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Bat night - 14^th September 2011

23 adults and 11 children joined our 2011 Bat Night, including a group from Fieldtown Ladies. The evening was warm and still, a great relief after the tail end of Hurricane Katia.

John Woolliams introduced the session by explaining that bats are a large and diverse group, with about a thousand species worldwide. A bat swooped round the glade on cue, its cry converted by the bat detector into audible clicks. The call frequency of 45 kHz identified it as a common pipistrelle and John explained that these tend to work a cicuit, removing flying insects from one area before moving on, only to return later in the evening. At about 7.45 pm, it had probably just emerged and was still warming up and very hungry. It was soon joined by 2 more and John handed the detector round to see who could make the most noise by accurately following the 3 bats as they worked the glade.

There are 16 native bat species in Britain; common and soprano pipistrelles have been detected at the Community Woodland before and a brown long-eared bat has been spotted in the village. Bats use echo location to avoid obstacles and find prey, a method also used by dolphins and, more surprisingly, by shrews and mice. Children are often able to head lower frequency calls. Bats can detect distance and shape so accurately, it is thought that their brains convert the information to allow them to 'see' with their ears. Every time the bat screams, it automatically closes down its ears to avoid deafening itself, before re-opening them to receive the echo.

Bats favour a range of habitats, according to species: Daubenton's bats use a flap of skin by their tail to scoop insects from the surface of water, and Natterer's bats like open fields. Brown long-eared bats don't hunt in quite such a macho way, swooping out of the sky: they pick insects from the leaves of trees, moving in close with a whisper rather than a scream, a sound like dropping plastic straws onto a kitchen top. Bats may not breed every year and only give birth to one baby at a time in the spring, which the mothers carry with them. When the babies become too large to carry, they are left in creches, their mothers returning regularly for feeds. At this time of year, the babies are grown and bat numbers have reached a maximum.

We are grateful to John Woolliams for an interesting and enjoyable evening and, of course, to our 3 stars for their well-timed performance.

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.

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