Blink and you might miss it....

Well, not quite, but small toadstools like this come and go all the time, sometimes surviving for less than a day. This one appeared amongst our broad beans and lasted for a day and a half - there's an approximate 12 hour gap between each of the photographs. 

And so to the difficult question - what species is it? The trouble is that not only are there lots of small toadstools like this, but also they tend to look quite different at different stages of growth - and the field guides usually only illustrate one stage. I think it might be a Mycena species, but then again......... maybe not.

Our garden soil is dry and sandy but I've been digging compost into it for over 20 years, and now small toadstools like this are increasing in frequency in summer. So maybe it's a sign that the organic approach, which improves humus content and moisture retention, is working ................

Mystery Micro-moth

Can anyone ID this micro-moth that I found in the garden yesterday evening? I can't see anything in Sterling and Parson's Field Guide to Micro-moths that's a really convincing match......

Any help gratefully received .....

Worn-out wings

Bees' wings suffer a lot of wear and tear during their brief lives and as they fly through the vegetation their beating wing tips often touch plants and become split and broken.

The wing tips of this bee, feeding on rampion Phyteuma nigrum flowers are almost completely worn away ...

... as are those of this one, feeding on green alkanet Pentaglottis sempervirens. 

The loss of wing area must mean that these bees need to work a lot harder to stay in the air.

What goes on in a hoverfly's brain when its head rotates?.

Owls are famously capable of swivelling their heads so that they can look directly behind them, but hoverflies have even more flexible necks. This one landed in front of me and began to clean its tongue with one of its feet, then........

..... swivelled its head through 180 degrees to clean the top of its head. That's its tongue pointing upwards.

Consider for a moment what goes on in a hoverfly's brain during this contortion.

Those large compound eyes given it almost 360 degree vision, above, below, to both sides and also, to a considerable extent, behind. So when it rotates its head like this its image of the world must invert in a fraction of a second. Often they'll rotate their heads clockwise through 180 degrees, and then do the same anticlockwise.

 I'm struggling to imaging what the sensation must feel like .... maybe something like one of those big dipper rides .....?

Now that's what a call a field of buttercups.....

Currently several of the fields around Blanchland in Northumberland have some of the densest displays of buttercups that I've ever seen. Double-click the image for a better view.....

Early Summer in Teesdale

Some pictures taken around Romaldkirk in Teesdale today.

This year has produced some of the finest displays of hawthorn blossom that I've ever seen - but here's something strange. The two hawthorns that you can see in the picture above were once part of an old hedge, so are of more or less equal age. But whereas the tree in the centre has so much blossom covering its branches that it looks like an iced wedding cake, the hawthorn on the left has almost none at all (double click for a larger image). Maybe it flowered and fruited heavily last year and is having a year off...

Early June sees wood cranesbill, in the foreground, coming into bloom, while all the pastures are full of buttercups.

The curlews have chicks now, so when you walk through the fields the parent birds do their best to lure you away, uttering alarm calls to alert their chicks.....

... and there are willow warblers everywhere in the alders, searching for food for nestlings.

The old disused railway line between Romaldkirk and Cotherstone. It's a very pleasant two mile stroll between them, with good pubs at either end.



Romaldkirk. All the roadside verges in this part of the dale are frothy with cow parsley at the moment.

Pond snail

These bright orange ramshorn pond snails have been thriving in our garden pond for years, but I'm still not sure which species they belong to.

You can see the mouth and the radula quite nicely in this picture, or one of the snails grazing algae from the glass in a fish tank.

Double-flowered Midland hawthorn

I found this unusual double-flowered cultivar of Midland hawthorn Crataegus laevigata 'plena alba' in a hedgerow in Durham city a few days ago.

Midland hawthorn isn't very common in Durham and this double-flowered version is rarer still - this is the first time I've seen it.

This is common hawthorn Crataegus monogyna, which is the prevalent hawthorn species in hedgerows in the North East. Can't honestly saw that double-flowered hawthorn is an improvement on the wild type.

A Butterfly Bank.....

Along the old disused mineral railway line between Garmondsway and Trimdon Grange, on the magnesian limestone in east Durham, there's a 200 metre south-facing stretch of embankment that's near perfect habitat for the the limestone flora and its associated butterflies.

When we visited last week the first generation of small coppers had just emerged. This one is sunning itself on one of last year's carline thistles - a very painful plant to kneel on when you are trying to take a photograph.

The bank is also an excellent site for the dingy skipper butterfly which, despite its derogatory name, is very attractive when it settles for long enough to be examined at close quarters. Chasing butterflies around on a hot day is frustrating and unproductive, and can only lead to extensive tramping of the flowers, so I just sat and waited for the butterflies to come to me. Dingy skippers like to sunbathe on patches of bare soil and sure enough a female settled right next to me, soon to be joined by a male, on her left here.

Once she recognised that she was being courted she cocked up her tail and opened her scent glands, releasing pheromones that are the butterfly equivalent of Chanel No. 5, to secure his undivided attention. Double click this and the above image for a large, clearer view.

This is the butterfly bank in question.

At the moment it's dominated by drifts of common hawkweed Hieracium vulgatum but some of the choicer limestone flowers are coming out, such as .....

..... common milkwort Polygala vulgaris , and ....

..... and spotted orchid, growing here amongst salad burnet.

Flowery Tynemouth

There's a fine display of wild flowers around Tynemouth Priory at present. The top of the cliff is carpeted with red valerian. This plant, from south west Europe, was first recorded in Britain's gardens in 1597 and began spreading into the wild in 1763 - and it's still spreading, especially in coastal locations where it likes to grow in the mortar of old buildings. It produces a lot of nectar and is one of the plants that hummingbird hawk-moths like to visit.

Down on Tynemouth pier this sea pink (aka thrift) plant is thriving between the rusty old railways lines that once supported the travelling cranes that unloaded ships berthed alongside the pier.

The second introduced plant species that carpets the cliffs here is  Alexanders, a green-flowered umbellifer from southern Europe that was introduced by the Romans and grows in great profusion here. Its glossy leaves are edible and it was once cultivated as a pot herb, but by the 15th. century had been replaced in the garden by more palatable celery.

The native wild food plant that graces these cliffs is wild cabbage, the ancestor of garden cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli and kale which produces these spectacular sprays of yellow flowers.