Beetles, Butterflies and Birds

After having a break from my blog in July I am back!

Not far from where I live, just below the Malvern Hills, is Hollybed Farm Meadows, a Worcestershire Wildlife Trust nature reserve.

It was acquired by the trust in 2013 when it was used a horse grazing field - now it is a beautiful series of wildflower meadows, woodland and hedgerow.

One of the recurring plants throughout the reserve is Field Scabious which this Painted Lady is clearly enjoying! The Painted Lady's presence in the UK is unpredictable; they are a migrant here and some years many will turn up and in others barely any! Perhaps as the climate and weather changes we might see more of these beautiful butterflies.

Its not just butterflies that like Field Scabious, these flower beetles (the one at the back is a female Thick-legged beetle but I'm not sure about the one at the front) were probably looking for pollen to eat.

As I walked along the edge of one of the meadows I noticed a Marbled White butterfly flying just above the Knapweed and grass. This wasn't the first I'd seen that day though it was the first that was close enough for me to get a photograph and while it was resting on a dried-up Knapweed head I saw it was in a rather bedraggled state.

Something white on a Knapweed stem caught my eye... it was a Crab Spider with a Honey Bee it had caught. Once I got home and was checking out the days photos on my computer screen, I could see there were quite a few little flies on the bee, possibly feeding of its dead body too - yum!

Nearing the end of the walk a Small Skipper butterfly perched on a grass head just in front of me. The Small Skipper butterfly is by no means rare but they are extremely flighty and so can be tricky to photograph. However, this one stayed put for long enough for me to get a shot.

Moving on now to Backney Bridge near Sellack where there is a large Sand Martin colony on the banks of the River Wye. I only discovered them in April 2022 and have since visited the colony quite a few more times; the most recent providing my best photos. I sat on a shingle beach around 20 meters away from the nest burrows so as not to disturb them. Soon, a pair swooped down low over the water and after struggling for ages my camera managed to focus on them.

The colony has been active for over 40 years with Sand Martins coming back to the same spot every year from their wintering grounds in the Sahel region of Africa, south of the Sahara Desert. They are one of the last hirundine migrants to leave the UK, departing in late September and arriving back in mid March.

They dig a nest burrow in a sand bank, sometimes up to a meter in length, before laying a clutch of between 3-7 eggs, which hatch around mid June. The chicks will fledge when they are about 19-24 days old though will still be dependant on the adults for another few weeks before they are fully independent. 

There were quite a few flying down low over the water, then skimming their beaks across to have a drink. 

This one was making a bit of a splash!

Moving on to another spot - a friends lovely wild garden in Ledbury, Herefordshire, where the lawn has been left to grow long. Among many other species were some Field Grasshoppers which were singing in the warm sun.

You can tell its a Field Grasshopper because it has a very clear 'egg timer' shaped pronotum (the area just below the eyes) and the whole body is brown in colour. It is one of the most commonest grasshoppers in the UK after the Meadow Grasshopper, which is a bright, matt green and has black knees!

That's all from me for this time, hopefully I'll be back to posting more soon.