Mixed Bag

Some quick snaps from the last couple of days, none that I'm especially happy with. The TG-6 seems a bit low on image quality and not as sharp as I'd like when using out in the field, hand-held in stacking mode. There has to be something I'm missing in the settings ....

Heterogaster urtica

Bruchus rufimanus - found loads of these under bark, keyed

Pine Ladybird

Common Malachite Beetle larva - under bark on same tree as I found one in 2013

I've decided these certainly are Pammene regiana cocoons - collected to rear

Lecanora muralis

Common Earwig

Dead Moll's Fingers [Xylaria longipes]

I've also got a Norellia spinipes pinned (keyed, swept off daffs, early?), and a new beetle - Calathus fuscipes - to try and photograph alive if possible. First Small Tortoiseshell of the year today as well on a short walk this morning.

This afternoon I headed to the hospital. To have a tourniquet strapped on my arm, have my arm sliced open a little and have a thin tube of plastic inserted in a major artery and fed up, across and down to just above the heart under x-ray .... not as dramatic as it sounds, and in the great scheme of things not the most uncomfortable procedure I've had to endure in the last couple of years. My chemo got deferred by a week so I could have this PICC line in, starts again Monday and hopefully will be easier to deal with.

Patch Wheatear and Garden Stuff

Today was constrained by parental duty in the morning and shite weather in the afternoon, but I managed to squeeze a bit of natural history in between one way or another. Firstly, I dropped Alex off at his Karate session and took the opportunity for a quick half-hour nose around at Jubilee Park. Fairly quickly I picked up a female Wheatear milling about on the turf by the pool. Not the first Wheatear I've had on the patch, but the first I've had at this site within it. It wasn't very obliging though and always stayed very distant.

No zoom - it was around the turf on the edge of the pool under the big red arrow

Full zoom - still a very dodgy record shot to say the least!

Also noted this Alder Fly whilst there.

I'd been there for around 20 minutes before it registered that amongst the various songsters in the background was a Willow Warbler. It was only yesterday that I heard my first one in the county for the year, and yet already that song has faded into the background (though as always I heard and registered the incessant chiff-chaffing that was also going on). Nothing else noteworthy really - very quiet although the cows are doing their best to attract Yellow Wags by leaving big piles of shit everywhere on the pool-side of the river.

Later in the day back at home, I decided to install a very basic effort at a pitfall trap underneath the slab that I use to run my MV moth trap from. It is in the border, slightly raised off of the soil by bricks and I figured that underneath that would be as good a place as any. I sorted out a plastic pot and wandered into the garden with the camera - everytime I lift that slab I see something and I wanted to be ready. Just as well I did as I saw a couple of things - albeit small things that the Lumix barely copes with .....

This is a really common springtail - Orchesella cincta

As far as I can work out, this is an Earwig nymph

A bit bigger - one of the two large Tegenaria spp. 'house spiders'

Also a few Green Shieldbugs obvious in the garden today