We’d been told to expect wet weather for much of the day, and I’d planned my time accordingly, but in the event we didn’t get much rain till this evening, when the garden got the kind of soaking that meant you could hear it growing afterwards. My rainy day planning meant that I was not at Farmoor this afternoon, when a gorgeous Red-necked Phalarope paused briefly to pose for the paparazzi on the causeway before pushing off again (sigh), but did mean that I got some lovely financial admin done (deeper sigh), and excavated the accumulated paperwork deeply enough to reacquaint myself with the surface of my desk. I’d intended to finish the working day with some seriously overdue filing, but news of the Phalarope was so upsetting that all the filing happened vertically, into a large heap on my study carpet.
In better news, the fact that we only had brief showers during daylight hours meant that I could at least use my tea breaks to hunt insects in the garden – though the light was so dire and the wind so strong that photographing any of them presented a bit of a challenge. As an example, a little brown and white moth that was clinging grimly to a leaf of the oak tree, while the branch it was on bounced up and down like an over-sugared toddler on a trampoline, turned out on later examination of my very poor record shots to be an extremely interesting lacehopper. And yes – I was wearing my glasses at the time. Anyway, not everything was quite that difficult, though I did have to rely on high-speed burst shooting, followed by ruthless culling of around 95% of the day’s shots.
The Hummingbird Hawkmoth in my main image needs no introduction, and we haven’t yet reached the point in the season at which I feel I should apologise for posting another one. But if you don’t already know it, I’d also really love you to meet the Iris Weevil (Mononychus punctumalbum) in my second photo – very small, at about 4mm long, but chunky enough, I feel, to merit being described as a bit of a unit. It was on one of the irises in the wildlife pond this morning with a special friend, so I daresay their larvae will be munching through the seed pods fairly soon, but I find that I’m quite sanguine about that prospect: there are always more irises, but a good weevil is hard to find. Interestingly, this species seems to be quite new to the Shire, according to a 2023 report by two of my colleagues from the Worcestershire Recorders, but my own files show it in this garden just a year later, at which point it made its debut in this blog.
R: L2, C10, D11.
