Author: Daniel Greenwood

Landscape photographer with a focus on woods and trees, fungi, and macro photography

#30DaysMacro 2023: week two

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

Welcome to the second week of my #30DaysWild macro photo challenge which I call #30DaysMacro. All photos here are taken with an Olympus TG-6 Tough compact camera and cropped/tweaked in Lightroom.

This week was another hot and dry one, and possibly showed a bit more of an increase in insect numbers after a worryingly scant spring. These photos were taken in London and West Sussex, and both areas are in desperate need of rain.

Day 8/30: shield bugs (known as stinkbugs in North America) are some of the most charismatic insects out there and easiest to see. These two cabbage bugs were mating in what I reckon is a plant in the cabbage family, in south-east London. I think this is my first sighting of them.

Day 9/30: this photo is part of an experience that will benefit from a dedicated post. This is a red-belted clearwing moth laying eggs in a diseased or cankered apple tree in a residential road in West Sussex. It’s only one of maybe three clearwings I’ve ever encountered and you can see that it’s a really extravagant, day-flying species. Maybe I could be swayed by moths after all. Scroll down for another part of this story.

Day 10/30: a click beetle takes flight from a flowering climber in my small hedge. This click beetle is one that I think is common as I’ve seen one very similar on several occasions. Probably need to upload it to iNaturalist to identify it.

Day 11/30: a tangled web for this poor red admiral in West Sussex. I was surprised to see one so still in the hedge but on closer inspection it has been caught by a spider.

Day 12/30: the emerging larvae of the clearwing can be seen here, pressing out of the apple tree’s bark, just like in certain sci-fi movies. The plot twist here is the arrival of an ichneumon seeking out red-belted clearwing larvae. The ichneumon’s epic ovipositor will be used to lay eggs in the unsuspecting larvae and parasitise the host. You can read more a blog post I wrote about that here.

Day 13/30: a busy day working from home (yes there is such a thing) left me pressed for time, but I managed to snap one of the common hoverflies in my garden. I don’t go out for long in the hottest parts of the day so I am usually reliant on the early mornings or evenings for macro encounters.

Day 14/30: a difficult week for red admirals, with this much-pecked butterfly enjoying(?) some evening rays. You have to make do with what you have in this life.

Thanks for reading.

Macro

#30DaysMacro 2023: week one

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

Happy #30DaysWild! As per the last couple of years I’ll be taking a macro photo – an image greater than 1:1 lifesize magnification – every day in June. I call it #30DaysMacro.

This is one of the best times to look for invertebrate life, and is a nice motivation to get outside, and to share your experiences with others.

The difference for me this year is that I’ll try to take each photo exclusively from a compact camera or my phone. I recently traded in some equipment that was gathering dust and got an Olympus TG-6 Tough compact camera. It’s waterproof, can withstanding being crushed somewhat, but more importantly it has the best macro capabilities available in a compact camera. It will be interesting to see what I can get from it.

Another #30DaysMacro – let’s go! on y va! vamos!

Day 1/30: I had actually forgotten it was June (been busy) and wasn’t thinking of #30DaysWild until after I took this phone pic. The spider was on the rear windscreen wiper of my car in the supermarket car park. It’s one of the running crab spiders.

Day 2/30: a bumblebee with full pollen sacks gathering nectar from the deep flowerheads of yellow flag iris in my small pond.

Day 3/30: a swollen-thighed beetle ‘enters the ring’, the nectar station of an oxeye daisy. I planted these last year and they’ve only flowered in the past few weeks. The small insects on the edges are carpet beetles. They’re there all the time.

Day 4/30: I found this beautiful red cardinal beetle in my family’s garden in SE London, as it rested in the shade of a hazel bush.

Day 5/30: I was lurking around the borders of my garden where the foxgloves grow, waiting for bumblebees to emerge from the flowers. Luckily this bumblebee chose to hover for a while so my camera could lock on and get the in-flight pics. Impressive for such a little camera!

