I was sitting in my garden when a large, wasp-like insect zoomed into view. It dropped into the skimmia and began nectaring on the flowers.
‘Hornet!’ I called out, but trying to be quiet enough not to spook the insect. I captured these images, convinced it was a hornet, the first I had ever seen in my garden.
When I popped a crude phone photo (not the world class images above) onto iNaturalist I began to have second thoughts. The first suggestions were for a species of wasp, the median wasp. That is now the consensus, and so my hornet drought goes on. But it is a beautiful thing.
My house is quite old, built in the 1840s. The path outside our door is known as a ‘twitten’, a Sussex colloquial name for a little footpath. The path is bricked (like many of them are) and always flushes with spring flowers. Lesser celandine and grape hyacinth are two of the species that enjoy the margins.
Does this rose regrowth remind you of a certain American President?
A few holes have appeared in the lawn. I haven’t seen who created these mini-bunkers but I am confident they’re mining bees of some kind.
The red mason bees have been rather slow to appear this year and many of the bamboo slots are still sealed. Some of the bees have been hovering around the entrances, as above.
I took this photo of two – yes, two – collared doves with my macro lens. Macro lenses usually often can act as a telephoto lens because you need space between you and the thing you’re photographing to ensure you don’t spook the subject. The flag isn’t mine, as you may have guessed if you’ve ever met me or read this blog before 😉
The pansies are doing well in the milk churns, a good place to end.
Five years ago we were facing up to the Covid-19 lockdowns. In response to the stay-at-home orders I began a weekly macro blog, an assignment from the gods? No, just our Supreme Leader at the time Boris Johnson and his better half in Public Health Chris Whitty.
While I can’t promise weekly blogs due to work and life commitments, it’s definitely time to dust off the macro lens after its winter slumber and step out into the garden to see what’s happening!
As ever, there’s far more going on than you might think. I also think it’s important that we look at and try to understand invertebrates when this misinformation is coming from the leader of the country (I know it could be worse, but get your facts straight, folks).
We depend on nature and our ecosystems and their wildlife for our food, clean water, fresh air and function. Wildlife has a right to exist and the world does not revolve around our species.
The snails are roosting in our front porch. My wife was wondering if they might be too hot there, as the paint’s white and it can get quite sweltry in there.
It looks to me like something is going on with the shells and they may be roosting to grow their shells. It’s not something I know much about. Please let me know in the comments if you have any info 🙂
We have some nice pansies my wife planted out by our front door. You can see the bee drive-in here with the dark landing marks and the brush of hairs to ensure the pollen of other pansies are retrieved from a visiting bee.
The broom plant flowers in a subtle way, these little yellow petals appearing from the red sepals.
This is a common little fly that seems to stand around on leaves and petals for ages!
Their eyes are very cool, and I enjoyed the single spot in their wings as well. These flowers are some saxifrages my wife bought from the garden centre.
In January on a cold Saturday afternoon I laid or ‘plashed’ the hazel shrub I had planted out in our hedge. It’s a little hedge, but the usual shrub that made up the hedge has died back so I needed to take action. It’s so pleasing (‘pleaching’?) to see the hazel respond so well and new shoots to appear from the lain-down stems.
I also uprooted a sapling that a squirrel had cached as a seed, which is doing well. I planted this out around the time of frosts, which shows hazel’s hardiness. I did know that was the case, but it’s nice to see it come through.
The normal hedge I mentioned is this Skimmia japonica. It’s good for pollinators, no doubt. But it doesn’t seem to last well without pruning.
It was abuzz with drone flies as spring really began to arrive in mid-late March.
These drone flies (Eristalis) are probably the most common winged-insect in our garden at the moment. They’re quite funny I think.
Bay flowers promise so much, but they are quite modest really. I am hoping this provides some decent nectar for any invertebrate that needs it.
I spotted this little crab spider hanging out on one of my thermal t-shirts. It’s probably Misumena vatia, the most common of the crab spiders.
A cat monument in our garden in memory of our cat Kaiser who loved this spot in the flowerbed. The wolf spiders also love this spot because it gets so warm. The white stone of the cat is even warmer than the surrounding soil. I think this may be a male and a female wolf spider, with the male the smaller of the two, with the palps (dark spots at the front of its head, in the cat’s eye!).
The fence next to the cat monument was a helpful basking spot for the first nursery web spider I’ve seen so far this year.
