Lacewing fly winter guest

When we first moved into this old house, about 35 years ago, it had an interesting and diverse invertebrate fauna. There were gaps and draughts through the doors, windows and floors and I can recall a wide range of winter visitors in those days: devil's coach horse beetles, small tortoiseshell butterflies, ladybirds, woodlice, earwigs, several species of moth. But as we renovated the place and made it more energy-efficient it became harder for small animals to find their way in. Those that arrive these days mostly come in on our clothes or on plants brought in from the garden. That's probably how this lovely green lacewing arrived, back in the autumn. It woke up from its winter hibernation in January.

 

I think it's a green lacewing Chrysoperla carnea, which is really a group of almost identical cryptic species that can only be told apart by the sounds that they make. Courting lacewings communicate with each other by drumming with their feet on leaf surfaces, creating vibrational songs, and each cryptic species has its own distinctive song frequency. 

This individual is currently spending the winter behind a picture on the wall. When spring arrives I'll let it go in the garden - lacewing larvae are useful, very effective aphid predators.

A waxwing at last!

 It's thirteen years since we last saw a waxwing, when a whole flock turned up in our garden, feeding on crab apples. There have been numerous reports of these spectacular birds all over the north-east this winter, but  it was only yesterday that we finally found one, feeding on hawthorn berries near Willington in the Wear valley. I didn't have a proper camera with me, so these pictures were taken with an iPhone 7 SE. Luckily, the bird was very obliging and let me get with a few feet before it flew higher into the tree.

Great-spotted woodpecker and Sitka spruce

 Watched some interesting behaviour by a great spotted woodpecker recently. It arrived at a sallow carrying a Sitka spruce cone in its beak, then wedged it in a hole that it had already hacked with its beak, so it could use this as a vice to hold the cone while it pecked out the seeds. Sitka spruce is clearly a winter food source for this bird because there were scores of cones that it had discarded on the ground under its tree. The Sitka plantation nearby is carrying a very heavy cone crop this winter - enough seed to supply dozens of woodpeckers.