Life on Comfrey and Alkanet

The Alkanet and White Comfrey are in full bloom in the garden and provide home and food to a very large variety of species. Here are a few. The Rhingia rostrata has very impressive mouthparts for slurping up nectar!

Latest Toft Invertebrates

With warm and relatively still conditions, there were lots of species to photograph in the garden yesterday. My favourite images are of the male Jumping Spider males found wandering across one of the flower beds.

More Garden Arrivals

The midday sunshine brought out a few more flies, bees etc in the garden.

Cucumber Spider

This little spider was hiding in one of the seed heads that I cut down in the garden and made a perfect model to try out the 90mm Macro lens. Image 2 is a photostacked image, others are single shots. The only other 'model' I found was a Blowfly and demonstrates the incredible sharpness of the lens.

Inverts Emerge from Winter Hibernation

As the temperature climbed to 19 degrees insects and spiders emerged from the vegetation. Gwynne's Bee is always one of the first to be recorded and please to see a Zebra Jumping spider holding the usual territory on the summerhouse wall

 

First Insects etc of the Year

 The warm sunshine yesterday brought out quite a lot of flies, spiders and bees in the garden. Recovering from surgery is frustrating as I can manage the camera and macro lens but no fill-in flash and chasing bees is definitely out! Anyway here five invertebrates to start 2025 garden records

Change of Fungi Species at Paxton

Not quite as many fungi as 3 weeks ago but several different species now showing like the White Saddle and the Jelly Rot, Phlebia tremellosa. I was using my Fuji compact camera with the Raynox  auxilliary lens which isn't ideal for the smaller objects such as the Flies  but does a good job on the wider views. A couple of large patches of the shaggy Pholiota squarrosa and several other species!!