Birch sawfly

 At first glance I thought this was a bee, resting on a gorse flower - then I noticed those club-tipped antennae, the un-beelike way it held its wings and its lethargic behaviour. It's a dark birch sawfly Trichiosoma lucorum, one of the club-horned sawflies. Its larvae feed on birch leaves.

I found it in this gorse thicket, with birches nearby, on the north bank of the river Derwent at Blanchland in Northumberland.

Waiting for a breeze

A field on the edge of Durham city, full of thousands of dandelion 'clocks', waiting for a breeze to carry their plumed seeds aloft. 

The final phase in the dandelion life cycle, when the flowers are transformed into silvery spheres, dandelion ‘clocks’ composed of seeds each equipped with its own parachute, is a magical moment when an umbrella of hairs, a pappus in botanical parlance, carries the seed up and away on the wind, to pastures new. At sunrise in late spring, whole fields can shimmer with silvery dandelion clocks as their pappuses expand as they dry in the sun’s heat. Sometimes goldfinches arrive to feed on the seeds, releasing wraiths of downy seeds, ethereal ‘witches’ gowns’, into the rising thermals.

The name dandelion is a corruption of the French dent-de-lion, lion’s teeth, describing the deeply serrated leaf edges, but botanist Geoffrey Grigson also collected 52 parochial county names. Some, like Devil’s Milk-plant (Kirkudbrightshire), refer to the bitter milky sap. Many, like Schoolboys’ Clock and Tell Time (both Somerset) allude to the childhood game of guessing the time by the number of puffs needed to blow away all its seeds from the ‘clock’. Monk’s head (Wiltshire), likening the bare seed head left behind to a monk’s bald pate, is said to have medieval origins, while Wishes (Wiltshire) stems from the belief that the airborne seeds carry away hopes and dreams with them.

 And perhaps this is the best name of all, for these troubled times. Pick a dandelion clock, rediscover your inner child, blow as hard as you can and send dandelion seeds skywards, into the blue. 

 

Cherry-plum, infected with pocket plum disease

I had been hoping for a good cherry-plum harvest this summer - the fruits make excellent jam - but the hedgerow trees that I had my eye on are infected with pocket plum disease, caused by the fungus Taphrina pruni. In the first picture you can see one uninfected developing fruit, green, and then the rest are red, swollen and deformed so that they are flattened, resembling pockets. Soon spores will erupt from their surface.

In previous years I've seen infections on sloes and on bird cherry. This is the first year I've seen a severe infection on cherry-plum.

 

Tawny mining bee

 I encountered this lovely little female tawny mining bee Andrena fulva, provisioning her newly-excavated nest tunnel with pollen, on the Teesdale Way footpath between Egglestone and Meeting of the Waters. The lower three images are of what I think is a male of the same species, photographed in my own garden in County Durham, where tawny mining bees are excellent pollinators of blackcurrants.

Brittle bladder-fern

 Brittle bladder-fern Cystopteris fragilis in a shady, damp retaining wall in Teesdale, North Pennines. A beautiful, delicate fern with brittle frond stalks, typically found in crevices in limestone and mortared walls in the northern dales. Growing with hart’s-tongue fern in the third picture.

Tawny owl

 Ashes limestone quarry at Stanhope in Weardale ceased operations over 80 years ago and has since become a haven for wildlife. The bottom of the quarry is now a lake with a good range of wetland plant species, including mare's tail, reed mace and water mint, and is a breeding site for several dragonfly and damselfly species. The vertical cliff face hosts nesting jackdaws and sometimes its larger cavities ae occupied by less familiar bird species, like this tawny owl that I saw there a couple of weeks ago.