Barnsley Nats

From Ron. I think every birder in the Barnsley area will have made the pilgrimage to Cudworth to see Barnsley’s first ever Rose Coloured Starling. Well worth the trip.

We also managed to get up to the Small Blue site, before the sunny weather broke. I think we saw more Small Blues than ever this year, the colony seems to be thriving. Regards Ron and Joyce.

From David S. My long-suffering other half Esther has really missed going camping this year, so last weekend with the weather being so fine (seems like a distant memory now), we decided to spend it camping in the garden.

With the tent set up, fire-pit in place, camping chairs ready, a good book and a beer to hand we spent the next two days in the glorious British countryside (imagination required at this point). Thankfully our garden has high fences around it and I keep the borders full of lovely flowers to attract my beloved bees, so it does feel away from the world and you soon forget you are surrounded by other houses.

Esther was comfy with her nose buried in a book and I was scampering around the garden with an ID book, hand lens and capture pot on a bug hunt.

There was a good number of common bumblebee species on the flowers and a selection of solitary bees which I had no hope of identifying apart from two, an Ashy Mining Bee and a Red Mason Bee. The only other thing of note was a cluster of Black Bean Aphids being farmed by some Common Black Ants for the sticky honeydew that they produce. I got a blade of grass and tried to move an aphid to see how the ants would react and I was not disappointed, in a flash a gang of ants were savaging the grass blade.

Later in the afternoon we saw something very unusual, there was a Kestrel doing its trademark hovering right above us at about 60/70 feet, checking out the garden. Not seeing anything it fancied it moved on, and I watched as it systematically worked down the street doing the same thing over each garden before peeling off. In all the years we have lived here we have never seen this before and it made me wonder what had forced it to look for new hunting opportunities.

Finally, I had wrestled into my sleeping bag, got comfy and was just dropping off when we were both brought sharply back to awake by the shrill yelping alarm call of a Little Owl, which sounded really loud in the dead of night. This too was a first for us, we have never heard an owl of any species before in the garden – strange times indeed. Happy camping everyone. Regards, David.

From Adam. Last week I was out walking around Silkstone Common/ Hood Green.

The highlights were spotting a clump of Common Bistort (Bistorta officinalis on the road verge of House Carr Lane, (although I have read that sometimes the more vigorous cultivated version Suberba can escape nearby gardens) and coming across Pignut (Conopodium majus) for the first time this year in the fields below Hood Green

On the topic of insects I have attached a couple of pictures of something that caught my eye in my garden today. After a scan of my insect book it looks to me like Arge pagana – it has an obvious orange abdomen and black stripes on leading edges of wings. I wondered whether anybody in the group had any thoughts?

From Stuart and Lynn. The warm weather of spring appears to have left us for a while here in Penistone and we are back to the normal British mix of wind and rain. But, of course we would probably all agree that we did need some of the wet stuff if only to give the gardens a drink.

With the last of the warm weather I had a walk to look around Wigan Spring near Hartcliffe (on open access land). [It’s in Brockholes Local Wildlife Site]

I was on the hunt for adult stoneflies and caddis however the long dry spell has all but dried the area out. Eventually I did find some water and it was long before I netted some stoneflies and the odd caddis. The adult stoneflies were Leuctra nigra and the adult caddis were Wormaldia occipitalis (archive photo attached). Both would be expected from that habitat but it is always nice to find them.