Showing posts with label Common Blue Damselfly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Common Blue Damselfly. Show all posts

Saturday, June 21, 2025

Garden Spiders etc

Definitely to be too hot in Cambridgeshire to be outdoors photographing insects so these are the remainder from yesterday's garden hunt. The Flower Spider (Misuna) was deep inside a white rose with its prey while the Labyrinth spider has built an impressive den in the Acanthus. Blue-tailed, female immature Common Blue and male Azure Blue all competing for space around the pond. Favourite species the Figwort Sawfly. IDs on sheets at end of images.



 

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Paxton Insects

A few images from a walk round Redlands area of Paxton. Great number of Soldier Beetles at the moment, many mating plus Scorpion Flies and large numbers of Damselflies. All the Damsel photos I took turned out to be Common Blue Damselflies but there was quite a variation in markings from the adult male, teneral male, green form of female and blue form of female. Grizzled Skippers still on the wing, plus several dragonflies - here a female Scarce Chaser. Several Hoverflies (here Pipiza noctiluca) plus their larvae on the nettles

Friday, May 16, 2025

Marsh Harriers and Cuckoo at Lackford

Ellie chose to visit Lackford with me today on her day off, hoping to see a Kingfisher - no luck with that wish but we did have great views of Marsh Harriers, Heron, Egret, Lapwing in the Irises etc and, best of all, a really good view of a male Cuckoo, who conveniently then landed in a tree and proceeded to call just to confirm the ID. A lot of Common Blue Damselflies and a quite late Orange-tailed Mining bee

Sunday, June 30, 2024

Butterfly and Dragonfly Survey Paxton

 Definitely lower numbers of Butterflies for our June Survey at Paxton but Dragonflies made up for it with large numbers of Common blue damselflies plus a few Azure and Variable and, mostly strikingly, very large numbers of Emerald damsels and in areas not previously recorded. Here a few images from the day, including male and female Emeralds and Banded Demoiselles, a species of  Potter Wasp, a Red-tipped Clearwing and  Wilke's mining Bee

Sunday, May 26, 2024

Paxton Pits May Butterfly and Dragonfly Survey

Although warm and sunny there were worryingly few butterflies around though the Dragonflies made up for them with good sightings of Norfolk Hawkers and a very good year for Banded Demoiselle numbers. A lot of time was spent early on refreshing our ID skills for Variable (narrow or exclamation mark top thorax stripe, spur mark with stem, short amount of blue on S9 and 'bat' mark on tail segment), Azure (wider top stripe on thorax, but less than Common, Spur mark no stem, large amount of blue on S9 and spur-type mark on tip of abdomen) and Common (very blue thorax, wine glass mark, lots of blue on abdomen etc). Other dragonflies photographs are Blue-tailed Damselfly and Four-spot and Scarce Chasers. The highlights of the very few Butterflies were a Small Copper and a Grizzled skipper - the latter in a new area so hopefully they are spreading. I couldn't resist two other subjects that caught my lens - a Sallow Kitten moth caterpillar and some Sawfly larvae.