HITCHIN WILDLIFE OCTOBER 2021

October is a good time to appreciate berries, seed heads, spiders, and the last remnants of the warmer weather.  I'm not going to lie though, I like insects best of all so there will be a few pictures of them too.

Spindle bushes are easiest to find in autumn as their amazing pink fruits stand out from the hedgerow, despite their exotic look they are a native species and over at Oughtonhead I found a Spindle bush covered in scale insects and on the same bush were many Kidney Spot ladybirds, which specialise in eating the scale insects. 

I note that the scientific name for Spindle bushes is Euonymus, and if you have a related garden plant it is worth checking it for Kidney Spot ladybirds, including the funky-looking nymphs, shaped like a spiky teardrop.   

 

Another bright berry is on yew trees, the following photo is from Hitchin cemetery this must a female tree as only they bear fruit. Yews have often been planted in church yards and are one of the three UK native UK conifers, can you name the other two? (answers at the bottom). 

Also from the cemetery, one of the adult insects I've seen this month is this beetle (no common name, but I think it is Ablattaria laevigata) which predates on snails and seems to be adopting a defensive posture here: that armour looks very effective!

A bright sight in October was the yellow flowers of Common Toadflax I noticed whilst cycling near Charlton and there were several of the day-flying Nettle Tap moths taking advantage. There will be flowers of other all sorts of species hanging on for the rest of the year provided the weather is not too bad. 

Ivy flowers have been providing food for all sorts of insects during September and some of the plants have still been in flower in October. Here is a tiny Compost Hoverfly, notable for the chunky thighs on its rear legs, having a feed.

October is a good month for spotting leaf miners, these are the tiny insects where the larva lives between the upper and lower surface of a leaf: I still can't quite get my head around how small some creatures are! The leaf miners can be the juvenile stages of flies, wasps, beetles etc and perhaps the most obvious one is the Horse Chestnut Leaf miner (see the picture in my September blog post), a moth which has been busy turning our Horse Chestnut leaves brown since summer. However the particular leaf miner which I was pleased to find was a "case bearing" moth which lives in a little tube underneath a Silver Birch leaf and stretches up into the leaf to feed, but can retreat back into its tube if needs be. The left-hand photo shows the case and the right-hand photo shows the leaf held up to the light and you can see the caterpillar, with its dark head, feeding within the leaf, its rear end still attached to its case.

 

  

Other insects busy doing things on Oak leaves are gall wasps, the underside of some leaves are completely covered in galls. The following shot shows three different types: Smooth Spangle Galls (least common), Spangle Galls (usually most common) and Silk Button galls (with dimples). All the wasps that will emerge in spring will be female and they will then lay another generation of eggs which will produced mixed male and female wasps.

Staying with the theme of insects on leaves, here are some sawfly caterpillars I spotted on a Willow sapling at Purwell Nine Springs, I love the way they hold themselves on the edge of a leaf posing in formation. There were about a dozen of them acting as a team, stripping each leaf bare just leaving a skeleton before moving on to the next leaf.

Also at Purwell I saw the seed heads of Small Teasel, a plant I spotted for the first time earlier in the year, a striking autumnal sight. The plant likes damp places, but also needs some disturbance for the seeds to germinate, so best of luck to the seeds finding the right place to fall. 

I don't seem to have seen many fungi this year, probably because I haven't been looking properly, but a lovely one I saw in Standhill Spinney was Wrinkled Peach growing on log, looking to me like some exotic coral.

I'll finish with a few photos of spider's webs. The 9th of October was a the only really misty day in the month and I was struck by how on that day there were webs to be seen absolutely everywhere, I only really noticed one type of spider though. I think this is a Garden Spider with its characteristic cross shape on the body, it is responsible for large orb webs.

Orb web on the cemetery railings... 

Oak leaf and pine webs...   

 

On the left a "trampoline" underneath a tangle of silk, presumably to catch the unsuspecting prey as it falls from above, and an orb web spread out over a 6 foot gap near The Priory...

So October produced wildlife sights around Hitchin enough to keep me fascinated (and no fossil fuel expended).

Phil Barron

Twitter: @pcbtwit

All photos taken within the Hitchin Outer Orbital Path

Quiz answer: Three native conifers are Yew, Scot's Pine and Juniper.