The flowering of our magnolia is short and sharp, but these globular flowers are a delight. Magnolias are very old trees in evolutionary terms, and here’s to another year under their belts.
This is a showcase of the posh mushroom pics I gathered with my proper camera during a visit to the wonderful Dartmoor National Park in November 2024. Mad props to my wife who is chief squirrel during these Devonian photo forages.
The photos were taken on Sunday 10th November 2024.
I write these blogs in my spare time because I want to raise awareness about the beauty and diversity of fungi. If you enjoy reading them you can support my blog here.
A reminder that I am not encouraging people to pick or remove mushrooms in these areas. You could very easily clear all the mushrooms we saw within minutes. I think that would be sad because it would mean other people wouldn’t get to see them and learn or be inspired by them. I think with rare species like waxcaps that are featured here, we should be taking photos and submitting them to apps like iNaturalist or Plantlife’s waxcap campaign. In some areas that would be illegal anyway, due to site protections.
While I don’t believe 2024 will go down as a vintage mushroom season, there were a lot of lovely waxcaps to be found on the moor in a place we’ve been visiting since 2016. Moorlands seem to be quite good for waxcaps, not that I know why, and also for lichens because they are rocky, wet and the air is fresh.
I’ll post the images in chronological order for my own sanity.
This is the landscape where the fungi lived – moorland with a view towards the Teign estuary.
The first fungal find were these eyelash cups (Scutellinia) growing on animal dung! Plenty more dungi to come.
Waxcaps make up the crux of the mushrooms we found. These beauties are butter waxcaps (Hygrocybe ceracea).
Not to be outdone, some very photogenic sulphur tuft (Hypholoma fasciculare) were found as we climbed the moor.
These mottlegills (Panaeolus) are quite common in places with grazing livestock like Dartmoor ponies.
My best guess is that this was one of the moss bells (Galerina).
These lichens are beautiful. I don’t see them very often because I have to travel west see moorland. They’re probably gritty British soldier lichens (Cladonia floerkeana).
I’m unsure what this species is, but it’s a beauty.
As we approached the more remote moorland (in terms of people living out there) the waxcaps began to appear in the cropped turf. This is another example of how important grazing to some degree is, and how it mimics very ancient processes. These mushrooms would not grow in closed-canopy woodlands.
This is one of the red waxcaps, but I’m unsure if it’s honey waxcap or not. It looks too orange for scarlet waxcap.
This is one of several species under the umbrella of blackening waxcap or witches’ bonnet (Hygrocybe conica complex).
This is a species I only really see in the west of England or Ireland. It’s one of the dog lichens (Peltigera).
These are crimson waxcaps (Hygrocybe punicea), stunning mushrooms indeed. There were some young men passing by who stopped to admire the colours of these impressive shrooms.
I don’t have an identification yet for this gorgeous waxcap and the closest I can guess is a colour variation of parrot waxcap (Gliophorus psittacinus).
This is meadow waxcap (Hygrocybe pratensis), often fan-like, always best photographed from ground level.
I’m not up on my corals and suchlike, but these are probably in this family.
The walk ended in a little graveyard, great places for waxcaps, by the way. That was evidenced again by this clutch of what I would say were scarlet waxcaps (Hygrocybe coccinea).
Phew!
Thanks for reading.
I write these blogs in my spare time because I want to raise awareness about the beauty and diversity of fungi. If you enjoy reading themyou can support my blog here.
This time five years ago I was hunkering down into my Macro Monday blog series as the pandemic locked down on us all. Now we are at the short end of the lean mushroom season. Spring is about to, well, spring, so the temperatures will rise and fungi will fruit again in modest numbers.
With that in mind, I made a right fool of myself with my neighbour this week. But then again, at least I’m not threatening them with military invasion and putting tariffs on the bird identification information I share.
No, instead I got excited about what I thought was false puffball (Enteridium lycoperdon), a species of slime mould (not actually fungi, but growing in the same way and places) that can be observed at this time of year.
On the way out for my morning walk, I spotted some white mushrooming thing at the bottom of my neighbour’s fencepost. Wow, I thought, false puffball on our doorstep!
The organism was white, had appeared quite quickly, and was growing in a damp location on decaying wood. Perfect!
I sent some photos over to my neighbour to say what I’d seen. Obviously he had no idea what I was on about, and so he checked with his roofer who confirmed they had sprayed expanding foam (in two seriously random locations, in my defence) while working on the house the other day.
If false puffball is what it says it is, does that now mean that expanding foam is false false puffball?
