Category: David

A small insect searching for the last grains of pollen on star magnolia flower. Is it a tiny fly or some sort of beetle?

Birdsong in a Wolverhampton garden early on the morning of 11th April 2024. Technically, it was a few minutes before dawn, but the day was heavily overcast, so it was already as bright as it was going to get.

A first attempt at recording ambient birdsong using the excellent Merlin app, and using the app to ID the birds singing.

It picked out one or more sparrows, blackbirds, wood pigeons and blue tits. I think there’s also a magpie or carrion crow in there as well.

During a brief period when the rain clouds gave way to sunshine, a house fly warming itself while resting on a dustbin lid.

The flowers on a star magnolia were already showing signs of the punishment they had been taking from the weather when I grabbed this picture earlier in the month.

Two ladybirds, different species, were resting on the same thistle plant. The harlequin ladybird, colour scheme yellowish with black spots. It’s an intrusive species, originating in Asia. First recorded in Britain twenty years ago, they are now very common.

The other is a 7-spot ladybird, which is also common, with a reputation as a gardener’s ally in the constant effort to control pests.

In a favoured spot which catches the sun for most of the day (when it’s not cloudy) hawthorn flowers were forming and the buds beginning to open by the first week of April.

Photomicrographs of Hydrilla verticillata at different magnifications. The subject is a plant, native in a wide zone of Eurasia from Poland to India, but now introduced and an intrusive waterweed in much of the rest of the world.

Taken using a National Geographic branded microscope with its digimicroscoping* attachment. The microscope is designed for use by children, and occasionally appears in the special offers aisle at ALDI. Today’s pictures feature one of the prepared slides which is included in the purchase.

* My coinage, on the model of digiscoping, where birders put their mobile’s phones up to the eyepiece of their telescope to picture birds.

A fungus growing on the inner surface of a red pepper which had been left exposed for some days. I’m guessing that the liquid-seeming ends of the strands hold the spores.

Quite impressively big, but not actually a giant, a house spider in a house.

During pauses in the persistent rain, honey bees out gathering pollen. They were diving deep into some camellia flowers to get their pollen baskets packed even fuller.

One of nature’s standard colour-coded warnings: black and yellow stripes equals danger. This scarlet tiger moth doesn’t sting. The coarse bristles probably already make it unpleasant to eat. Anything which tries to eat it anyway would get bigger problems. The caterpillar is poisonous.

In close-up view, the tiny seeds in the inside of a red pepper remind me of nothing so much as rows of standing stones.