No ladybirds for months, then five species all at once.....

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary describes encounters with ladybirds in Weardale and Teesdale.

Back in the spring it seemed as though 2013 might be a good year for ladybirds locally - plenty of 7-spots seemed to have come out of hibernation so I anticipated a thriving population by the time their offspring hatched in summer - but it never seemed to materialise. I found a few isolated individuals of other species - notably 22-spot , 14-spot and an orange ladybird  but then last week .........

........ this huddle, near a pine plantation at Wolsingham in Weardale. It was the largest number of 7-spots I'd seen in one place all year: six that had chosen a split in a fence post as their hibernation site. 7-spot ladybirds aren't usually associated with conifer plantations but his particular row of fence posts, on the sheltered, south facing side of the plantation, as always been a good place to find other species. 

So it was no surprise to find this eyed ladybird - a conifer specialist - sunning itself on the same line of fence posts.

A small, unidentified fly with unusual up-turned antennae had even chosen to hitch a ride on it. The eyed ladybird is our largest species but ...

...... this one, a larch ladybird that shared the same fence post, is one of our smaller species ...

..... here going head-to-head with a staphylinid beetle (which it simply head-butted out of the way!)

Then, a day later at Egglestone in Teesdale I found ivy in full flower that had attracted several orange ladybirds, that were feeding on nectar.

You can see here the translucent pronotum of this species, that used to be considered scarce but seems to have increased in abundance in recent decades, supposedly because it has taken to feeding on fungi that grow on the honeydew secreted by sycamore aphids. On one occasion a few years ago I found a cluster of ten of this species hibernating on the bark of a sycamore in winter - it's certainly a species that can be added to the very small number of insects that are associated with sycamore, which has been present on these islands for around 500 years but has a very small insect fauna.

Close to the orange ladybirds on the ivy I then found a single 7-spot sunning itself on a fence post and ......

.......... scores of this very unwelcome addition to our ladybird fauna - the harlequin. The first time I saw these locally was in Durham city back in 2009, on ivy flowers at almost exactly this time of year. Harlequins are noted for their bewildering range of colour patterns but the indentations at the tail end of the elytra are also a distinctive feature, although they too vary in extent between individuals.

This group of about a dozen individuals had just hatched from their pupae and were still developing their full colours. Harlequins have a breeding season that extends well into autumn.

Some, that also seemed to be the most rotund individuals, were almost entirely black ...

..... but his was a more typical colour pattern in this population.

Finding another population of harlequins was an unwelcome discovery because this disease-resistant species is known to be a predator of our native ladybirds and can also transmit a parasite that kills other species. It also feeds extensively on eggs of butterflies and moths. Over the last decade it has spread rapidly from south east England to the Scottish border. It originated in central Asia but was introduced elsewhere in misconceived biological control programmes aimed at 'environmentally friendly' aphid control in greenhouse crops. Wherever it has been introduced it has escaped and has had a detrimental effect on native insect populations.

The predominantly black individuals seem to have blue eyes.

This was the last unhatched pupa, attached to the fence posts. At the point of attachment you can just see the remains of the larval skin, which is spiny in this species. 

Harlequin larvae also seem to have an affinity with sycamore, perhaps because of the vast supply of sycamore aphids that they find on the leaves - so it may well be that orange ladybirds will also form part of their diet too.

If you find harlequin ladybirds you can report their presence by contributing the record to the Harlequin Ladybird web site.

Gimme shelter.....

This is a frequent sight in our garden early in the morning at this time of year - a seven-spot ladybird holed up inside (well, almost inside) the follicles of a columbine seed head. I don't think they go in for anything that's edible - they just seem to find it a good place to spend the night.  

It's always worth avoiding the temptation to tidy up too soon in a garden in autumn, and instead leaving seed heads on plants throughout winter - aside from the seeds that they provide for birds, many provide shelter for small, overwintering insects.

Some, like this and this and this, also turn into very attractive 'skeletons'.

Ladybird Spotting

A lot of bloggers have reported unusually large numbers of seven-spot ladybirds emerging after overwintering successfully and I don't think I've ever seen so many in my garden here in Co. Durham - even in high summer. It's certainly not a local phenomenon and when I had a look around a tiny back garden in Cleethorpes, in Lincolnshire, today I counted upwards of 20 on a single aphid-infested Euphorbia characias shrub .... plus an unusual interloper in their midst ..