Day 6/30: in the centre of my town there’s a brick wall that is covered in trailing bellflower. At this time of year it catches the sun wonderfully. I took this photo along the main road and was stopped by a woman who said she often tried to get a similar photo on her way home. Trailing bellflower is native to south-eastern Europe and likes rocky places, brightening dull civic spaces.

Day 7/30: a tortrix micro-moth in Peckham, SE London. I really like the holes in the leaves that surround the moth, and its bluey scales.

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Macro

Praying for Everton’s survival among the wildflowers ⚽

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Amberley, West Sussex, May 2023

I am aware that most of the people who read my posts are likely to have a natural aversion to football. But really I’m not sure this blog would be here without the football side of my life. I’m someone who is able to say I’ve had words printed in national newspapers having written (unpaid, of course!) short articles about Everton Football Club as a student for the Observer newspaper. As a child I learned to love the outdoors from playing football with my dad and then my friends in the park, and chasing the irregular bounce of a ball over uneven grazing land in Ireland on summer holidays.

As a masters student I dreampt up articles and essays about the psychological landscape of football pitches and the sheer absurdity of the rules of the game. I wanted to deconstruct football, to make it make sense. The ball crosses a line and people’s lives are changed, while billions of pounds change hands. It has become something so unpleasant in many ways nowadays, but its heritage is old and significant. My family have probably supported Everton since the late 1800s when the club was invented.

On Sunday 28th May I forced myself, though tired, to go for a walk in the Arun valley in the South Downs. The aim was to try and distract myself from Everton’s final day game against Bournemouth, where my team could be relegated from the top division of English football for the first time in 69 years.

Formed in 1878, Everton were relegated in 1951 but came back in 1954 and promptly won the league. My dad passed away just short of his 72nd birthday. As an Evertonian from the age of 5, he had never known his team to be anything other than in the top flight. I can say they have won the league in my lifetime, in 1987, in the year of my birth, 1985, as well as picking up the FA Cup against the odds in 1995. It’s not something Newcastle and Spurs fans my age or younger can say!

The stress of these final day relegation cliffhangers is extreme, but I couldn’t tell you why. In 1994 Everton were on the brink, 0-2 down to Wimbledon (RIP) on the final day, but managed to win 3-2 and stay up. In 1998 I put my face in the grass and pleaded with a god I didn’t really know, to save Everton from relegation again. They survived yet again.

Back on my present day distraction walk I passed through Amberley village and popped into the churchyard. It was a beautiful sight, with intelligent mowing having taken place to allow the chalk downland of the churchyard to grow into a rich and healthy sward. #NoMowMay indeed. One unlikely advocate of this excellent initiative is the former footballer and now pundit, Chris Sutton. Sutton regularly makes the case for bee conservation while barracking his co-host Robbie Savage on BBC Radio 5Live’s football phone-in. Well in, lad.

Back in the churchyard, the grasslands were full with oxeye daisies and that downland favourite, yellow rattle.

I entered into the church and took a break from the sun. I love the cool air and quiet of churches, of which the South Downs is spoilt in terms of the sheer number of them. Now, I am not a practicing religious person of any recognised faith, my cathedrals are usually either tree or hill-shaped, but I did ask for my pathetic football team to be spared while sitting on the pew (I also donated to support the church’s eye-watering running costs).

Some hours later, having hammered out 6 miles on the Downs and rushed back to catch the train to listen to the second half at home, Everton survived.

1994, 1998, 2023. Please, just not next year.

Thanks for reading.

The South Downs

Dartmoor: finding Grimspound in the mist 🛖

Daniel Greenwood5 Comments

Dartmoor, Devon, May 2023

It was a misty morning high on Dartmoor. We began walking from Bennett’s Cross, passing Birch Tor and heading through wintry heather moorland. The white tails of wheatears burst across the paths as we disturbed them. Their journeys here are some of the longest undertaken by any migratory animal on the planet.

After a short plateau in the moor we crossed a quiet road and ascended Hookney Tor. Here the mist came in from the north, sucking up the wider moor, and the long stone wall that framed views in that direction. We switched east to pick up the unsigned Two Moors Way and walked between the rocky eruptions of Hookney Tor.

