Author: Barnsley Nats

Jill’s 2021 Christmas Quiz

Here’s Jill’s annual Barnsley Nats Christmas quiz! Now with answers!

Did you have a go at her festive offering in the days before Christmas​ or at Christmas itself​? Check the answer by hovering over each image. You can make them larger by clicking.
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Now the Quiz! …

Which owl species? Answers given by clicking in order on the images

QUESTION 1. A bird of open country/farmland/coastal marshland and forest edges. Hunts over grassland

QUESTION 2. A bird on the northern edge of its range. Has a wide range of habitats but nests on farmland

QUESTION 3. A habitat adaptable species of deciduous and coniferous woodland, farmland, towns and city centres where there is parkland.

QUESTION 4. This bird is nocturnal, inhabits conifer and deciduous woods and forests. Breeds in conifer plantations, edges of large woodlands, thorny thickets and tall hedges, always where there is open country nearby, moorland and marshland.

QUESTION 5. This species hunts regularly in daylight (especially at dawn and dusk). Habitat is open country, moorland, coastal marshes, rough grassland and dunes.

QUESTION 6
Can you identify these birds in flight ?(a to c)

Can you identify these plant galls?
(Questions 7-10. Remember, match your answer to the image)

CAN YOU IDENTIFY THE FOLLOWING PLANTS ?
( Questions 11 to 14; in the second images there are two plants!)

CAN YOU MATCH THE CATERPILLAR TO THE BUTTERFLY
(Questions 15 -17)

QUESTION 18. How is this fungus related to a pirate ?

QUESTION 19. This staining on the wood is produced by Green Elf Cup, what dye does it produce ?

We hope you enjoyed Jill’s quiz. All the best for 2022.
Thanks of course to Jill – and to Ron and Doug for the photos.
Barnsley Nats

Stranglers at Wortley Hall

Saturday 2 October: Wortley Hall parkland and walled garden.

Doug and Barry led us on a visit last Saturday to Wortley Hall for fungi and veteran trees. A good visit made more exciting by Doug’s earlier discovery of a special rare fungus: one that parasitises and grows out of another!

The greyish parasite fungus (the Powdercap Strangler, Squamanta paradoxa) grows out of the much more common yellow host fungus (Earthy Powdercap)

YNU VC63 excursion

Saturday 23 July saw the Yorkshire Naturalists Union yearly meeting for south-west Yorkshire. We met near Monk Bretton Priory and walked downstream along the river Dearne. Unfortunately there was torrential rain but we made our way through the dense vegetation along one side of the river, had lunch sheltering under a viaduct, and after some botanising in a meadow made our way back along the other side.

Our first field visit in 2021

Midsummer in a Worsbrough meadow
Our first Nats evening nature walk in 2021 was on Wednesday 23 June to Worsbrough Country Park. We used the wider paths and more open areas to help with social distancing.

We enjoyed exploring the flowering plants in a meadow and seeing chimney sweeper moths in an area with their food plant pignut

Jill’s lenten quiz

QUESTION 1
What is the flower in the picture?
a) Ramsons
b) Snowdrop
c) Lily of the Valley

QUESTION 2
Can you identify this spring flower?

QUESTION 3
Can you identify this spring flower which can be found on hedge banks and woodland clearings?

QUESTION 4
Can you identify this tree from the picture of the male and female flowers?

QUESTION 5
Can you identify the tree from the male and female flowers?

QUESTION 6
Of which Elm are these buds from?

QUESTION 7
What sort of organism is this?
a) Plant Gall
b) Fungi
c) Lichen

QUESTION 8
Which plant was collected and dried in large quantities for the Great War?
a) Coltsfoot
b) Crocus
c) Sphagnum Moss

QUESTION 9
Which two British mammals turn white in winter?

QUESTION 10
Which Raptor generated a great deal of interest on the Uplands locally in 2020?

CAN YOU NAME THE BRITISH WILD FLOWER FROM THESE STATEMENTS
QUESTION 11
Shabby Bird

QUESTION 12
Amphibian Linen

QUESTION 13
‘They seek him here, they seek him there’

QUESTION 14
Prudish National Emblem

QUESTION 15
Is this insect a
a) wasp
b) hoverfly
c) solitary bee?

QUESTION 16
What sort of insect is this?
a) cockroach
b) soldier beetle
c) long horn beetle

QUESTION 17
Can you name this bird and what family does it belong to?

QUESTION 18
Can you identify this bird and can you name the plant which is believed it spreads?

QUESTION 19
Can you identify this secretive bird ?

QUESTION 20
Can you name this bird and what family does it belong to? Where in Barnsley town centre does it roost?

Answers available at Easter!

Images of birds: Thanks Ron Marshall

Growing the mighty oak

The mighty oak is a symbol of strength, morale, resistance, and knowledge, supporting a complex ecosystem with many species.

This is the oak I started growing over 10 years ago. I just put one in a pot and it germinated. That was in 2010 and it should be over 15 foot now.

However it’s only three foot – I cultivated a kind of ‘bonsai’, but it produced acorns in 2018 and 2020.

Then I found out you can grow them in a bottle! 