For comparison, here’s the real thing from back in that fateful month of March 2020:
One thing I have learned from this process of misidentification is that my blog appears quite high up in the rankings on Google for ‘false puffball’. It comes at a time when Google emailed me to ask if they could feature some of my photos on their store blog and do an interview.
‘What’s in it for me and my phone,’ I asked.
One of the richest companies in the world, and it turns out they don’t want to pay to use your images or harness your knowledge and experience. What a bunch of puffballs. I hope you appreciate it’s the principle here that matters. Remember those, principles?
So it goes that the only way I have ever been paid as a photographer is when you lovely people ‘buy me coffee’ via my Ko-fi page. Thank you to everyone who has supported me.
Anyway, I hope Google like these absolutely stunning false puffball images. Shot on a Gaggle Tinsel 35c. Feel free to use guys! 🙂
I had some hours to take one Friday afternoon in August and so headed to my local heathy woodland to seek out some summer fungi.
I found zero mushrooms, but did learn that summer wasn’t quite over.
In a clearing created a few years ago by the removal of non-native conifers, a heathland has flourished. Sussex, like other southern counties, once had far more heathland before it was either built on or converted to coniferous forestry (like this particular site).
This little patch of restored heathland was zinging with insect life, not least on a fallen birch tree.
Enter: the magic birch tree. Or at least sunbathe on it.
I revered it in such a way because it was providing roosting space for one of my favourite subjects – robberflies!
I managed to get my best ever photos of robberflies here, thanks to the capabilities of my camera, and a little bit of that famous fencepost knowledge.
Robberflies are predators of other flies, but also wasps. The photo above was taken using an in-built function of the camera to stack about 15 photos together to create a seamlessly in-focus image. It worked to great effect here.
Less dramatic was this flesh-fly, one that is actually quite smart in their black and white get-up with red compound eyes.
On the toe of my shoe a hoverfly that looked like a scuba diver was resting.
There was plenty of evidence of burrowing insects in the form of these pilot holes.
I didn’t get to see who lived here. Probably solitary wasps or bees.
What this blog can never express is the sheer number of grasshoppers. Every footsteps sent insects like the one above flying for the safety of a grassy tussock.
The birches were showing signs of autumn and its inexorable approach.
In August I was camping in West Sussex. On the final morning I opened the tent door and nearly stepped on a dragonfly that was resting in the grass outside.
It had been a cloudy night and the ground was very dry compared with the previously dew-laden start.
The dragonfly is probably a migrant hawker (Aeshna mixta) and is known to breed in SE England. As its name suggests it can also migrate to England from southern Europe.
It’s a dream to find a dragonfly in such a restful state, although the insect is vulnerable. It was in the right place however, especially if it wanted its portrait done.
It was an excellent opportunity to look at the wings of the dragonfly close up. They are renowned for their beauty and likeness to stained glass.
By looking at the wings I noticed that a planthopper bug had leapt aboard the dragonfly.
Here’s a closer view. I’m not sure of the species but it’s one I don’t remember seeing before.
A day earlier we had walked along the River Adur, famous for its connection at Knepp Wildland. It was good to see some more wasps around, with so few of them being reported this year.
The wasp is scrapping a layer of wood from a handrail or fence post to be used in the construction of a nest. You can see the ball below its mandibles above.
What a lot of hard work, worthy of my respect that’s for sure.
A break from my blitz of my usual summer macro posts for something a bit more, monumental.
I’ve been using a dedicated macro lens since 2014, so this year marks my 10 year anniversary.
Now, no one cares about this, and I only just remembered, but it gives me an excuse to share 10 of my favourite invertebrate macro images. I’m not including fungi in this, they are a different game entirely for me.
In no particular order:
Hairy-footed flower bee in Peckham, London (April 2018)
Nikon D750 + Sigma 105mm macro lens
This picture was taken while I worked for London Wildlife Trust at the Centre for Wildlife Gardening in SE London. I knew that hairy-footed flower bees were keen on flowering currant. I got down at a good angle and managed to capture the bee just as it visited the flower. I love the pink of the flowers and the isolated shape of the bee.
Chalcid wasp, West Sussex (August 2021)
Olympus EM-5 Mark III + 60mm macro lens
Wasps fascinate me, none more so than the parasitic species which are numbered in the thousands. This little wasp is a chalcid wasp which I saw one grey summer’s afternoon. You can read the post about it here.
