Nature Chain Winsley

Night-scented Garden  & Wildlife Gardening Tips ‘Here’s looking at you kid!’ Last word in last post was the Elephant Hawkmoth sleeping out the daylight on a post. It’s true beauty and prowess is at night - here it is head on! Those compound eyes are now on the lookout for night flower nectar. It hovers in a whirr of wings, body motionless, projecting its long tongue into night-flowers which are adapted to attract such night pollinators. The flower’s allure is pale or white petals, intensifying by reflecting light by night and their scent comes on as evening falls. Honeysuckle is one such flower, wild or cultivated, easy to grow  . Its petals are swept back and the Elephant Hawkmoth’s feet never touch as its extra long tongue delves deep down that tube. Like all night-flying moths, it sniffs out the nectar with sensitive antennae, feather-like and visible in photo 1 and in the Black Arches moth   More Wildlife Gardening Tips : Besides Honeysuckles, oth...

  Hummingbirds?? & Wildlife Gardening Tips A regular visitor, always awaited with excited anticipation and a little concern in case it doesn’t turn up ... so fast, so evocative of foreign exotics, so intricately patterned, so extravagantly equipped with kit designed for function... and so unpredictable and transient! Blink and it’s gone! It is the aptly named Hummingbird Hawkmoth. Decades ago, it was the unexpected sight of this insect which prompted me to realise that the neglected jungle of nettles, coarse grass and hogweed which was our newly acquired garden had actually been a bit more... an old bit of meadow. The Hummingbird Hawkmoth (I had never seen such a thing before) was humming about round an accidentally unmown bit which was bedstraw. This is the main food plant of its caterpillars – Lady’s Bedstraw (small, filmy thin leaves, yellow flowers) and Hedge Bedstraw (taller, thicker greener leaves, white flowers). This was special... and so our mini meadows began....

  Meadow Cut Time ! Butterfly ID’s Wildlife Gardening Tips A beautiful Common Blue butterfly drinks from a meadow marjoram flowerhead – a flower that is never without butterflies when the sun shines. This Summer, clumps of Marjoram have offered a continuous food supply to masses of brown meadow butterflies. Less flamboyant, but intricately patterned members of the meadow community, they can be difficult to tell apart Which are which? Compared to the Meadow Brown the Gatekeeper (2 & 3) is smaller, has more orange on the wings (very obvious in flight) and has two dark framed white spots on its forewing. The larger, browner Meadow Brown only has one framed white spot (5 this butterfly has a damaged wing - a narrow escape from a predatory bird peck!). But there has been another brown butterfly about the meadow and in the flower border –  It is a notoriously difficult one, and it has a doppelganger. Variable amounts of blue scales at the base (or even entirety) of the w...

Day Flying Moths & Wildlife Gardening Tips Day-flyers are dazzlers! If you think that moths are dull white and brownish creatures melting into the night, or eating holes in woollen clothes, and furnishings, think again... There are two main species of clothes moths, yes... but there are about 2,400 others which are not! And their variety of colours and shapes and sizes is staggering. Take the Six-spot Burnet moth for example – It flaunts brilliant red spots against an iridescent black background which glint to a greenish shine – an artefact of shifting sunlight as the animal moves. The forewings have 6 red spots (which in some individuals occasionally fuse to make bigger, fewer spots) When it opens its wings, the red hind wings make an unexpected dazzling red flash. (Rarely, the red of the 6-Spot Burnets can be replaced by yellow.) But this moth’s dazzling contrast colours are not there for medieval-style human admiration, but are a warning... Red against black, like a wasp’s ...