Bug Hunt

18 June 2011

24 adults and children joined our Saturday morning Bug Hunt, enjoying a long sunny break between showers and capturing some of the wide range of mini-beasts that inhabit our community woodland.

Ringlet, meadow brown, large skipper, and large white butterflies were spotted amongst the long grass and wild flowers of the glade, as were juvenile froghoppers, surrounded by foamy cuckoospit, and a six spot ladybird. 2 oedemera nobilis were found and immediately renamed the 'fat-thighed beetle', for obvious reasons! These were both male (the females have slender thighs) and beautifully irridescent, changing from copper to a vivid greem according to their angle from the sun. They had long antennae and may be found feeding on the pollen of many different flowers. Saturday's breakfast menu included purple knapweed, ox-eye daisies, foxgloves, yellow rattle, nettles, and red dead-nettle, with scabious almost ready to bloom..

Sweeping the long grass of the glade with nets revealed green cucumber spiders, various mirid bugs, adult and juvenile common froghoppers, aphids, juvenile common meadow grasshoppers, and a large wolf spider carrying a silken ball containing her young. Also found were and apion foumentarium weevil and a bot fly, or similar species. A bumble bee buzzed slowly amongst a sunny patch of nettles (bombus hortorum, with a pattern of orange, black, orange, and white stripes), and many wasps were observed entering and leaving their nest, hidden amongst the nettles at the entrance to the glade.

Bashing tree branches with sticks released a shower if rainwater and sone invertebrates onto a white sheet below; a shield bug (possibly eyascoris fabricii), an earwig and a bright green caterpillar fell from a dogwood, while an oak yielded red spider mites, a tiny froghopper, mirid bugs, and a black click beetle. We saw the click beetle jump, with a faint b8ut audible 'click', by flexing its wing cases when stroked. An elderflower was less productive (1 moth flew out), but a hawthorn shed mirid bugs, a dramatic black and white hairy caterpillar, with a stripe of orange dots down the centre of its back, and a very handsome fly with a bright green underbelly, possibly a soldier fly.

As we removed our bug hunt poster from the gate, on our way out, we disturbed a mass of earwigs which had found shelter behind it, including a soft, vulnerable white earwig, yet to regain its brown colour after shedding its skin. Thanks are due, as always, to John Woolliams for helping us to identify our finds and providing so many interesting background details.

Bug Hunt in 2010

2011 news index