Here we are, another June slipping away and with it another #30DaysWild. Thankfully the humidity has dissipated this week and it’s been more comfortable to spend time outside (for me).
The final week of another June #30DaysMacro challenge, here we go:
Day 22/30: leaving my mum’s house in SE London I noticed this yellow shell moth on the frosted glass. iNaturalist helped me with the identification.
Day 23/30: the zebra jumping spiders have been absent for me this spring but I am noticing them now. This little charmer was in the garden hedge.
Day 24/30: there have been a new range of bees arriving in my garden as the spring plants shift to summer flowers. The birds-foot trefoil has attracted leafcutter bees like the one above. They have an unusual flight, almost like a kind of hover.
Day 25/30: this was a day of weekend working and several hours travelling, so I had to make do with taking photos in my garden at dusk. I used the built-in flash in the Olympus TG-6 and wasn’t enamoured with the results, mainly because the flash isn’t softened by a diffuser. This mirid bug is out of focus but I enjoy its colours.
Day 26/30: the insect populations seem to be greater now that summer has arrived. Going out of the house first thing has been a good chance to see the range of hoverflies and other bees. This hover was doing that odd leg cleaning ritual and I managed to catch it with ‘legs akimbo’!
Day 27/30: at last a good show from the wool carder bees. I’ve written about these wonderful bees before – if you want to attract them get yourself some lamb’s ear (not literally), also sold as ‘stachys’.
Day 28/30: an evening foray in my mum’s garden late into the evening, in cooler weather. I spotted this mirid bug climbing over the flowers of a snowberry.
Day 29/30: in SE London I found this grasshopper nibbling away on a grass blade. It was far smaller than the photo suggests. The grass was blowing in the breeze which made the focus a bit difficult to pin down, so it’s not the sharpest picture here.
Day 30/30: and so to the final day, one of the few rainy days in June. I was out on the South Downs for a walk and found this pyramidal orchid growing in a laneside verge. A beautiful plant of chalk grassland reaching its peak.
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.
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.
And so to the final week of the 30 days of macro photography challenge. You can see week one, week two, and week three, by clicking their names.
Day 22/30: a seed of unknown origin resting on a fennel stem. I think it looks like Einstein!Day 23/30: I didn’t manage to get this photo of a green nettle weevil in focus but the colours on its body are incredible. Perhaps it was a bit older and so had lost some scales.
Day 24/30: the very next day I found another green nettle weevil on my green wheelie bin! I don’t think it’s the same one, but it was posing perfectly and in focus this time. I always want to eye in focus with invertebrate photos.
Day 25/30: something that needs its own post here. It’s a fly that’s succumbed to entomophthora fungus, a parasitic species. I was astonished to find this having read about this kind of thing before, but never expecting to see it.
Day 26/30: in my garden as the light began to fade, I spotted these shieldbug nymphs on a grass head. They’re probably green shieldbugs, even though they’re black at this stage.
Day 27/30: another evening photo, this time of a green mirid bug in some rather posh mallow flowers.
Day 28/30: nettles are great for invertebrates. This is a nursery web spider garden her nest web, which will contain her eggs before they hatch into spiderlings. Hence the name ‘nursery web.’
Day 29/30: I took some photos of a large slug eating the remains of some pigeon feathers but I opted for this one instead. I took a similar image towards the beginning of this challenge, so it felt fitting that the hedgerow-snail-shell-portal-to-another-world would be opening once more as it neared the end.
Day 30/30: I spent the morning in a very nice woodland in Hampshire for the final day of the challenge. I witnessed many inverts at a period when I couldn’t photograph them, but when I had five minutes I found this leaf beetle exploring the edge of its world.
Day 15/30: looking around my Mum’s garden in London, I was harnessing the softer evening light and hoping some insects would come and bask. Lo and behold, this large red damselfly flew over my shoulder and landed on a leaf half an arm’s length away!
Day 16/30: I’m not convinced 2022 is a particularly good insect year in the SE of England, but small tortoiseshells have been out in force this year. This one was on a salvia at Polesdon Lacey in the North Downs.
Day 17/30: at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve in East Sussex, I notice peacock butterfly caterpillars racing across the concrete causeway. Somehow, this caterpillar had been hugely unlucky, with its head being trampled on by a foot or a bike. There was a bloke zipping around on an ebike that looked like a motorcycle, which may have been what squashed it. Other caterpillars did make it across, where they were headed I have no idea.
