Day 41 of Lockdown

Nearly six weeks of lockdown in the UK now and still easily finding something new to identify each day either in the garden or on our hours exercise and still adding to our birding lockdown list with an unexpected Cuckoo yesterday! Insect wise it has been very exciting in the garden as you can see;

Green Nettle Weevil 

On the face of it the next two look pretty similar however due to the plants they were on and length of antennae I'm confident they are Solomons Seal Sawfly and Iris Sawfly

Solitary Bees where to begin - I have Steven Falk's field guide to British Bees which is a fabulous book if only I had the skills to use it - I spent a longtime keying this bee out to Andrena wilkella and then via twitter asked Steven to confirm my id and no surprise I was wrong it is in fact Andrena clarkella

Lockdown Insects

During the last five weeks of lockdown we have had lovely warm sunny days which has given us a great opportunity to look for insects in the garden and local surrounds - here's a round up so far

Hairy Shield-bug

 Ashy Mining Bee

Helophilus pendulus

This I am not sure about - photos just not good enough to key out but I'm thinking Dusky Mining Bee?

Green Longhorn Adela reaumurella

 

14-spot Ladybird

Leucozona lucorum

This is a tricky one - I took this next the the colony of Ashy Mining Bee (Andrena Cineraria) which should make it  Nomada lathuriana but I don't think that it is as it looks more like a male Nomada flava.

Orange Tip Butterfly

More Green-Longhorn Moths

Our Coronavirus lockdown list

So along with the rest of the world the UK is in lockdown for the foreseeable future and so far we're coping well with staying home and our hour a day exercise and although we are obviously missing our usual haunts of Messingham, Alkborough and Barton we have seen some cracking wildlife over the last five weeks  - we're so lucky to have a garden which backs onto open fields however those fields are managed by County Turf so we are to all intense and purposes surrounded by an industrial landscape which is fertilised and pesticide to an inch of its life however last Saturday gave us the best garden tick we have had in the 21 years we have lived here - this fabulous Wryneck - it hung around for a couple of hours giving us the runaround between the neighbours gardens and ours but what an absolute joy!

We have been keeping a lockdown birding list - seen or heard in or from the garden and this currently stands at 59 - most interesting heard has to be Common Scoters migrating over late one night  - obviously the rarest would have to be the Wryneck.  We are also creating a database of every insect we are able to identify and are actively brushing up and learning new skills on keying out bees and hoverflies which leads me to our second most exciting find of the lockdown - a bee I have always wanted to see and which we found on a walk yesterday about a mile and a half from our house - the Ashy Mining Bee (Andrena Cineraria)

Hopefully lots more lockdown posts over the coming weeks ....