Two spiders in the bath - only one came out alive

Cellar spiders Pholcus phalangioides look fragile, with those long, slender legs, but they are formidable hunters. This is what happened when a house spider climbed down into our bath, to drink from a dripping tap, and became trapped. The cellar spider climbed down after it, snared it with silk, bit and paralysed it, then wrapped up its prey in a silken shroud.

The cellar spider had little difficulty in climbing out, with its prey slung under its body, then spent the rest of the day clinging to the skirting board, guarding its meal from rival spiders.

These lanky, harmless arachnids need warmth and are confined to human dwellings in Britain. In 1958 the eminent arachnologist W.S. Bristowe, in his book The World of Spiders, described how he zig-zagged across England on his motorcycle, requesting to see hotel rooms on the pretext that he might rent them, so that he could check for the presence of Pholcus and map its distribution. He only found it along a narrow corridor in southern England.

Since then this synanthropic spider has moved north – perhaps in furniture removal lorries, because it seems to have a predilection for living behind settees and under tables – and has even reached the Shetland islands.

Ants tending a herd of aphids

 For the second year in succession we have ants nesting in one of the garden waste recycling bins, which happens to be close to a cardoon plant that's hosting numerous small colonies of black bean aphids. These attract the ants because they secrete sweet, energy rich honeydew, the waste product of the sap they siphon from the cardoon. 

The ants caress the aphids with their antennae, which stimulates the aphids to produce droplets of honeydew that the ants drink and carry back to the nest in their distended abdominal segments.

In the image above and in the final image below you can see a feeding ant's swollen abdomen, rendered almost transparent where the pigmented plates of the abdominal segments have been stretched apart.

Juvenile magpie attempting - and failing - to fend for itself

 Magpies have nested successfully again in a hawthorn near the end of our garden and their fledglings, now well grown, have been harassing their parents relentlessly for food. Lately the youngsters have been showing signs of foraging for themselves and this one mistook the squeaky toy belonging to a neighbour's dog for a real dead animal.

The young bird circled its prey cautiously at first, pecked it a few times to check that it was dead, stood on the toy's head and then pecked and tugged it furiously. 

The attack went on for about ten minutes but, apart from pulling out a few threads, the attacker never managed to reach the stuffing of the soft, cuddly carrion 

It probably would have continued until it broke through the outer covering, but then a parent bird arrived and fed it some real edible food.

Bumblebee nest

 Buff-tailed bumblebees Bombus terrestris are nesting under a moss-covered pile of rocks in the garden. There were field mice living in the rock pile last summer and apparently it's quite common for these bumblebees to nest in their tunnels after the rodents have abandoned them.

The workers are very active and there's a lot of busy pollen collecting going on at the moment, with bees returning with full pollen baskets very few minutes yesterday afternoon.

The pollen they are carrying is orange and most of it is probably coming from this plant, Geum 'Totally Tangerine', which is in full bloom. It's an excellent bumblebee plant for species with short tongues, with open, easily accessible flowers and a long flowering period. The bees collect the pollen by working their way around the central tuft of stamens, buzzing to shake the pollen free and into their fur, they combing it into their pollen baskets.

Green dock leaf beetles

 There are lots of broad-leaved dock Rumex obtusifolius plants around at the moment with foliage that looks like this, resembling green lace.

It's the handiwork of the larvae of the green dock leaf beetle Gastrophysa viridula - turn over a leaf where damage is just beginning and you'll find several on the underside, eating the soft tissue between the leaf veins. When fully fed they burrow down into the soil and pupate, emerging as adult beetles within a couple of weeks.

And here are the rather beautiful adult leaf beetles, mating. The abdomen of the female is so distended with eggs that it displaces her wing cases. She'll lay as many as 1000 eggs and, with a short generation time, the numbers of these insects can rise rapidly as summer progresses.

