National Moth Night runs from 8th-10th August and last night proved to be a good night in our garden with some very beautiful moths being attracted to our trap…
Swallow Prominent
White Satin Moth
Pebble Prominent
We think this is a Common or Lesser Rustic
and another Rustic showing how variable some species are
Brown-line Bright-eye
A beautiful moth - came into the moth trap last night ………..
Or so I thought! now not so sure after zooming in and seeing a gorgeous hairy yellow face I’m now thinking Bombus Pratorum (Early Bumblebee) but it doesn’t seem to have a striped yellow thorax so who knows.
The Bees are still frustrating me beyond belief and other then the Tree Bumble I don’t think I have yet to correctly identify one here’s some more I’m not sure of..
These could all be Bombus Terrestris (Buff-tailed Bumblebee) but zoom in and some do not have extensive hairy back tibia which would make them Bombus Bohemicus!
It’s bad enough trying to identify Bumblebees without finding Beetles at the sametime – this is my attempt at identifying the following but it’s suppose to be uncommon in the North UK. The first image I took last week in my parents garden and forgot about it and then my Father showed me the following 3 photos which he had taken a few days later. It was only on closer inspection that I realised they were probably a male and female of the same species (female being the fist image).
Pretty confident that this is a male White-tailed Bumblebee, mainly because it is the only one I can find reference to that has a hairy yellow face.
Armed with stool, walking stick and bucketfuls of painkillers I made my first venture out of the garden with Wayne this morning in the hope(in our dreams) of bumping into a Two-Barred Crossbill as you can imagine no Crossbills or at least Two-Barreds were seen but we did finally come across a known patch of one of my favourite plants Herb Paris which I had been dying to see and in the same area we found this Woundwort Shieldbug 4th instar, now I sound like an expert but in reality I just googled it and have never heard the tem “instar” before but presumably it’s an early stage of adulthood! On the bird front today we have seen a Red Kite, Med Gull, Yellow Legged Gull, 2 Whimbrel, 565 Avocet on the humber and 2 Common Crossbills over the garden.
Herb Paris
Now I have discovered an urge in me to identify all Bumblebees in the garden I find myself looking further a field, the trouble is the more I try to identify them the more confused I get. I’m not even going to attempt these two except to say I think the first is a Cuckoo and the second a Social - I really need an expert so if anyone out there …….
