A few photo from Wat Tyler CP during the recent sunny spell. First up a ruddy darter. This wolf spider was warming her egg cocoon in the sun. And this lizard posed for a photo… …before playing peak-a-boo.
I’m a bit of a pond dipper, as some regular readers will have worked out, but there is one species that has always eluded me, the water stick insect. This year I saw a preserved specimen and a captive one (which I never managed to photograph), but never before had I seen a live wild…
More recent photos from Wat Tyler Country Park. This time a female emperor dragonfly which was laying its eggs on some fallen reeds. This angle, although a bit top down, shows the tip of the abdomen in action below the surface. And I tried an in the environment shot too.
The rubbish weather so far this summer has stopped me getting much in the way of macro shots at all, let alone of the local speciality, the scarce emerald damselfly. However the improved weather last week did let me get the following.
After visiting Elmley Marshes last Saturday, we popped over to East Blean Woods, a Kent Wildlife Trust Reserve which is one of the best best sites for the rare heath fritillary butterfly. It took a while to find one as the sun had disappeared behind some thick cloud. But we looked around a promising spot…
A few years ago on my old blog I posted a diagram to show the emergence and flight times of all the British odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) and a seemed to be quite popular. Since then a number of new species have become established in Britain, or are at least well on their way to…
On Saturday morning I headed reasonably early to Elmley Marshes. The drive in was pretty quiet except for a few yellow wagtails until I reached an area with a field that had much shorter vegetation. Here were a number of hares, which wherereachable with my Pentax 300mm and 1.7x convertor combo. One decided to have…
Here’s a slightly different pond creature shot, with a white background. The backswimmer is also a bit different as its Notonecta maculata, rather than the usual N. glauca.
Today just before my lunch break ended (typical!) I spotted an emerald damselfly (Lestes sp.). I managed a few photos, trying to focus on the key ID features to separate the from the Scarce (Lestes dryas), ‘common’ (L. sponsa) and the Southern/ migrant (L. barbarus) emeralds, all recorded from Wat Tyler Country Park. It refused…
Ive posted photos the larva of a lesser water beetle and the great silver water beetle recently, but the most ferocious of them all are the larvae of the great diving beetle species or Dytiscus larvae. If you mange to get one of these in your pond dipping tray, you will soon end up with…