Flying chimney sweepers

 There were scores of these little chimney sweeper Odezia atrata moths flying in the sunlight in the hay meadow in Durham University Botanic Garden this morning. It seemed as though there had been a recent mass emergence, since they were all in mint condition, with the white tips to their sooty-black wings intact.

Their larvae feed on the flowers of pignut, the white umbellifer growing amongst the hay rattle in the photo below.

The meadow has a sheltered, southerly-facing aspect, perfect for this little day-flying moth that only produces one generation, in early summer, each year.

Butterbur going to seed

It seems like no time at all since the first butterbur flower spikes began to appear along riverbanks in early spring, but now they are ready to shed their seeds. These impressive seed spikes were growing in woodland beside the river Wear at Durham Wildlife Trust's Low Barns nature reserve last week.

There are separate male and female plants of butterbur, which spreads via creeping underground rhizomes. Large areas of England have only male plants, thought to have been transplanted long ago outside of the plant's natural range by beekeepers, because butterbur is a prolific producer of pollen and nectar for honeybees. In Country Durham we have both sexes of the plant so seed set is common, although the female plants only become conspicuous when they elongate and produce these tall seed heads in late spring.
 

Speckled wood butterfly laying eggs

 Speckled wood butterflies have been expanding their range northwards, into County Durham and beyond, for fifteen years now. They've been visiting our garden for about a decade and for the last five years they've been present from early spring until late autumn, so we guessed that they must be breeding here, producing a second summer generation. Last week I found proof.

A female laying her eggs on grass stems, carefully placing them one at a time.

The tiny, glassy pale green eggs provide an excellent excuse for not pulling up the grasses that are infesting the flower borders.

Do ants 'high-five'?

 

Spent a lazy hour sitting in April sunshine watching foraging ants, in constant transit to and from their nest in a big terracotta flower pot. Every time an outgoing ant met an incoming forager their stopped, head-to-head for a moment , to touch antennae, like the pair in the foreground here. Is this the ant-equivalent of a ‘high-five’? I’d like to think so, though it’s most likely colony recognition behaviour, border control, defence against potential invaders.

Stinking hellebore is bumblebee heaven

 Stinking hellebore is an unappealing name for a very bee-friendly plant. It has been the epicentre of bumblebee activity in our garden ever since they first emerged from winter hibernation. The green flowers of Helleborus foetidus are a prolific source of nectar over a prolonged flowering period.

There used to be just one plant in the garden but three years ago I collected all the seed it produced and chucked them on ground where I'd removed a holly hedge in the corner of the garden. There are now about a dozen plants flowering, bearing hundreds of flowers. They don't really stink, they're just a bit pungent on a hot afternoon, but that's a small price to pay for providing such a good food resource for queen bumblebees.

The purple-edged, bell-shaped flowers are unusual because those structures that look like petals are, botanically, sepals that protected the bud during its formative stages. The real petals, inside, are arranged around central whorls of stigmas and pollen-loaded stamens, and are rolled into tubes that are prim-full of nectar.

The flower retains its bell-shape until its pollinated but it's just open enough to allow a large bumblebee to hang underneath and force its way in. Even then, the bee needs to have a long tongue to reach all the nectar. Helleborus foetidus makes its visitors work for their reward. 

If you plant Helleborus foetidus once and let it go to seed it will seed itself around the garden, thanks to the white extension called an elaiosome on the outside of the shiny black seeds.This is very attractive to ants, which carry them away, eat the elaiosome and disperse the seeds, which require a winter of freezing temperatures before they'll germinate. 

Blackthorn blossom without a blackthorn winter?

 The first blackthorn aka sloe Prunus spinosa flowers opened in a hedge alongside one of my favourite walks in Weardale last week. This often signals the start of a 'blackthorn winter', a period of intensely cold north-easterly winds, but this year it looks like we might be lucky - the forecast for the next couple of weeks is for milder weather, warm enough for pollinators to be active. Last spring's blackthorn winter led to pollination failure and a very poor crop of sloes locally, and almost complete crop failure for the damson tree in my garden.