Put the acorns in a bowl of water and discard those that float. Place an acorn on top of a bottle filled with water, and away you go. The one in the photo was placed on the bottle on 28th Oct 2020 and is 10cm tall. They build up a strong root system first then the top growth follows.

Here’s my new forest of oaks, grown from the acorns from 2018.

I have planted out the 32 acorns I got from 2020, so I will have a humongous forest to look after soon.

And some of these oaks have galls already.

Jill’s quiz – now with answers

Here is Jill’s traditional quiz. We normally have her quiz at our Barnsley Nats Christmas Social but this year it’s online!

The answers are hidden at first so you can still do the quiz and then look at the answers!

First of all ten butterflies or moths to identify …


Here are the answers to Jill’s butterfly and moth quiz …
[click on the image]

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And a second section of the quiz on flowering plants – again identify them with their common name.


Here are the answers to Jill’s flowering plant quiz …
[click on the image]

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Hope you enjoyed the quiz.
All the best for 2021.
Best wishes Jill and Doug.

Barn owl in December 2020

As you know due to the current lockdown restrictions and travel allowed only in our local area, we’ve all had to spend a lot more time in the Barnsley area. Not least Ron Marshall. ‘Any sunny, fine evening [of which there’s not been many] I have spent with this glorious Barn Owl.

Hope to see you in the New Year! Stay safe and well. Ron and Joyce. 

Recording wildlife sightings- some questions

Some questions for everyone: Do sightings need to be out of the ordinary to be worth recording? What makes sightings worth recording?

And how do you record what you see? Do you make a list on paper or on a computer? Do you send in your records? Perhaps you use online recording and do you recommend iNaturalist, iRecord, iSpot or get online another way?

Let’s hear what you think!

The cricket and the ladybird

I’ve got a cricket and a ladybird to share with you. I was washing the car one morning and noticed this insect just sitting there on the alloy wheel!

I think it’s a male Oak Bush Cricket- Meconema thalassinum. Males have two short rounded claspers as in the picture, whereas females have a long ovipositor at the end of their body. More

I think it’s there because I have about a dozen oak trees in my garden that might have attracted it, albeit they are miniatures. It looked as if it was still forming as it was so fresh and green. Such a beautiful creature!

I thought crickets sang (stridulate) with rubbing their legs together, this is not the case. It’s grasshoppers that do this. Apparently both the male and female cricket have a ridged vein at the base of their forewings that acts as a scraper. To sing they pull this ridge vein against the upper surface of the opposite wing, causing a vibration amplified by the thin membrane of the wing. More

We have all tried at times to locate crickets when we could hear them chirping in the grass. But their hearing is so acute that they can sense the vibrations of your feet so stop singing. A great defence from predators with their hearing.

And then, whilst cutting some shrubs back in my garden, I acquired this ladybird on my blue fleece. It hitched a ride into the house, where I supposed it was trying to get somewhere warm for winter.

I think it is a Two-spot Adalia bipunctata f. quadrimaculata red-on-black four spotted form. The black versions are more common in the north as this “melanism” helps them to absorb heat from the sun. These are much smaller than the harlequin, at about 5mm, and as you can see the underside is black and has black legs. Harlequins have reddish-brown legs, and orange abdomen.
Cheers Andy, keep safe and well. ? ?

2020 Glowworm site report

The glowworm season started earlier this year at our site near Thurgoland with the first glowworm being recorded glowing on the 30 May, after a few weeks of hot dry weather. On the following three visits, the weather was wet with low glowworm counts.

The counts and the weather started to improve towards the end of June with a count of 11 on midsummer day (they usually peak around the 21st ). I was now expecting numbers to drop, but they kept increasing with 19 on the 1st July dropping to 7 on the 8th July; it was heavy rain which they do not seem to like!

Ten days later 48 were counted in the better weather. The numbers kept up throughout July/August with a peak of 55 on the 13th September (with a possible high percentage of juveniles).

Numbers slowly fell for the next two visits to the end of September – at this stage I thought I would be counting until Christmas – but then at the start of October numbers reduced dramatically and the 2020 glowworm season finished on the 21st October.

The length of the season has been 144 days compared to 132 days in 2019. Why this is, is unclear at the moment. Records compiled by Doug Brown.

[Congratulations Doug on your persistence and stamina! Thanks to Pete Riley for the images]

AutumnWatch galls

AutumnWatch Galls. Looking back to AutumnWatch you may remember a sequence of images of galls including this impressive example …

They are the galls of the Yellow Flat-footed Fly (Agathomyia wankowiczii) on the Artist’s Bracket fungus (Ganoderma applanatum). The only recorded example in Barnsley, it was found by Geoff Jackson in 2016 on a felled Horse Chestnut tree in Woolley Bank woods.

The galls start as small warts, growing up to 1cm in height and caused by the fly depositing its eggs in the fungus. Inside each wart is the grub of the fly. Once the grub is fully grown it bores a hole into the top of the gall and falls to the ground where it buries itself into the soil before it pupates to turn into the adult fly. The holes in this example show that the larvae have left the galls. The fly needs this fungus to survive.

Another local gall seen on AutumnWatch was the Diplolepis mayri, another first for Barnsley. [See earlier post]

Catherine tells us that her article about the galls on Barnsley Main has now been published in the British Naturalist Association magazine. Congratulations Catherine!