Garden in Autumn

 Definitely the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in the garden at the moment. This season's very tall growth is providing lots of habitats for insects etc to prepare for winter like this Elephant Hawk Moth, fully fed on the Willowherb and making its way to the soil to hibernate.Still flowers for the Bees and other insects, berries for the birds and, hopefully, some produce for us. The Ivy is in full flower and the hedges amazingly high this year draped with blackberries and White Bryony.

More Garden Species

Although cool temperatures over the last day or so, the sun is still high enough to warm the garden foliage in the mornings bringing out lots of insects including this new Soldier fly for my garden list, Sargus bipunctatus, with two white spots and a lot of colours on the thorax and abdomen, the Hawthorn shieldbug and a new Gall Fly, Tephritis divisa.. Always happy to see old friends such as the Flower spider -  this time hiding in a Carrot seed head

Serpentine Green Peterborough

 Serpentine Green Shopping centre was opened in 1999 in the Southern area of  Peterborough. When it was built the Tesco outlet was a flagship branch, and the largest store in the UK, with a floor space of 130,000 square feet (12,000 m2),[2] - larger stores have since been built however. I was using my small infrared-converted Sony RX100 which gave an interesting colour combination to the centre.

Paxton Snails

On Monday, I spent the day with Richard Preece at Paxton surveying some of the molluscs that live there. We only managed two areas but from that Richard identified 31 species.  The Caddis Fly that inhabited this case obviously had a liking for snails' shells - many might still have been alive when added and carried around. Some of the snails had very interesting origins such as image 4, a very small snail with a very long name Potamopyrgus antipodarum an immigrant all the way from New Zealand, and a bivalve (no.5) spread here from Asia. The grid is 5mm so you can see how small some of these were.

Botanic Garden challenges

 We had a good turnout for our camera club trip to Cambridge Botanic Gardens and generally kept the public amused with our various antics while fulfilling five challenges - Contrast, Close up, Colour, Movement and Creative. Here are two attempts each at the subjects.