I found a load of birch leaves with some very obvious feeding damage. I reckon this has to be a sawfly, and the damage is not too dissimilar to the Zig-zag Sawfly on Elm - except being within the leaf rather than from the edge. It's not really a mine as such. You'd think that this would be straightforward to identify the culprit, but so far I have no idea. No larvae on any of these though, so it's one I will have to make a point of looking out for a bit earlier in the year next year if I remember ....
This fits Agromyza idaeiana. The above phone snap was taken
when I found it, what I hadn't noticed until now was that the photo I took at
home of the larva in the mine, just over 24hrs later, shows that the blotch
had developed substantially in that time. In the photo above, use the obvious
dark spot just to the left of the the blotch as a reference; in the photo
below you can see that it is a load of frass which is now much lower
down the leaf than the top of the blotch which is now doubled in size.
1 comment:
Hi
Ref your feeding signs on Birch - try Hemichroa australis
https://www.naturespot.org.uk/node/122996
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