Ant harvesting honeydew, my garden in West Sussex (June 2021)
Nikon D5600 + Sigma 105mm macro lens
Ants farm aphids for their honeydew and it’s something I’d always wanted to get a decent photo of. Right by my garden door this garden ant was gathering the honeydew from a group of aphids. I took a number of photos and cropped this one down. I like the glow of the globule and the warm background colours.
Fencepost jumping spider, my garden in West Sussex (June 2021)
Nikon D5600 + Sigma 105mm macro lens
Spiders are an unknown quantity for me but the lockdowns helped me to learn more about this in my house and garden. I was taking some photos after work one night when his large and rather pink jumping spider emerged from my fence. It was such a joy to have it wait so patiently for its close up. See blog here.
Silver-studded blue, South Moravia, Czechia (August 2016)
Nikon D750 + Sigma 105mm macro lens
I have to thank my friend Karel for inspiring me to take the plunge and buy a macro lens. So Czechia, where I first met him, forms a place in my macro story. When visiting there in 2016 my friend Pete and I were introduced to a meadow by Zuzka, our host. The meadow was alive with butterflies and wildflowers. We found hundreds of silver-studded blues, many of them roosting on cooler August days. This is a memory as much as a favourite macro photo. See the blog here.
Javelin wasp, my garden in West Sussex (August 2020)
Nikon D5600 + Sigma 105mm macro lens
I will always remember this photo because my dad was with me, visiting from London for the day in those strict Covid times. Along with my mum (hello), my neighbours were also there to see this stunning ichneumon – the javelin wasp. It was a rare social moment, and one of the last times I managed to enjoy nature in the company of my dad before he passed away the following year. See the blog here.
Planthopper, my garden in West Sussex (June 2020)
Olympus EM10 MIII + 60mm macro lens
In June 2020 I was taking a macro photo every day. It was a rainy afternoon when I realised I needed to pull a macro pic out of the bag. I opened the garden door and found a grass head a few steps away. Inside it I found this planthopper roosting, so took a few pics and went straight back inside!
Tawny mining bee, my parents’ garden gate in London (April 2017)
Nikon D750 + Sigma 105mm macro lens
I was staying with my parents during the Easter weekend and keen to explore the macro world in their garden. I noticed some little holes drilled into the garden gate, which had been in place for maybe 50 years. I noticed a bee heading in and out and waited on the step for the bee to emerge. Bingo! This lovely male tawny mining bee popped his head out to say hello.
Plant bug, Coulsdon, Surrey (July 2017)
Nikon D750 + Sigma 105mm macro lens
Farthing Downs on the Surrey/London border is where I would spend hours at a time honing my macro skills (basically the art of positioning and then finding subjects, nothing too technical). You could lie on the grass paths and not see anyone for hours. It was also the first place I took my new lens in 2014 (Sigma 105mm) to try it out. One summer’s day I found this plant bug climbing to the top of a scabious flower. It is one of my most accomplished pics and shows full-frame cameras at their most powerful, with beautiful colours and detail. See the blog here.
Paper wasp, South Moravia, Czechia (August 2016)
Nikon D750 + Sigma 105mm macro lens
Another one from my visit to Czechia in 2016. It was a great time for insects and with a more gentle heat than the months preceding. This was my first time seeing a paper wasp. I love these social wasps, which we don’t have in Britain, and I love the way it’s in a bed of wild carrot.
Here’s to another decade in macro.
Thanks for reading and for the support on here. I really appreciate it.
I write these blogs in my spare time because I want to raise awareness about the beauty and diversity of our landscapes. If you enjoy reading them you can support my blog here.
Warnham Local Nature Reserve, West Sussex, July 2024
I was making my first meaningful trip out to a wild space after being ill with Covid, to see if I could concentrate enough on taking some macro pics. Thankfully there were some very docile bugs pleading for their close up. Here you go, team.
I’ve missed a lot of the macro season this year, what has probably been one of the ‘worst’ summers in this part of England. Lots of rain, quite cool, clear lack of insects. I’m only just getting over brain fog so not able to compute how worrying the insect declines are right now. It seems that approving the use of bee-killing pesticides without appropriate risk assessment doesn’t help.
I was fortunate to spot this cinnamon bug nectaring in the flowerhead of a Michaelmas daisy within a few minutes of my visit to Warnham Local Nature Reserve. I love how this pollinating beetles get so covered by the pollen. It’s a bit like me after eating a choc ice.
