Ladybirds galore!

The sun came out today. So did the ladybirds. More ladybirds than I have ever seen before. All 7-spots. Everywhere I looked this afternoon, there were ladybirds.

 

On honeysuckle, on clematis, laurel, hawthorn, ivy, daffodils, brambles, beech hedging, on bits of wood, on the grass – even on some washing I hung up to dry. I saw well over 100 in a 20 metre radius from our house. Ladybirds by themselves; ladybirds mating (at least 20 pairs); ladybirds in groups of 3, 4 and more.

  

I’ve never seen so much ladybird activity. And I’m not the only one. My neighbours, young and not so young alike, are commenting on the sudden deluge of ladybirds. We shouldn’t have too much trouble with aphids on our roses this year!

Spring firsts 2007

Ladybirds were not the only things the sun brought out today (see Ladybirds galore! post). I saw quite a few Spring firsts in the garden, including:

- My first hoverfly of the year.

- My first queen wasp of the year (which I recorded at the Nature’s Calendar SpringWatch website). I think this is the first queen wasp I’ve ever seen. Or rather, the first time I knew I was looking at a queen wasp. I knew what it was because of an article I’d read in BBC Wildlife magazine.

- My first brimstone butterfly of the year – indeed, the first I’ve ever seen here.

- My first peacock butterfly of the year (which I also recorded at the Nature’s Calendar website). Usually this is the first butterfly we see see each year. But this year I saw a Red admiral first, back in February. And then a brimstone (see above) earlier today.

World Premiere at St Nicholas Fields!

I shall be performing a brand new poem for the very first time this morning to Mr Green’s class from Archbishop of York’s CE Junior School, who will be at St Nicholas Fields Nature Reserve and Environment Centre for the day. I look forward to hearing what they think of the poem (and all the other poems and photos!). The new poem is called ‘Alex’, and it’s about a leafhopper.

How did I come to write this poem? Well, I took some photos of ladybirds in our garden on 8 March, and when I looked at these photos on my computer screen, I noticed that there was a small green blur in the corner of some of them. I looked more closely, and saw that it was a tiny insect, which I hadn’t noticed at all at the time.

So, I went back outside to the sage bush where I had taken the photos, and looked very closely. I had to look very, very closely before I spotted some of these insects – they are very small (about 3 mm long), and very sage green!

I took some photos and set about trying to identify them. For this I enlisted the help of Dr Dave Chesmore at the University of York. It was he who told me they were leafhoppers. I googled ‘leafhopper’ to find out more, and discovered some incredible things about these creatures (read leafhopper article). And that’s what inspired me to write the poem. I went to bed with the first 2 lines in my head, and woke up the next morning with the rest of the poem on its way. I hope Mr Green’s class enjoy it!

LitFest Wildlife Walk

Great fun was had by young and ‘less young’ alike at the Wildlife Walk we did in Rowntree Park last Sunday after my York Literature Festival It’s Buzzing! performance.
Read audience feedback

             

The walk was led by Vicky Harland of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Stephen Whittaker of City of York Council.

Highlights for me were finding an Orange ladybird and some Pine ladybirds, both of which took some identifying, and neither of which I’d ever seen before.

Beady-eyed John, who’d come from Settle for the event, also spotted a particularly fine shieldbug on the trunk of a tree.

 

 

York Literature Festival

Keep your fingers crossed it doesn’t rain too much between now and Sunday lunchtime! I’m scheduled to be performing then as part of York Literature Festival, in the Pavilion in Rowntree Park. But the Pavilion is right by the river, and if the river floods, the Pavilion floods!

The river was high, but not too high, on Wednesday, when I was at the Pavilion for a rehearsal. Vicky Harland of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Stephen Whittaker of City of York Council were there with me to try out all the equipment we need (see below).

Vicky and Stephen will be leading the Wildlife Walk through the park after the performance. Rowntree Park consists of 20 acres of Green Flag listed grounds, so I’m looking forward to seeing what we find there on the walk.

Spring ladybirds

Spring is here – the ladybirds are mating!

On 3 March I went out and there were five 7-spot ladybirds sunning themselves on our mint, sage and marjoram (which are up against a south-facing wall). And then yesterday I went out and there were 11. This morning I went for coffee with a neighbour who said she’d seen ladybirds mating in her garden earlier. So when I got home this lunchtime, I went and looked at our ladybirds, and lo and behold, two of them were mating too.

Mating ladybirds is one of the ‘Signs of Spring’ that Nature’s Calendar ask you to record as part of their national SpringWatch programme. So, I noted my sighting with them. At their website I can see the sightings I’ve recorded there in previous years. So, in 2005, for instance, I first saw ladybirds mating on 31 March – much later than this year.

P.S. I also saw my first ants of the year in the garden today.

Photo competition success!

I entered my first ever photo competition last month. It was run by the UK Phenology Network/The Woodland Trust, who organise the Nature’s Calendar recording scheme. Nature’s Calendar aims to ‘collate and store all UK data on Nature’s Calendar’. It includes SpringWatch, which the BBC is involved in.

For the competition you had to send in a photo that ‘captures the essence of spring and that features one of the species recorded by the UKPN’. I sent in this photo of a peacock butterfly on blackthorn blossom:

I took it last spring on the banks of the River Derwent in North Yorkshire.

And guess what? It won ‘Highly Commended’ in the competition, and the UKPN/Woodland Trust have chosen to use it as the banner image for their Nature’s Calendar e-newsletter for March, as you can see by clicking here.

Nature’s Calendar, and its children’s site, Nature Detectives, are great places to record what you see where you are. And their newsletter is a great way of keeping up-to-date with what’s going on around the country.