Day 18/30: the difficulty of a photo challenge each day is managing your expectations and trying to keep things simple. I took this photo of a micro-moth in my house at about 9pm or later. At first it looked like a little smudge but with the benefit of flash and a bit of editing, it has red hair like me!
Day 19/30: speaking of red hair, I was taking some macro photos in my garden when a fox that visits us most evenings came as close as she ever has. She always comes to sniff my camera but her boldness suprised me. I recorded this video quickly on my phone. It got quite a lot of traction on Twitter which was quite exhausting but nice that people are interested in foxes.
Day 20/30: at lunchtime I went to a nature reserve within walking distance and found lots of damselflies gallivanting in a nettle patch. This blue damselflies were focused enough for me to get quite close and take a photo.
Day 21/30: I like this photo because the fennel leaves and stems make it look quite abstract. This is probably a meadow spittlebug, a common leafhopper. I took this one after sundown.
I’ve had a burst of American visitors in recent days (to my blog, not my house). So thanks for visiting, y’all, and sorry about the year you’ve had. You may have noticed I’ve slipped to monthly posts on here. Between April and October I posted blogs every Monday without pause, which is a tricky task…
Here’s my seasonal update of stuff you don’t need to know about, but then welcome to the Internet. What I’m writing Soon I will be self-publishing my third poetry collection, Fool’s Wood. It’s seven years since my last one and this collection has taken longer because of LIFE. There will be a booklet and also…
I’ve been slow to post week two of my June 2022 macro challenge, mainly due to offline and online duties. But don’t worry, the photos are still being taken and I’m on track to get it all done!
Day 8/30: some heavy rain in West Sussex brought some of the more ephemeral mushrooms out into the open air. These mower’s mushrooms (also known also brown mottlegill) appeared for a day or so after a downpour on my unmown lawn. It has been so hot and dry that the lawn has barely even grown anyway to be honest!
Day 9/30: I spent a good few hours walking around a local woodland expecting miracles (“assumption is a curse” as an old school friend used to say). Instead I just remembered how difficult woodland invertebrate macro can be. It was only until I got out onto the heathland, where the sun hit the woodland edge, that I saw more interesting things. This pic above isn’t perfect, it’s a bit shaky I think, but I do love the story. Ants and aphids have mutualistic relationships which allow the ants to harvest honeydew and the aphids to be protected from predators and also disease. The ants can remove diseased aphids to stop outbreaks. Amazing!
Day 10/30: This was one of those days when I was out and about doing other things but had a camera with a lens with me that did macro. This is a lesser stag beetle clinging to the corner of a brick wall.
Day 11/30: I only managed to venture out into my garden as night was falling. I found an absolutely miniscule wasp of some kind, as well as a typical yellowjacket harvesting wood shavings from the fence. The bug is probably a mirid or plant bug growing into an adult.
Day 12/30: in my garden again and I found this quite beautiful mirid bug.
Day 13/30: venturing out for a long-distance walk in the Surrey Hills, I was amazed to find bird’s nest orchids growing under some yew trees on chalk. I have never seen this orchid before and wasn’t ever expecting to see it. The delights of hiking or rambling over longer distances, especially in June.
Day 14/30: back in the garden with the mirid bugs. This was a very small, perhaps juvenile of some kind, pottering about on a very hairy hazel leaf in my garden.
Here’s another entry in my slow-blogging Oak Timbers series. You can view my galleries and posts archive here. I visited Salisbury in Wiltshire (south-west England) for the first time in 2023 and was really charmed by the place. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, Salisbury is the place for you. Here’s a gallery…
I’m getting into more of a routine of recording and editing audio, so here is the latest episode of Unlocking Landscapes. Listen on Podbean or via the usual platforms. Also via YouTube: https://youtu.be/y1K9Pqx68to?si=B-Fdhf3sdDH35Z8w Following on from July’s rather optimistic fungi walk, I popped back to the same area of ancient Wealden woodland to see if…
Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria, June 2025 This is a longer post of the images I captured during a recent visit to Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. We travelled to Innsbruck on a sleeper train from Amsterdam. It’s such a great experience and is significantly lower in carbon emissions compared with flying. If you consider the fact…
I’m back from my annual visit to the west of Ireland. I managed a couple of day trips to forage for photos, which will crystallise later this year into dedicated posts, all being well. Like many people I enjoy the Blind Boy Podcast, none more so when I have the headspace to take in all…
Every June the Wildlife Trusts run a campaign called 30 Days Wild. The aim is to encourage people to notice nature at this special time of year and do one thing each day that connects you with the wild world around you. Last year I did #30DaysMacro, taking and posting one macro wildlife photo each day in June on Twitter. This year, I thought I’d have another go.