As we continued down on the Two Moors Way, a grey bird cut across the edge of the visible moor, some 25ft ahead, before the land was hidden by the mist. It was a male cuckoo, another African bird looking for a mate to breed in this harsh terrain.

The cuckoo slid away into the mist and we headed south for our prize – the 3000 year old settlement of Grimspound.

Approaching, only the collapsed stones of the outer enclosure were visible, painted white by the crust lichens that thrive on Dartmoor stone. In the distance we could hear the voices of other visitors to this ancient place. A family were visiting, posing for photos inside one of the small enclosures that had been rebuilt.

Entering into the ring of fallen stones, the smaller huts came into view. This wall will have been intended to protect the inhabitants and their livestock from wild animals like wolves (now long extinct) and any attacks from other people.

Thanks for reading.

Dartmoor

A spring epistrophe? 🐝

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

Another week of some sun, some showers, and some temperatures that got close to freezing. That sentence may turn out to be a spring epistrophe, but more of that later. In Scotland it reached as low as -5C. April 2023 has been a mishmash of seasons. Here’s what I encountered in my garden on 22nd April.

One of the joys of this time of year has to be the red mason bee. They are tricky to catch up with sometimes away from their bee boxes, but I managed to get close enough to this red-haired male in the skimmia hedge.

This is a mining bee that I can recall seeing each year early in the season. I’m not sure of the species, but it has a likeness to the chocolate mining bee.

I tried with this rather slender-shaped mining bee, but it didn’t like Homo sapiens approaching with a camera and macro lens, however small that equipment is nowadays.

He’s not quite in focus but this hairy-footed flower bee stopped for a snap. Never mind his hairy feet, look at those legs! They do look a bit like tiny Highland cows to me.

To finish this week’s post, I noticed this medium-sized hoverfly in the skimmia. Putting it on iNaturalist I received a quick response, identifying it as spring epistrophe. It has a huge range, from Sweden to northern Spain, and then as far as Ireland to the Caucasus (Russia). Its name obviously means it’s a spring arrival, but ‘epistrophe’: “repetition of a word or expression at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses especially for rhetorical or poetic effect” – via Miriam-Webster.

I’ll have to listen to the hoverfly more closely next time.

Thanks for reading.

Macro

Is this England’s national mushroom? 🍄

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No nationalism was expounded in the making of this blogpost.

On a recent visit to the National Trust’s Nymans Gardens I spotted some big, cream-coloured things in the lawns near the car park. No, these were not scones or cream cakes, or even pasties discarded by visitors. It clicked almost immediately for me that these might be St. George’s mushroom – and guess what? I found them on 23rd April, St. George’s Day!

That is definitely the most enthusiasm I have offered for this national day. If it were to be made a holiday, then we can talk.

Spring can be a time of shrooms, as the frosts end and the temperatures rise. We’ve had quite a lot of rain this spring in SE England and so some mushrooms will fruit in response. St. George’s mushroom is one of those springshrooms.

Like many people in the UK my sense of personal identity is not straightforward, and I don’t celebrate St. George’s Day. I have strong Irish roots and as a Londoner of 50% Scouse parentage I feel an affinity with a more regional, culturally complex identity, rather than one of red and white, chest-thumping ‘Englishness’, whatever that is.

It makes me wonder though – is this England’s unofficial national mushroom?

A simple online search shows up no such award, which is probably a good thing. Surely that accolade should go to honey fungus!

You may not be surprised to find that its common name changes depending on its location. In Germany the mushroom fruits in May and is known as Maipilz. That means ‘May mushroom’. In fairness to Maipilz, that’s only 8 days later.

St. George’s mushroom is also edible. I didn’t pick or eat this one, and it’s not on my radar to do so anytime soon. The above seems to have been nibbled free in actual fact. Also, I wouldn’t encourage people to forage from National Trust properties generally because I don’t want to get banned.

The cap turns brown over time making it look like a barbecued chicken piece

St. George’s mushroom appears to enjoy garden lawns, so if you’re lucky you may have one popping up outside your front/garden door. As ever, you should be cautious about eating wild white mushrooms as there are several toxic species which can be confused for edible ones.

