a bit and die.  Ho hum.

So it's their one afternoon of ecstasy.  Give 'em a break.

MORE HELP FOR THE HEDGE

Sharpening up their scythes, the indefatigable Filnore Friends volunteers cleared a bit more breathing space for the hedge near the entrance.

Before                                                          After  

And here they are: Peter, Chris, Andy, Jim, Eric and Alan recovering under the oak tree at the picnic bench after a hard morning's work in the hot sun.

 

BLACK MEDICK

Black Medick (Medicago lupulina) has small yellow flower heads but each head can contain 10-50 separate tiny flowers.

It grows in areas of short grass and forms large clumps.  The leaves are trifoliate (made of three leaflets) like so many clover types.

But you can distinguish it from other yellow trefoils because each leaflet ends in a minute point.

 

LESSER STITCHWORT

Greater Stitchwort is larger than this dainty flower and appears in springtime along hedge banks.  Lesser Stitchwort nestles amongst grass as you can see below and is in flower now.

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.

 

MINI-WEBS

On a patch of bare soil, after some mizzly rain, lots of miniature webs became apparent.  I don't know which spider made them but thought I would share a few of them.  So delicate and yet so strong.  

 

COMMON SNAILS

The Common or Garden Snail (Cornu aspersum).  Shell looks a bit battered but carrying on regardless.  Relieved that the dry spell was over but will hide away if it gets hot and dry again.  They like damp conditions.  As do the banded snails in the Cepaea genus, which can be brown, yellow or striped.  

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.

Glow worm photo: wikipedia

SORREL

Like a pink mist in the grass, the flower spikes of common sorrel stand waving in the breeze.  

I was surprised to find that some were white . . .

. . . until I realised this was the seed stage.  They gradually change from pink to white.

The tiny red bells of the flowers . . .

. . . are followed by little white spades - the fruit.