"Go back! Go back!"

People up here in the North East are famed for their warm welcome for visitors but red grouse could do with a bit of hospitality training - the parting shot in their alarm call when anyone encroaches on their territory sounds very much like 'go-back, go-back'


Mind you, since they're going to be shot at in a few months time I guess it's understandable....

There's another fine sound recording made in Allenheads, not far from where this rather more friendly female was photographed, here


This recording was made by Richard Dunn whose work is here on the wonderful Xeno-Canto web site. 

Assassins on the Pond Surface

Even though there was a frost last night and the pond surface briefly froze, there were two pond skaters Gerris lacustris out hunting by mid-morning, on the lookout for any small insects that had become trapped in the surface film .....

..... like this one. At this time of year most of the prey items are small but in summer I've sometimes seen pond skaters descending like a pack of wolves on drowning wasps.

This one, with a nightmarish countenance, has caught a small fly whose wing you can see held between the short front legs of the predator.

The pond is currently suffering from an algal bloom which slows down the skaters' progress across the surface and sometimes clogs the microscopic hairs that makes these hunters water-repellent. They are spending a lot of time grooming the algae off their body surface and when they do this, grooming the second leg against the third leg on each side in turn, they use one of those short prey-capture legs at the front as the third leg of a tripod to support themselves - normally, when the animal is on the move, the front legs are held just above the water surface. The greenish-yellow deposit on that middle leg on the left-hand side in the picture is a patch of algal cells that the insect hasn't managed to remove yet.

At the moment there are only two pond skaters present and the larger one, top left, is the female. They seem to be courting, by slowly approaching and extending a middle leg towards each other. They breed in May so she'll be laying eggs now and by the end of the month I'm expecting to see nymphs scooting across the surface.

What happens when a raindrop, travelling at terminal velocity, hits a butterfly .....?

I've never seen an insect actually hit by a raindrop but I did once read an eyewitness account (of dubious reliability) of such a collision with a bumblebee in flight, which supposedly killed the bee. It came to mind yesterday as a dark rain cloud slid over the sun while I was photographing this newly-minted female orange tip butterfly  visiting bluebells.

Almost immediately the butterfly folded its wings as completely as possible, assumed a vertical position on a bluebell infloresence and even aligned its antennae tightly in line with its body axis - all of which presented the smallest possible target for a falling raindrop. I wonder if this instinctive behaviour is triggered by the sudden drop in light level and temperature that's characteristic of an approaching shower on a spring day? Many insects crawl away under leaves during rain showers but orange tips always seem to roost in the open. I've often found dew-covered specimens early in the morning.

As soon as the sudden and very heavy shower had passed I went out to take a look and found the butterfly unharmed..... hard to believe that it hadn't been knocked off its perch by the downpour!