I’m going to break the posts up into one each week. It’s actually a lot of work so blogs will be confined to this for now. Here goes!
Day 1/30: zebra jumping spider
My first encounter was with this zebra jumping spider in my garden. I got a bit lucky as it held this position and faced the camera for a good few seconds. They’re usually quite, er, jumpy! I also found some other nice subjects, though, including a mint moth (which seems very common in my garden) and a beautiful greenbottle fly.
Day 2/30: wasp beetle
In the garden again. Really pleased to find a wasp beetle in the hedge just resting on a leaf. They’re another one of those wasp-faking insects, using those terrifying colour patterns to warn any predators. I also found this ichneumon wasp (I think). That is a fairly lethal looking ovipositor protruding at the rear.
Day 3/30: snail vortex
June has been quite wet and grey so far, which is helpful for macro in some ways but not all. The snails get a lot of motivation from the wet hedges and shrubs. This caterpillar was hiding away in the aromatic chambers of a rose flower.
Day 4/30: bumblebee-mimicry
In the garden I spotted this bumblebee-mimic hoverfly on the fence. I’d seen them a couple of days ago duelling over territory, but they were too energised then to get a photo. This one was nice and chilled. It’s nice seeing all those yellow pollen grains, though I’m not sure which flower produced them. The caterpillar here may be the one that was taking shelter the previous day.
Day 5/30: wasp cleaning antennae
Guess where? Garden again! Another cloudy day but quite warm so the insects were out and about. I got quite close to this wasp which was giving its antennae a good clean.
Day 6/30: bee phone pic
Due to work commitments/time constraints I couldn’t spend any time in my garden with dedicated macro equipment. I was walking down a main road in town and saw a nice siding of thistles in front of a housing development. Lo and behold, there was my macro photo. A white or buff-tailed bumblebee was nectaring on that lovely pink bloom.
Day 7/30: the slug ate my salvia!
A day of rain, as evidenced by the raindrops around the hoverfly. Also more motivation for the slugs and snails (who have my backing) to teach me not to plant certain things in the flower bed. The slug here was doing a rather acrobatic job of eating the salvia I planted out recently. There’s also a very soggy bumblebee, and some kind of lacewing or hoverfly larva.
This is the first of a series of posts I’ve been working on covering national relationships with mushrooms. It’s just a bit of fun, but there’s definitely some interesting stuff to share.
In August I made my annual visit to the Weald and Downland Living Museum in the South Downs. You can see my timber-framed building photo gallery here. This is the first view you encounter inside the museum grounds after you pay your entry fee. Amazing to think the medieval hall house is from Cray in…
In June 2021 I undertook a variant (not that kind of variant) of the Wildlife Trusts’ 30 Days Wild campaign. I decided to try a month-long project of taking a macro photo every day: #30DaysMacro.
It was a lot of work, mainly in processing and tweeting the photos to keep up with the community aspect. But it reminded me of the importance of making time for yourself each day, even if only for 5-10 minutes, to go outside and look at things other than a computer or phone.
In the past 18 months my salaried work has become screen-based, when once I used to spend several days outdoors each week talking to people and monitoring wildlife. It’s not healthy, but it’s a byproduct of UK lockdowns.
I feel a bit as if this was such an intensive assignment that it has burned me out a bit photography-wise, among everything else happening in Brexitland (it didn’t come home in the end 🦁🦁🦁). I definitely hurt my back from some poorly considered leaning over waist-high hedges (bending with my lower back, not knees, etc.).
Almost all the photos were taken in my small urban garden, with a handful taken away from home. All were in Sussex. I am adamant that travelling for macro is often unwise, depending on your focus. Macro takes a lot of time and if photographing wildlife, you need to know your patch. Otherwise you spend ages trying to understand the landscape when you could be taking photos.
Below I go through the photo captured each day. Hopefully this post unclogs my macro blogs, which have been waiting on this monster post for a while now.
Thanks for taking a look and I hope it inspires you to consider the wilder things in life.
1st June 2021: aphids protecting their young (I think) on the underside of a sycamore leaf.
2nd June 2021: a noble false widow spider in my porch. There is a whole lot of hysteria about this species, which has actually been in the UK since the 1800s. It has caused me no trouble.
3rd June 2021: a moth resting on a leaf at dusk. I was working quite hard to get this pic and as the temperature fell it calmed a bit and let me get close.
