Yet More Spring Finds!

 Today's walks were on a duller day, but still a productive one. 

The first tawny mining bees were out today, seemingly country wide judging by my social feeds, and I came across one at the edge of someone's front garden, seemingly not operating at full throttle yet, but its colours were glorious. 

Then I found a female hairy footed flower bee foraging off red dead nettle growing out the pavement. This one seemed rather mad at me. 

My final find, at Rumbles Cafe on the park, was a beetle with a beautiful metallic sheen. Possibly a rainbow growclock beetle, this was another new find for me. 

Si 

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 

Life on the Curry Plant

 Many many years ago we tried to dig out and plant a wildflower herb garden for pollinators at the entrance to our work campus. 

It failed. The soil is terrible, we weren't given time to maintain it, and anything we have tried to plant in it recently has died, with two main exceptions. 

One is a rather nice smelling sage plant. The other is a rampant curry plant, that is currently in full flower with its little bright yellow flowers, and also smells - to my poor nose - awful, especially in hot weather. 

Plants are not supposed to smell like curry! It's just plain wrong. 

It does attract pollinators, but more flies, than bees and butterflies. However, today, it did have some very fast moving tiny bees that never settled, and I captured entirely by accident on the wing. A possible clover blunthorn bee, a species utterly unknown to me until today. I'm going on the pale patch on the face, and, er, what iNaturalist says. 

Most of the other denizens are beetles, hoverflies. flies and various less glamorous, but still important, little pollinators. 

They all have their uses. 

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 18.06.25

The Beauty of Small Things

 I'm not seeing many "big" pollinators at the moment, but as the occasional, well, I'd hardly call them "bursts" of sunshine have appeared - more like watery visitations of a sun like object in the sky - there have been plenty of smaller pretties on offer. 

I like to take every opportunity to get outside, waving my cameraphone around hopefully, to see what might be out there, and I like to advise everyone to do the same, if only with their eyes. Because at this time of the year, beautiful things are emerging, and they might not all be of the largest size.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 07.03.24

Nearly Stuffing it up

 Sunday saw the visit of Attenborough to our ground - the Nottingham suburb rather than the naturalist - and they had got me in a quandary before the match had even started.

They had told me earlier in the week that they were bringing a side with four adults, and seven juniors. On paper, we had quite a strong side, and so I had been working out in my mind how I was going to approach this to ensure a decent contest.

Would I only be able to use slower bowlers?

Would I have to tell our bats to go easy on any very miniture bowlers? 

If we batted first, would I have to declare rather than let our batters go mad and post 300 plus?

When the opponents turned up, may of them barely taller than the stumps, these thoughts returned. As it turned out most of them were moot, as they won the toss and batted first on a blisteringly hot and humid day. 

I opened the bowling with what I would thing of as being medium intensity medium pacers, firstly to see how well the youngsters were going to handle the bowling, and also because our two quickest bowlers were late and we only had nine fielders to start with.

Stellar capataincy and organisation from me there. 

One our openers had a couple of early wickets caught at mid off and in the covers, and then ran a very young lad out off his fingertips, an appeal I immediately and generously withdrew, thinking myself a very sporing captain. "No little kid is getting run out like that in a Sunday game on my watch" I thought smugly. 

Of course, he turned out to be their best bat, and very competently spanked boundaries, leading me to realise I could turn the bowling up a bit, with some first and second team bowling that prised out a couple of wickets with some lovely left arm swing in the heavy air, pregnant with a thunderstorm that never happened. 

I even brought myself on, and found that remembering to really keep my left arm high and active meant that I could bowl accurately and beat the bat, even if I was barely turning the ball. Got a wicket with a short ball dollied to mid wicket, before castling a young'un in my 5th over.

Five overs one maiden, two for fifteen. I quit while the going was good.

Now, there was a different kind of problem. I had managed the game well, getting different and unusual bowlers on, trying to give everyone a go, but we were still taking too many wickets and they weren't scoring enough runs. In a friendly, you don't want to kill the game, you want the opponents to get a reasonable score so it gives your batters a chance to have a reasonable game. They were about 70 for 7 at this point.

So, I allowed the chairman and third team captain to swap the keepers gloves with the first team captain - hilariously, I was captaining captains - so he could bowl some sort of googly variant that he only "unleashes" on Sundays, and brought on a leggie at the other end just as a chunkily built Kiwi came out to bat for Attenborough.

He proceeded to wallop some big old sixes, but the leg spinner was taking wickets when he wasn't batting, and after they had got to 128, I decided enough was enough and decided to bring back the opening bowler, who promptly took one ball to shut down their innings. 

Now, with our batting line up, we ought to have chased that total down fairly easily against a young bowling attack, and indeed I wasn't too worried about our batting line up and even though we had the first team opener in the side who had taken a wicket earlier on, I sent out the first and second team opening bowlers, who both normally bat a number 10 in their league sides to give them a chance to score some runs.