Though flies are feared and reviled for their connections with unpleasant organic matter in this world, some of them are very interesting to look at. Many of them also tend to be pollinators. It’s not all about the bees. This fly is probably Nowickia ferox, which feeds on flowers. Moth fans – look away now. Their larvae develop in the dark arches moth.
Dock bugs are a common sight in southern England, especially in flowery grasslands and meadows. They are very easy to photograph – they’re like the mushrooms of the insect world, slow moving, if at all. How trusting.
Elsewhere, this mid-summer period is one of hoverflies, many which looked very similar to the untrained eye (this one) but which can be nice subjects among the flowers of hogweed and other umbellifers.
I was pleased with this photo of a dancefly as it nectared on some ailing hogweed flowers. That is one heck of a proboscis. The light is very soft and the background is a serene green.
Over the years (I’ve been using a dedicated macro lens since 2014) I’ve learned about species behaviour, and how a little bit of knowledge can really help you to find wildlife. In terms of invertebrates, I remember a blog written about fenceposts and how they were a good place to find roosting insects. This is solid advice.
During this visit, in the forefront of my mind was a past, failed attempt to photograph a robberfly where it sat on a handrail. On that same handrail I didn’t find a robberfly, but instead my mother and father-in-law, which was also nice. But, that wasn’t the end of the story…
Turning to head home, realising how fatigued I was, and lacking in normal, basic levels of energy, I spotted something. A robberfly was sat on a different handrail! It’s so pleasing to have this sense of validation for my fencepost knowledge.
In the world of wasps, we are of course in the throes of the UK Media Silly Season (despite there being a General Election, potential dictatorship in the US, and far-right riots across the UK!) and wasps are in the news. Interestingly the mwin story is, where are they?
iNaturalist users think the wasp above is a German wasp. What you can see is the wasp gathering wood shavings for a nest. But that wasn’t the only wasp I saw.
July and August are good months to see the iconic ichneumon wasps. I absolutely love them, an interest which was deepened by reading The Snoring Bird (I recommend it). I wasn’t fast enough for this ichneumon to really get a strong pic, but this will do.
Even worse was this attempt to photograph one of the Gasteruption ichneumons. People, I am just too short for plants that want to grow this tall. I do enjoy the bokeh here though (circular light in the background). Take that, full-frame cameras!
So, all in all a decent showing for a fatigued individual.
Thanks for reading.
Photos taken with Olympus EM1 Mark III and 60mm f2.8 macro lens, edited in Lightroom.
Nymans is a National Trust garden in the western edge of the High Weald. There are great views across Mid Sussex towards the South Downs. This visit was just for a general walk, but it quickly dawned on me that it could be a chance for some macro.
I had my Olympus 12-45mm lens with me which can work really well as a macro lens. Bingo!
Nymans has a lovely array of rock gardens and extravagant flowering borders.
The common spotted orchids were peaking, as you can see, the flowers turning to seed.
I realised this visit could be interesting for macro when we spotted this caterpillar munching on a knapweed leaf. It’s the larva of a sawfly, rather than a moth or butterfly.
Elsewhere on the knapweed was this small robberfly. I love seeing this striking group of flies, they make great subjects. They also strike, in the predatory sense.
I’ve seen loads of alder leaf beetles since moving to Sussex but I usually see them in towns. It’s always nice to see one in a meadow.
There were a number of small bees around. I think this is one of the bronze furrow bees.
In the head of a meadow cranesbill was this rather dozy little solitary bee. I pulled the petal to the side, as you can see here, to see if it had been caught by a spider. It hadn’t, it was just still.
Nymans has rose gardens, where I found this solitary bee trying to make sense of the maze of petals. Life, eh?
You know it’s spring when the bees and things start getting trapped indoors again. I visited my mum on Easter Sunday and her kitchen (which has lots of windows) turned into a veritable insect survey trap. Not just the ‘horrible flies’ she pointed out, but this lovely ichneumon wasp which I rescued with a glass and a local elections envelope.
You can probably tell that these are phone pics, I haven’t quite got into proper macro lens work yet this year, but soon! I love the orange-yellow-black fade of the antennae, which is probably where the name ‘xanthoria’ comes from in the scientific name.
Xanthoria is a genus of lichens which are commonly known as sunburst lichens. In Latin it means golden yellow, which is perfect.
And here’s the proof – Xanthoria parietina, a pollution-tolerant lichen that grows everywhere.
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