Thanks for reading.

Fungi | Sussex Weald

What this hoverfly doesn’t know 🐝

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This time of year will probably always remind me of 2020, when most people were entering into Covid-19 ‘lockdowns’. That spring was early, warm and sunny in SE England, which seemed to contrast with the extreme anxiety of the situation we found ourselves in over here. As the lyric in ‘Someone Great’ by LCD Soundsytem goes, ‘the worst is all the lovely weather‘.

This spring feels different: later than recent early seasons, wet, cool but also quite hot. On Monday I got a bit of sunburn on my neck (despite wearing suncream) and on Tuesday it was quite cold in comparison. This all affects wildlife in a far more immediate way.

On Sunday 16th April my garden thermometer (kept in the shade, don’t worry) read 16C, and the garden was alive. Here’s what I found in the space of about half an hour.

My first find is not actually pictured here. I was about to clean the kitchen hob when I noticed a small deceased insect on it, what turned out to be a lovely male red mason bee. I was surprised and a bit annoyed, so went outside to put its tiny little body into the flowerbed where its cousins were zipping around.

Nearby, I noticed my first bee-fly of the year, doing their usual flowerbed hovering. You can see from the image above why this fly is sometimes referred to as the ‘dark-edged’ bee-fly.

There were a large number of drone-flies in and around the Japanese skimmia that makes up much of the hedgeline in my small garden. I’m actually a big fan of this shrub, which provides excellent cover for invertebrates and seems to be a solid nectar source.

I’ve not seen any birds eating its berries which are held for a long time. I would pick this over the dreaded cherry laurel any day.

This is a common hoverfly, which I have come to know as ‘the footballer’ but is also called ‘sun fly‘. Their mimicry is to fool us predators into thinking they’re wasps and therefore able to sting. What this fly doesn’t know is that I’ve read books and have iNaturalist so I know it’s a hoverfly.

Meanwhile, there was quite a bit of activity from the wasps, with two or more queens busy in the skimmia. This queen was less busy so I could get a photo of her basking. To any new readers, I’m a wasp supporter, and I don’t mean the rugby team.

I have another non-native shrub that is proving itself to be a valuable resource for pollinators in my garden. This has flowered for the first time since it was planted three years ago.

This is probably a the black garden ant. I hadn’t seen them nectaring like this before. I’d also seen red mason bees visiting these flowers, which is great news as it’s providing another source of forage for a wider range of pollinators.

This ant was definitely getting stuck in to the nectar on offer here!

On my recycling bin I spotted this green shield bug, a fairly common sight in my garden. They are lovely insects but are also known as stinkbugs in North America because of their pungent scent that is deployed when they’re in trouble.

The hawthorn was in full leaf. I have since coppiced this hawthorn sapling to allow it to form more of a hedge, compared to the spindly tree it was forming.

Hazel is also in leaf. I love their small leaves when first appearing. You can see where I topped this sapling last year. I have also recoppiced it since to form a hedge.

The dog violets are flowering between the brickwork on the twitten (a Sussex name for a type of path).

So too were the pea flowers of what I think is broom. It didn’t flower last year for some reason.

I think this close up helps to show how nice herb robert flowers are up close, with the yellow pollen grains highlighting their attractiveness to bees in particular.

Thanks for reading.

Macro

Bogshrooms, and a life lived wild and free 🍄🐐

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Mayo, Ireland, April 2023

I went for an evening walk down the old trackway to the foot of the mountain. The track was flooded, meaning that without wellies I had to find tussocks and rocks to move further. Where the track turned, I noticed a ram of some kind grazing up ahead. After a time, I realised it was a goat, most likely a wild goat from the flock that roams the mountain. I had never seen one so close before and began to feel some concern for it. Why was it down here in the floodplain rather than up there out of reach among the boulders and bogs?

Its bleating was weak, distressed. I felt anxiety rising, that I needed to act. I looked at my phone about guidance for finding a wild animal of this size, but it was stuff I already knew and I realised I wasn’t acting rationally. I walked forward, a little fearful that the goat may show aggression, so when it turned to look at me, I backed away and waited.

