Today was the early spring Bank Holiday, so obviously it was a cold and dreary day – I believe that this is actually the law in England – and I stayed huddled in the house for most of it. But eventually boredom drove me out, and I chose to go to the old mill site at Cleeve Prior, because I knew there’d be something or other to be found there. Given the temperature I wasn’t expecting Odonata, which is just as well because there weren’t any, but there were more hoverflies around than on my last few visits, and the usual complement of beetles, plus one.
That one was something I’d never seen before, but it was keen that this record should stay unbroken, and after I’d pursued it around the nettles for a few seconds it took the ultimate evasive action used by beetles and bugs, and simply dropped off the leaf. They have wings, of course, and the undergrowth was very thick there, so I was far more worried that I might not have a usable photo of it than I was about the possibility of it hurting itself, and in the event all my shots of it were indeed pretty bad (poor light, high ISO, slow shutter speed, windy conditions, frantic subject, crop sensor, excuses, excuses, &c., &c.), but Obsidentify still had no difficulty in pronouncing it to be an Umbellifer Longhorn Beetle. According to the map of sightings on iRecord this is a fairly widespread species across the south of England and the Midlands, but it doesn’t seem to be recorded very often, and certainly not in the Shire, so I’m happy to have found it.
I won’t share my shaky, grainy record shots of the Umbellifer Longhorn here, but I’ll try to find another specimen on a better day, and in the meanwhile, here’s a little about it. Instead, I thought that those of you with a taste for bug porn – you know I’m talking to you, so stop trying to look innocent – might appreciate a pair of Green Dock Beetles getting in the holiday mood. Though I have to say that accustomed as I am to tripping over bonking Dock Beetles at the moment, when I turned the lens on these two I actually winced. I think my words of advice to the male went something like, “Oh, mate – please. Just let her be! If she gets any more pregnant, I think she might explode.” Many female beetles come equipped with a kind of expandable gusset (ladies: feel free to insert your own joke here) that lets their abdomens expand when they’re gravid with eggs, pushing their hardened wing cases upwards and outwards. And female Green Dock Beetles inflate more than most. But still, I don’t believe I’ve ever photographed one as proportionately huge as this before.
There are any number of tasteless comments I could make here, and human parallels I could draw, but in the interests of decorum (yes – even I try to apply some occasionally) I’m going to step around all of those, and instead pose the question of flight. Could she? Would she even try, in this state? Having grown up on Monty Python, the parallel that immediately jumped into my mind was that of the flying sheep, and the shepherd’s observation: “Notice that it does not so much fly, as plummet.”
R: L2, C9, D4.