Right decision too, as they made it to 60 without loss with some good strokeplay, as ever making me completely envious of anyone who has any kind of batting ability whatsoever. However, in the twelfth over right on the stroke of drinks, one of them looped a catch up.

I now took a stint at square leg, and watched as our team seemed marooned in the 60s for what seemed like ten overs while losing wickets. Number three lobbed up a caught and bowled, number four was lbw off the bottom of his bat and the third team captain looked purposeful before spooning up a caught and bowled. 

So, umpiring stint over, back into the shade of the pavilion but wickets continued to fall, however at least a few more boundaries were being hit. For our first team captain and chief ship steadier was still out there after a sticky start as the wicket, which had been a belter most of the match, began to slow up and misbehave a little bit after it had about 600 runs scored on it over the weekend. 

We crept nearer the total, wickets still fell. But thanks to the ship steadier, we just got over the line 8 wickets down, with the unwelcome sight of me padded up and waiting to bat on the pavilion steps. 

Still, both teams got a lot out the game, players got a chance to do things they don't normally do, and our Sunday side remains unbeaten.

Good day all round really!

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 12.06.23

Yellow, Black and Long of Horn

 I've found some goodies on my lunchtime walks at work, in what has been generally a warm, grey and very humid week, with the odd bit of yellow sun poking through the haze, especially in the evenings.

Gentle breezes have brought the smell of the chicken hatching factory over campus, a sickly sweet and slightly rubbery miasma.

Campus is a mass of ragwort and st johns wort, our wildflower meadow now has musk mallow, ladies bedstraw and hedge bedstraw in flower but has lost most of its colour. Ringlets and meadow brown butterflies skulk deep in the long grass, while small skippers fleetingly feed of the ragwort, waiting until just before your camera comes into focus before skittishly flying off. 

At home my flat is being strafed by swifts every evening, blasting me with their screeches as they scythe around the buildings. 

Best find of the week has to be the pair of longhorn beetles I found mating on an ox eye daisy. Their yellow and black stripey antennae are so long and irresistible!

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 02.07.21

The Posing Coachman

Well, second week of lockdown, and I'm trying to keep active - I'm just not seeing very much.

The exception to this was coming across this mad beetle on the cycle path at work. It was gadding about with its bum in the air like a scorpion, a behaviour I've never come across in my admittedly limited experience of beetles.

It was clearly rather emotional about something though. Maybe it didn't like the slug that was crossing the cycle path at the same time?

A bit of research on google ("Which beetles stick their bum in the air?") revealed it to be a devil's coach horse beetle, a common species with a flexible abdomen that allows it to display like that. Common yes, but a new one to me.

Another interesting sighting was three skeins of about 300 pink footed geese flying over work - such a distinctive sight, cruising high in their shall v-echelons. The local kestrel is very busy hunting, and the juvenile buzzard would be too if he didn't get chased out of the sky all the time by the local carrion crows. 

Anyway, hopefully the rain stays away tomorrow, I want to go for a bike ride.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 14.11.20

 

A Stunning Rosemary Beetle

Only a short walk out today, feeling a bit under motivated today, but some warmer weather drew me out to the North Lock end of town.

There seems to have been a bit of an emergence today with the warmer weather - there was a number of rosemary beetles feeding on a lavender plant by the houses that back onto the river.

Apparently, they feed off plants such as rosemary and lavender in the late summer, and the RHS regards them as a pest species, a species that arrived from Southern Europe in the mid 1990s. Now I'm not sure if these stunningly metallic characters were feeding, but if they were than they were at it early.

However, this would not be the only natural event that has happened early this year, with the hot spring.

The chiff chaffs are singing along the river path where you tend to come across some "interesting" characters, who today included a guy searching from his partner's stolen bicycle. No drinkers on motobility scooters today though.

I also had a moment where a bottle of gin tripped the security alarms on two supermarket doors for some reason, and had to open my bag to security guards who approached me far too closely. This has left me typically feeling very anxious.

Awkward day then, but look, a glittery beetle.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 09.06.20

Finally the Workplace Wildflower Meadow Blooms

Three years ago, I got permission at work to both have a large section of uncut verge, and also to create two small wildflower meadows, so called pictorial meadows.

Myself and several colleagues dug out the grass, seeded the meadows, watered them over, and then waited for three years while nothing happened. Zero. Rien. Nada.

Finally, this year, there have been stirrings. First up, a few birds foot trefoil, which gradually thickened into a carpet. Then a few ox-eye daisies, then a few more.

Today, I noticed knapweed for the first time, and the red tailed bumblebees had noticed it too. A lovely common blue was the first butterfly I'd seen feeding there.

It's not amazing, but it is something. And the bees are loving it.

I did a good thing.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 28.05.19