The goat lowered itself to a sitting position, bleating in a way that suggested distress, weakness. Its voice was breaking, fading. It tried to stand but its legs gave way. It lay with its head on the ground, bleating again. I hadn’t moved, realising what was happening. Its stomach stopped moving. I approached it where it lay, its ears and lips were trembling. Then, stillness. Its eye remained open, and did not move. It had passed away.

A life lived wild on the mountain had ended at its foot, in a very short space of time. There was very little visible suffering, though some fear as it realised it was losing its ability to graze and trot.

I continued on and headed up the mountain. Seeing the death of the wild goat made me want to press on, a gentle reminder that all life has its limits. To the west, Nephin appeared in the distance, Lough Conn as silvery as ever at its foot. In the south-west Croagh Patrick could be see behind a rank of wind turbines. As I reached a curve in the path, where a cleft had been carved into the hillside, a small group of wild goats appeared on the hilltop. We watched eachother for a while, before they headed off out of sight.

I reached the top for the first time since 2017. A broken flock of sheep circled me against the horizon of rocky outcrops, mountains and distant loughs. Being up there will always remind me of the times me and my Dad made it up, always out of breath and red-faced.

Surrounded by bogs and scars of turf cutting, I looked down to try find an unusual species of some kind that I might not see elsewhere, due to the remoteness of the place. Down in a small bit of bog, with sphagnum and other mosses, a group of golden mushrooms were growing.

I had a second camera with me that had a macro lens attached for ease. I took some photos, unsure of the species. Its gills were not unlike a waxcap (hygrocybe) but I knew so little about boglife that I was happy simply to find some shrooms.

I’m still waiting on feedback on iNaturalist, so this remains a mystery. Unless someone reading this knows and can add some information in the comments?

I headed back down the mountain and along the track. There the wild goat rested. I hadn’t imagined its death, and it wasn’t trying to fool me. I went back to the cottage unnerved, reminding myself of a life lived wild and free in the Ox Mountains.

Thanks for reading.

Fungi | Ireland

The wildlife of London talk at Bell House, Dulwich

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Hi everyone,

Next Tuesday 18th April at 19:00 I’m giving an in-person talk at Bell House in Dulwich, SE London. The subject of the talk will be London’s wildlife, with (unsurprisingly) a focus on the woodlands that the city emerged from, and the role they still play today.

Tickets are £5 and the proceedings are split between me and Bell House: https://www.bellhouse.co.uk/events/2023/4/18/nature-talk-london-in-the-wild-with-daniel-greenwood

This talk should be of interest to anyone with an interest in landscape history, how wildlife is impacted by human development, both positively or otherwise. I’ll also be talking about some of the more iconic species found in the city’s reaches.

Thanks for reading,
Daniel

Poetry: nature writing book titles they won’t publish

Daniel Greenwood3 Comments


My life inside a snail shell
The Funguy: How suggesting I’m into psychedelics made me interesting to other people
Living in a badger sett for 15 minutes and other memories
Dog poo diaries: a guide to chucking bags at trees
Memoirs of a sexist birder: volume 9 and still they won’t edit me
Seagull: a day in the life of Britain’s most hated white thing
See no weevil: My failed journey through Britain’s beetle populations
Guided by porpoises: I read all the field guides so you don’t have to
Howling like a Woolf: Bloomsbury only publish you if you’re privately educated or on TV
Grassways: wild lines
So sewer me: a rat’s tail
Chasing ground nesting birds: a dog’s tale
Urban city wild jungle street town nature adventure chronicles
Human nature: my vague explanation across 220 pages for why I am natural
Human naturer: the sequel to the one above, this time with references to that one
The Tree: they asked me to write something about trees
Roamania: the year I walked on every inch of England
Man chop wet wood, make fire eventually: my attempts to inject some much-needed masculinity into the nature scene
Hedge fund manager: a guide to raising money for conservation projects
Windy Cindy: the day I got blown away by a tweet someone wrote about the weather
T O X I C: I ate all the poisonous plants so you… don’t… hav–

© Daniel James Greenwood, 2023