Allotment Spots

I don't think I showed you these... I wasn't supposed to be spotting, I was down at the allotment to work! But it was a beautiful sunny afternoon and this green-veined white butterfly caught my eye. Maybe it mistook the chive flower for the knapweed that it seems to be sitting on in the identification photos!

And seconds later something truly amazing .. amongst a pile of wood leaning against a shed was something so bright orangey-red as to seem almost fluorescent, a most un-'natural'-looking colour, a big thing. I watched it .. it looked like a flying strawberry! I followed it as it flew hither and thither, hoping it might settle so I could see what it was. Eventually it did .. a moth, a good size one, but just a drab brown colour with its wings folded.

I managed to get this snap on my phone camera before it was off again, but I needn't have worried as it stayed around the area. I turned to get on with some work when there in the grass before me was another one! And as I bent to look, the first one 'buzzed' into me .. the pair of them set off busily fluttering about each other and away.

You can see the kind of fluorescent orange underparts in the photo, and the big furry body. When I looked it up I identified it as a Ruby Tiger Moth, which are apparently common. But to me they were unexpected, exotic and exciting.. as well as a good excuse to sit in the grass in the sunshine rather than dig!

BioBlitz

Well we had a go in the garden at the weekend.. I'm still looking up and trying to identify many of the things we found, which is great because I'm learning all the time. The little one loved it, and his determined bug-hunting meant that we were able to identify three different types of woodlouse in our patch, including this rosy-coloured one.. I have to admit that before the BioBlitz a woodlouse was a woodlouse, as far as I was concerned!



A really noticeable thing was that we didn't find a single ladybird. Our garden is usually full of them. I've looked again this week, and have only found one or two tiny creamy-coloured harlequins, no red ones at all.

However, we were blessed with a large red damselfly, basking on a rose leaf in the mid-day sunshine:



And as well as white and blue butterflies, we found this tiny daytime flying moth:



I think it must be pyrasta aurata.. during the week I have noticed masses of them: numbers of them fly up as I walk amongst the plants in my herb garden, and now I know why! They feed on mints, marjoram and lemon balm, so I have provided them with pretty much a perfect place to set up shop.