Shiny

This was the prettiest of just a few invertebrates I found and photographed on a quick rattle around the garden this morning, before going out for lunch with R.

I do love a Hawthorn Shieldbug, and this one was displaying very nicely on an autumnal Norway maple leaf, but it’s one of the three species that I commonly find in my garden that I mentally characterise as “trickily shiny”. Though I have to say that Juniper and Birch Shieldbugs are worse, if anything, because their colours are more muted, and they can easily bleach out in strong sunlight or under flash. I was helped here by the fact that it was actually sunny in the garden, so the flash only popped at fill level, and after a few tries I found an angle at which the reflected specular highlights weren’t too dazzling.

One of our largest shieldbugs, the Hawthorn is common wherever its larval foodplants are found, and hard to miss if it colonises your garden. I have several hawthorn trees and saplings, despite my efforts to keep their enthusiastic self-seeding in check, but also rowan, whitebeam and cotoneaster, which this bug will also eat. As with many shieldbugs it overwinters as an adult – often changing colour beforehand to become more red than green, which presumably helps to keep it hidden among the leaf litter where it hibernates. Hawthorn Shieldbugs mate on emergence in the spring, and females lay their eggs on a suitable foodplant, whose ripening berries the nymphs will eat as they develop through the summer. Adults will suck sap from the leaves of a variety of trees and shrubs, so they can turn up pretty much anywhere. They’re attracted to light, and are sometimes found in moth traps.