... in the form of this beautifully marked eyed ladybird. 

These are usually associated with conifers but when I looked around I couldn't see any conifers in this garden or any of the adjoining ones - so it must have been an accidental arrival, carried in from some distance away on the wind. Lovely little ladybird, though ...

You Have Been Warned .....

This morning this seven-spot ladybird crawled out onto a foxglove leaf in our garden, near the bird table, and spent the whole day there. All day long it was surrounded by hungry blackbirds, hedge sparrows, chaffinches and starlings, all fossicking around in the undergrowth looking for something to eat - and the ladybird remained completely unmolested,which is, I suppose, testament to the deterrent effect of its warning colouration (or aposematism, as it's more scientifically termed). 


I was surprised that the ladyird had ventured out at all because the temperature has hovered around freezing all day, with intermittent sleet showers. I wondered whether it was dead so just before darkness fell I gave it a gentle prod, when it beetled off into the leylandii hedge. These much-maligned conifers provide an excellent overwintering site for insects like this.

A Tree-Spotter's Guide to Fruits and Seeds: Part 5

This little huddle of 7-spot ladybirds, apparently settling down for communal hibernation, were a bit premature in their choice of these unripe alder Alnus glutinosa cones as a resting place last week. Within a few days the cones will begin to ripen ....

... become woody and spit open. You can just see the tiny chestnut-brown seeds inside. They are an important food source for many birds in winter and are released in vast numbers from now until January. The tree will be flowering again in February and you can see next year's embryonic cones already formed - they are the little knobbly things on stalks, top left, next to the bud at the tip of the shoot. Above the ripening cones you can also see next spring's male catkins already forming.

Alder cones tend to stay attached to the tree for a long time - these old ones would have shed their seeds back in October-November 2009.

Ever since grey squirrels moved into my part of Durham it has become harder to find fully ripe hazel Corylus avellana nuts - the squirrels take them while they are still at this green stage. Filberts are cultivated hazels that have much longer leafy bracts sheathing the nuts.

Wild cherry or gean Prunus avium fruit ripens in July. A couple of years ago I did a taste test on as many different fruit-bearing wild cherry trees as I could find. They were surprisingly variable - most were breathtakingly sour but a few were sweet enough to eat. The hard seed inside the fruit is a favourite food of hawfinches - one of the few birds with a beak that's powerful enough to crack it open. Everytime I see a tree in fruit I scan the ground below for a hawfinch eating the seeds from rotting fruits: no luck so far but I live in hope...... The hard cherry stones are also popular with field mice. When I demolished our old garden shed I found a mouse's stash of scores of cherry stones from the tree that used to grow in our garden hedge, each with a neat hollow nibbled in it.

Professional foresters can identify conifers just by crushing their needles and sniffing their resinous aroma. This is one of the easier ones for scratch-and-sniff botany - Western Hemlock Tsuga heterophylla (which is not related to the hemlock that poisoned Socorates). Apart from the hint of citrus scent in its resin (some say it smells like ground elder), it bears these small purplis cones and the shoots carry needles of varying lengths. It's a native of the west coast of North America, but often seen in forestry plantations in Britain, especially on the wetter western side.

For more posts on tree ID click here

Vegetarian Ladybirds

Ladybirds have a fine reputattion as greenfly-slayers, but what do they feed on in spring, before the aphid population explosion gets underway and animal food is hard to come by? This one - and scores like it - was feeding on the nectar of Alexanders Smyrnium olasatrum flowers. This is one of the commonest flowering plants along some parts of the Norfolk coast at this time of year, and must be a very welcome food resource for the large numbers of ladybirds that have recently emerged from hibernation.

Meanwhile, for those ladybirds for whom there was no conveniently blooming Alexanders, the pollen from silver birch catkins seemed to be an acceptable substitute. The dangly yellow catkins are male, the upright green catkins are female, and after pollination (which will be courtesy of the wind rather than the ladybirds) the female catkins will become spikes of tiny winged seeds that are favourite food for siskins and redpolls in winter.