Tuesday, August 13, 2013
A Taplow garden
A brown argus butterfly flew in yesterday and landed on the wild marjoram. I've never seen one before, so it was a bit special to get my first sighting of one in the garden.
The marjoram is nearly finished and the hebe flowers aren't as good as they have been in the past. Two bumblebees were found dead on the flowers this morning after a fairly cold night.
The worst thing this summer has been the complete absence of ladybirds. I'd begun to despair also of the larger hoverflies; but this morning a banded/hornet hoverfly zoomed in onto the hebe. This is the insect that first got me started and I'm glad one turned up as this will be the last year I record the wildlife in the garden.
When I began using the internet to look up insects I didn't know (which was most of them!) I realised that quite a few other people had also embarked on documenting the wildlife in their gardens, many of them as amateur as I was. Their blogs proved useful in helping to identify the various creatures, and I'm also indebted to many macro-photographers who have posted useful as well as stunning pictures on the web. One of these is Jeremy Early, who has also written a book entitled My Side of the Fence: The Natural History of a Surrey Garden.
Possibly the first garden recorder was Jennifer Owen (Wildlife of a Garden: a Thirty-year Study), who found thousands of species including invertebrates, mammals, birds, and plants and discovered six species of parasitic wasp previously unknown to science. I have photos of tiny parasitic wasps that I still haven't identified, but when I learnt that there are about 6,000 species in this country alone, I gave up! My list is probably under 200 species; and it's been only occasionally frustrating, mostly fun, and always interesting.
// posted by Christine @ 8:06 AM 
