Common Visitor

The Green Woodpecker is becoming a daily visitor. It may be the ant heaps I am uncovering as I cut the fields or maybe it's just a good year for ants here. Here it is hunting for ants on the drive.

My house is full of grasshoppers....

At last count there were in excess of 20 grasshoppers in the porch plus grasshoppers all over the house. I think the above is yet a third species after the Meadow and Field Grasshoppers already identified. These look like the Common Green Grasshopper (Omocestus viridulus) to me (although I don't have a grasshopper book as such so I might be wrong).

Another grasshopper in the house

I don't have to go anywhere to find new grasshoppers - this one was on the front door. A little covered in spiders web but identifiable as a Field Grasshopper (Chorthippus brunneus).

Bed and breakfast

There are a number of Six -spot Burnets around and I found these two asleep at the end of the day. Obviously if you are a day-flying moth there is no place better to rest up than on Knapweed leaving you free to have breakfast as soon as you wake up!

Good year for grasshoppers

There is a lot of wildlife here that is having a bad year - butterflies, swallows and sparrows for example. Grasshoppers are having a great year however. Each step in the field can initiate a swarm of fleeing grasshoppers. I left the front door open for a while and came back to find five Meadow Grasshoppers in the porch. The photo is one of the porch squatters sitting on the doormat.

New Species - Whitethroat

No photo but I saw a Whitethroat in the garden for the first time. I was alerted by its call which I didn't recognize but I knew it was different so I got the binos out to see what was making the call.

White Plume Moth

Bindweed can be a bit dominant so I was pulling some of it up when I disturbed one of the species that comes with it - the White Plume Moth (Pterophorus pentadactyla). This extravagantly coiffured moth is one of the easier moths to identify.