The blackthorn in this length of hedgerow is brutally cut back every winter but this is a tree that produces clusters of flower buds on the old wood that survives, that's almost completely coated in lichens. Blackthorn blossom in a carpet of grey and yellow encrusting lichens is a particularly attractive combination.

Wood mouse opportunist

I've finally taken the bird feeders down in the garden, because there's plenty of natural food available now that spring has arrived. That means that this wood mouse, that hid amongst the flower pots near the back door and raced out to pick up the seeds that the birds scattered, will also need to look elsewhere for a free meal.

There are always wood mice in the garden, usually living in the log piles, but they do occasionally find their way indoors. We've caught five in humane traps since Christmas and released them into a hedgerow about a mile away, hoping that they won't find their way back indoors. I wrote about them in the Guardian Country Diary last week.

Luxuriant growth of a lichen in a hedge in the Tunstall valley

 A leafless hawthorn hedge in the Tunstall valley, County Durham, shorn with geometric precision by a tractor-mounted hedge cutter, but decorated with one of the most luxuriant arrays of lichens I’ve ever seen. Much of the hedge was bare, apart from scattered yellow encrustations of common orange lichen Xanthoria parietina, but short lengths were festooned, like overdressed Christmas trees, with countless dangling fronds of farinose cartilage lichen Ramalina farinacea.

This valley offers high quality lichen habitat, thanks to relatively unpolluted North Pennine winds and humidity from Tunstall reservoir, but why had these short lengths of hedge become so gloriously laden with this particular species? I recalled walking here last summer and finding the same sections defoliated by small ermine moth caterpillars that had sheathed twigs in their silken web. By autumn the hedge had begun to recover, but maybe that leaf-loss and interruption in twig growth had given wind-blown lichen spores sufficient opportunity to colonise bare twigs, trapped by that web of sticky silk? It’s tempting to believe that the beauty of this winter hedgerow was due to the arrival of an egg-laying female ermine moth last spring, a serendipitous event in the endless, unpredictable cycle of life.

Danish scurvy-grass Cochlearia danica

 

Seen on my walk into town this morning - an exquisite rain-glossed rosette of fresh, spoon-shaped succulent leaves of Danish scurvy-grass Cochlearia danica, growing in the grime that accumulated between a wall and the pavement.

It’s a seaside native wild flower that thrives in salt spray on clifftops and sea walls along the north east coast; here, an hour’s drive inland, it’s doused in saline mist that hangs in the slipstream of traffic, along roads treated with de-icing salt in winter.

When we first moved to the north east, 50 years ago, it was confined to the coast but since then Danish scurvy-grass has followed salt-spreading council vehicles inland, all the way into the North Pennines. In another month a ribbon of its tiny white flowers will decorate road verges along most of our major roads, followed by a prolific crop of tiny seeds that will be carried away on car tyres.

Cochlearia danica is member of the cabbage family. Scurvy-grass leaves have a high vitamin C content and have been used as a fresh green vegetable and to ward off scurvy, but were described by C. Pierpoint Johnson in his Useful Plants of Great Britain: a Treatise, published in 1863, as ‘scarcely superior to water-cress in medicinal effect and much less palatable’ although ‘well known to the early navigators as a remedy for the terrible disease that formerly decimated our ships’ crews on long voyages and was brought much into the notice at a somewhat later period by the use to which it, with other like herbs, was applied by Captain Cook in his expeditions to the Southern Seas.’

Scurvy-grass flowering on Craster harbour wall, on the Northumberland coast, in spring.

Winter gnats lekking on a winter afternoon.

 A freezing cold afternoon, but a swarm of these winter gnats Trichocera sp. was dancing, in a shape-shifting column, above the garden hedge this afternoon, catching the last rays of sunlight as the sun was sinking towards the western horizon. They would have all been males, lekking, attempting to catch the attention of a female.

The flower border beside the hedge is covered in a thick layer of decaying autumn leaves - just the kind of place where the females will lay their eggs.

There are come close-up pictures of winter gnats here