Wednesday, June 04, 2014
With Greger deep in structural discussions with builders (despite his cold), I took advantage of a sunny though windy morning and walked up the quarry road.
The wood warbler was singing but remained hidden. Further upstream I saw my first spotted flycatcher of the year. Cuckoos are still very active, and as I turned to walk back down I heard the bubbling call of a female; exciting, because this was a first for me.
A noticeably large fly was busy around a particular tree which I identified later as a goat willow. The clubbed antennae point to its being a sawfly, but goodness knows which one.
Later, after much research: wanda.uef.fi shows a sawfly resembling mine, and the only other one I've found so far with a dark area on the trailing edge of the wing. It's identified only to genus level as being a Trichiosoma sp. Another photo on the site shows a larva curled up on the underside of a leaf of Salix caprea - goat willow. But many sawflies apparently use more than one host plant. It's possibly T. lucorum or T. triangulum.
A female golden-ringed dragonfly was patrolling the woody verges along the road.
Back at the car I could hear siskins calling, and a green-veined white butterfly was my last sighting
before driving down the hill and home.
// posted by Christine @ 9:31 AM 