4th June 2021: a noble false widow spider on my kitchen surface ledge. The weather wasn’t great on this day, so I had to find something in my house!
5th June 2021: a red and black froghopper in the South Downs near Alfriston. I walked 20 miles on this day for Macmillan Cancer Support and found this lovely hopper snoozing in the field edge.
6th June 2021: a mint moth selecting its preferred thyme flower. This is one of the more common or visible day-flying moths I encounter.
7th June 2021: a green shieldbug, the most common of its kind in my garden.
8th June 2021: one of the highlights – a fencepost jumping spider in my garden (on the fence!). I wrote a post (lol) about this encounter which you can read here.
9th June 2021: a bumblebee worker drinking aphid honeydew from the curled leaves of an apple tree in my garden. This was fascinating behaviour, with many bees of different species visiting this tree to nectar. I posted it on Twitter and a lot of people got in touch to say they were seeing the same thing. Glad I shared.
10th June 2021: a wonderful caterpillar in my green alkanet patch. I’ve not attempted an ID yet.
11th June 2021: this is a fly I see often in the garden. It is so cool. Its wings often whirr around its body as it walks around a leaf.
12th June 2021: a weekend away in East Sussex, met this well-travelled painted lady butterfly along a country lane.
13th June 2021: the carapace of a European green crab at Rye Bay.
14th June 2021: a beautiful gingery moth that spent the weekend looking after my house for me. Not sure of the species.
15th July 2021: the halfway point and an exciting find. I spotted a bee in the garden which looked unusual. Having got a photo I saw that it was a sharp-tailed bee. Delighted to have this in my garden as I’ve never seen one before and it was a new species for the garden list.
16th June 2021: green nettle weevils are funny. They play hide and seek sometimes. This weevil was happy enough to have its photo taken for a little while.
17th June 2021: a wet and rainy day when I thought a photo might not be possible. The hedge in my garden was alive with these beautiful snails. I opened the aperture to allow blur to occur and highlight the swirling shell.
18th June 2021: common jelly spot grows on the bird table in my garden. After enough rain has fallen it bursts back to life and probably chucks out some spores.
19th June 2021: a plume moth on another wet one in the garden. I love the pattern on this species, which I think may be a beautiful plume.
20th June 2021: a trip to the Adur Valley which I blogged about here. A ruby-tailed wasp, one of the most beautiful insects in the UK.
21st June 2021: another rainy day. I have learned how to find meadow spittlebugs in grass heads in recent years after finding one just outside my back door.
22nd June: a hairy masked bee (perhaps the American name), one of the yellow-faced bees, Hylaeus. These are tiny bees and not easy to photograph.
23rd June: one of my favourite partners in macro, a zebra jumping spider. They’re devilishly tricky to get in focus sometimes. I think this is just out, but I like its posture.
24th June: a running crab spider waiting for its lunch delivery. The fly behind probably didn’t know it was there.
25th June: another highlight which caused quite a lot of back strain! Here you can see an ant harvesting (and I think consuming) the honey dew from aphids they have farmed. This needs a blog all to itself to go through the amazing ecology of these two species.
26th June: I went to my local nature reserve, a farm managed by the council, to look for some different types of arthropod (insects and spiders, basically). It was hard work but I got some decent images. I like this one because it looks like this beetle is attempting to get better signal! This visit needs its own blog post as well.
27th June: I was tired after my macro outing the day before but managed to find this small green fly in my garden. I like its 1980s robot-like compound eyes.
28th June: I had been observing a large, dangly spider that lives in the corner of my kitchen for several weeks. I decided to get a closer look and was amazed by what I found. This is a cellar or daddy longlegs spider. They are from the tropics and are well established in the UK, having been here for hundreds of years. This also needs its own post!
29th June: I planted stachys (lamb’s ears) especially for this species, the wool carder bee. I haven’t seen much of them this year but they did show up towards the end of June. I love them, they’re also easy to photograph in cooler weather as they just clamp on to the flowers and chill. I blogged about them in 2020.
30th June 2021: and so the final day. I dropped by a favourite Sussex Wildlife Trust reserve on the way home, which I posted about here. This tiny slug was having a good look at me as I searched for mushrooms and slime moulds. It felt like a good reminder that as much as I was watching the wildlife, it was also watching me.
Thanks for making it this far and I hope you will spend some time out there looking out for insects, spiders, slugs and snails. They need us.
Unlocking Landscapes 