insects

our house is full of daddy long legs at the moment. and mosquitos and midges. it’s the like the battle at the end of Star Wars here.

take care around yellow jackets

keith sent me this picture and said:
“The attached shot is of a bug I found on some sweet peas growing in our garden in Southampton. Judging by this site: http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/bugclub/bugid.html
it might be some sort of Hemiptera, but that doesn’t mean anything to me so if you run out of things to post, feel free to put it up for readers to come up with a more meaningful name.
Apologies for the large file but I wanted you to be able to enjoy the full horror of it; if you zoom right in, he appears to have actually turned his head towards me to get a better look, if those are in fact eyes on his head….. ”

so, what do you think ?

Alan lead us on a butterfly walk after church yesterday.  there was a good turn out considering the wet weather

 esther and kezia loved walking through muddy puddles and streams in their trainers

 here’s alan demonstrating his butterfly lassoo technique

 alan really was the star of the show, catching and explaining everything about butterflies and nature and stuff

here he is doing the classic blanket sweep butterfly trawl. 

and explaining the catch to the assembled throng 

this is a butterfly 

here’s the specimen jar (temporary accomodation for the catchee before being let free again) 

all terrific stuff. i think alan was doing for butterflies what funkypancake does for lost gloves. so perhaps i should do guided photo tours round london ? any interest ? no, i thought not !

does anyone know what this white insect is ? our friend ian spotted it but didn’t know what it was, and wondered if any of the nature-loving (or hating!) funkypancake readers knew what it was. apparently it was a few centimetres long and had two sets of wings.
was it an angel do you think ?

any thoughts greatfully received via comments or email

(looks better if you click it for a closeup)

we’ve had hedgehogs, and mice and dried out frogs, but what’s this latest specimen we found last night inside ?
i put a one pence piece down on the ground before i let it out so you could see how big it was. deliberately (or otherwise) it walked over and sat on top of it to hide it !

i would have thought a book worm would be more likely to have an exam than a woodworm. it’s political correctness gone mad.

lynda sent me this mystery moth which she had in her house and couldn’t identify. is it a mothetore – the mythical mothical creature, half moth, half goat ?

here’s a funny thing. it’s a ladybird wandering over my computer screen. it had just walked between ‘delete’ and ‘junk’ and was heading for the word ‘thunderbird’.
this picture also shows the quality of emails i was receiving on a friday afternoon. someone had sent an email to a mailing list i’m on simply stating ‘please ignore’. people didn’t.