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.

Nature at Your Fingertips

Yesterday was the September Wildlife Survey at Paxton Pits and was in a large meadow complex adjacent to the River Ouse with damp ditches so it was not surprising to find quite a few wet species such as this Pond Olive that I rescued from a spider's web (it has lost one tail streamer). Lots of Spiders around this time of year including Xysticus matching its surrounding as does the Pardosa species running across pond weed. Otherwise the species that I was very pleased to record two years ago, Ormyrus nitidulus, a metallic green wasp, were very abundant below the oak trees (they lay eggs in the gall-causing caterpillars!).