On Friday 11th April I was hanging out in the garden when I glanced over at the small container pond on our brick patio. It’s an old metal wash basin filled with plants and, well, water.
Birds bathe in it, foxes drink from it, and something rather special now lives in it.
The first thing I saw in the ‘pond’ were two eyes looking back at me, and two big arms and webbed hands (are they hands?) holding onto one of the plastic plant containers.
It’s been so dry for the time of year, wildlife is really suffering with the lack of water. If you have the chance to build any kind of pond you should do it! We don’t have enough space in our garden to dig a ‘proper pond’, but we have been able to use a container we bought at an antique dealer. Without it, where would the frog go?
Elsewhere I’ve noticed the number of drone flies has ebbed a bit, but there are still plenty around. This is probably a tapered-drone fly, a species of hoverfly.
Sitting on this piece of charcoal (which you may notice is now being colonised by a very small moss) was a little spider. iNaturalist has suggested this is a fox spider.
It’s rather cuddly isn’t it? No?
At night we’ve begun to notice a powerful fragrance around the house. It’s a bit like honeysuckle but is probably a cheesewood, a species of plant from New Zealand. This grows in a neighbouring garden but reaches over to us. It’s absolutely covered in pollinators and the smell- wow. It doesn’t seem to be invasive so could be a good option for your garden if you like pollinator-friendly shrubs.
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.
In May 2024 my wife and I went on our interrail honeymoon to the Jungfrau region of the Swiss Alps. I am finally ready to post my photos from the trip, starting with some macro photos. I’ve popped in some short videos here to give a bit more texture and sound to bring things to life.
My cat whispering wife
It was an incredible trip, all done by rail there and back. The nostalgia is already with me.
In addition, I’m aiming to post about the spring alpine flowers and the amazing sycamore wood pasture. Hopefully one each week. I posted about the smattering of fungi back in May on Fungi Friday.
On the trip I took only one lens with me, one capable of pretty much any photography between 12-45mm (equivalent to 24-90mm in full frame cameras). That includes excellent close up capabilities. I also had a pocket compact camera and my phone.
The meadows were in full bloom, days from being cut for hay to feed the alpine cattle through the winter months.
Breathtaking alpine meadows
Oxeye daisies with the Wetterhorn (I think) in the background. This pic is taken with my Olympus TG-6 compact.
It was nice to see the variations in the grassland species in the different locations. At about 1200m up these meadows were packed with umbellifers. They make up the wash of white here. This meadow must have been impacted by the snowmelt as it nourishes the foothills in spring.
The typical mix around Grindelwald was one of red clover, scabious, oxeye daisy and hawkbits.
The Eiger looms over chalet homes and rich hay meadows. You can see the allure of Switzerland. High living standards and abundant nature.
It is a breathtaking place, as this beautiful phone pic suggests (as in the phone’s capabilities!). This meadow was one that lacked the diversity of others, with the dandelions being evidence of nutrient enrichment, which encourages more vigorous plants at the expense of others. The most diverse meadows will have lower levels of nutrients in the soil.
The Grindelwald meadows were at a height of around 1000m. They were peaking and very loud at times. Just listen to this:
It was a chorus of crickets, not something that we get in England much anymore. The management of these meadows follows a largely medieval practice of haymaking, though it is now mechanised:
This is probably a family cutting and collecting the hay. This photo was taken from a cable car heading up to Männlichen.
Now onto the invertebrates that lived in the meadows.
Bush crickets
The sound in the meadows was made by the European field cricket, a species that has received support via conservation projects close to me in West Sussex. According to the iNaturalist page it’s flightless, so when it becomes locally extinct it struggles to repopulate lost ground. In the UK it has suffered from the decline in heathland, its favoured habitat. The cricket above was travelling across a lane to reach another meadow. There were a number of them squashed by vehicles. It’s unavoidable.
Moths and butterflies
During a walk in the valley woods at the foot of the mountain this green-veined white butterfly (I think) was on the wing. The main butterfly we saw was the swallowtail, but they were too fast, restless and far away for my lens to reach.
In stark contrast, this latticed heath moth alighted on my actual lens before being coaxed onto my trousers:
This is a species we also have in southern England.
Wasps and sawflies
One insect you don’t see in the UK, as far as I know, is the European paper wasp.
They have a lovely orange hue to their antennae, feet and wings. I’ve seen them before in Czechia making nests in residential post boxes. Here you can see one gathering wood shavings for nest building.
Meadow cranesbill was another common flower in the – you guessed it – meadows. I noticed that one area we passed when returning to our accommodation had a number of cranesbills that held sawflies in their flowerheads. The iNaturalist sawfly oracles have decided this is Tenthredo koehleri.
Beetles
Beetles are not my strong point, unless they are from Liverpool. This is a species of click beetle from what I know, visiting an oxeye daisy flower.
Spiders
Now, I did mention those beardy daisies the hawkbits, earlier. I’m not up on my ID with these plants, but I did spot a crab spider which had joined in their colouring and caught a honeybee (I think) in one of the flowerheads. This was a statk example of how they can change their complexion to camouflage themselves in certain plants.
That’s all I really managed in the macro photos stakes. There’s much more to come from the Swiss Alps though.
Thanks for reading.
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 themyou can support my blog here.
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.
I’ve posted before about the so-called ‘zombie fungus‘, but that wasn’t in my own garden!
There are a few fungal concepts that have become mainstream in recent years, namely the wood-wide web and ‘zombie’ fungi. The latter has become popularised because of The Last of Us, a programme I haven’t watched and can’t say anymore about. The most famous parasitic fungus that can control its host is cordyceps.
My wife actually found this (not cordyceps) when she was inspecting the gooseberry bush, which was steadily being eaten by sawfly larvae. I’ll post about them next.
What is this exactly? It’s a fly that has been parasitised by a fungus called Entomophthora. It basically is able to control the movement of the fly by making it move to a prominent position for its final moments, or at least I think that’s what’s happening.
The prominent position then allows the fungus to spread its spores on the wind or from a more beneficial height to reach its next host, however that occurs.
It’s not quite as gory as cordyceps, where a fungal fruiting body rises from the body of its host. It is altogether more macabre and sad-looking, though. Cordyceps can be very colourful.
In reality it is just an example of the immense biological diversity out there, the interactions between two kingdoms – animals and fungi.
I started drafting this blog while unknowingly coming down with COVID, and now can’t remember what I wanted to say…
Nevertheless, the photos here are a few phone pics from a wonderful churchyard in Haywards Heath in West Sussex.
The churchyard has views of the South Downs, in this case towards Wolstonbury Hill. I was actually going to be walking there for the coming weekend but the virus has robbed me of that dream. I must spend less time hugging 5G phone masts.
Again, I am so impressed by the detail that the newer phone cameras can achieve. This is probably a furrow bee (I think sometimes referred to as sweat bees?) in a common knapweed flower head. Did you know that daisies are some of the most evolutionarily-recent flowers and they make use of multiple florets, as seen here. Bees are impressed.
Hawksbeard or hawkbits (too ill to check) abound in these Sussex Weald grasslands. This is an Oedemera beetle, so a relative of the iconic swollen-thighed beetle. You may have seen him pumping iron in your local gym.
The nicest find was among the ragwort, a plant that inspires those on the margins of society, and upsets those who worry about their livestock being poisoned by it.
This is a cinnabar moth caterpillar, like the socks of some experimental Netherlands football kit. Their homestrip warns of their toxicity, so I had a sandwich for lunch on this occasion, just to be safe. Not that it made any difference! #Sick
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