Bug Bugged

So here's another one, seen today just below the sheep field. This time I can't even guess the Order, let alone the Family. I mean, it might be Diptera - it appears to have two wings (not four), and two short antennae, with a long and dangerous looking mouth-part. But those might be elytra (wing cases) in front of the wings, and that could make it a Coleoptera.

I fear that this bug business could get a bit obsessive...

Distinct lack of Order

I'm bugged

Beetle identification is a mystery. The beetle Family - Coleopterae - are so hugely varied, with my insect guidebook noting for example that there are 30,000 species of Leaf Beetle, each different from the other.

I had thought that this bug, found today in the bark of a pine I was chopping up, was a Snout Beetle (Curculionidae), with a mere 41,000 species world-wide to chose from. Wrong again - what I thought was the elongated snout is in fact two chubby antennae. I'm bugged if I know what this is, but if anyone out there can identify her or him, let me know.

Bored, of Barking

Klimate Kalendar Kaos

Climate change is causing chaos here at the Croft.

It's too warm for a normal October (we've had temperatures over 30º Centigrade) and the plants are reacting by producing flowers in what is officially the Autumn.

First, the plum tree came into flower - this picture was taken just a few days ago:

Plum tree, stoned

 Then the pear tree did the same - this picture was taken yesterday:

An ice pear?

The cycle is broken, and there will be obvious effects; my bees will be confused, and so will other pollinators that might try to hatch another brood when their predators have left for warmer climes - for example the Bee Eater, Meriops apiaster, left for Africa a few weeks ago. But there may be other, less obvious effects. As Dr. Josep Peñuelas at CREAF, Catalonia, showed in 2009, the volatile gasses emitted by the plants could feed back into a climate change loop, potentially accelerating the climate crisis.

The ants are our annual clock. The winged alates (the ants would probably say "wingèd"...) emerge each year to mate and form new colonies. As the Natural History Museum points out in its excellent website, ants do not always swarm on the same day each year, but rather across a season.

 
October is late for ant swarms...and I spotted no swallows or swifts in the sky catching the alates. The swallows and swifts have gone south, too early.

The climate emergency creates collateral damage all over Nature. We, Homo "sapiens", could stop that. Will we?





Source:

Peñuelas, Josep, This Rutishauser, and Iolanda Filella. ‘Phenology Feedbacks on Climate Change’. Science 324, no. 5929 (15 May 2009): 887–88. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1173004.

Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.

 
And so, it turns out, do fungi.

Here's a fungus, photographed yesterday in the field (we call it “Camelot” because our friend Artur helped to create it) that the donkeys are using. Either its own spores have germinated, or it has another fungus biting it on the back.

Fungi break nature down into its component parts, so this is a melody of decomposition.

The gills are alive...

An hornet's days work...

I saw her yesterday, the first of the year. 

A queen Asian Hornet building her Spring nest (there is a later, Summer nest that is as big as a medicine ball). Inside the front porch of the Croft.

Off with her head

Reginacide is unpleasant but occasionally necessary. Asian Hornets are not very republican - they have between two and four hundred queens in their Summer nests - so killing this one will have almost no effect on their predation of the bees that live at the Croft. 

Like many reginacides, including that of poor Mary Queen of Scots, it's a symbolic act by a weak, frustrated neighbour armed, in this case, with a big clunky stick.

The Beginning

 

This is how it will begin.

Hello, world

A single flower forcing its way through the cracking concrete of an empty building.

The building had been a busy place, full of human life. There is still lots of life - bacteria, moulds, lichens, ants and now, plants. But it is silent life, a truly silent spring. The noise of humanity has gone and the earth can get back to its buzzing, humming and rustling. Peace on earth, at last.

This is the extinction of Extinction Rebellion. The time, possibly not far from now, when humans burn their way through the earth. Gaia reasserts herself and forces a new order on the planet, one without the carbonized remains of humanity. It's an outrageous idea, but one that is getting easier to imagine. A time when our failure to stop the burning releases just enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to tip the balance of a major ecosystem. The Arctic melts and the North Atlantic Current breaks down. Or Bangladesh floods as Southern Europe becomes a desert. It does not take much.

The rich will save themselves from the initial shock by moving away from the burn. But justice will prevail and a democratic virus, or a bloody resource war, will wipe them out too.

And then the flowers will spout through the concrete deserts that we have built, and, over time that is no longer recorded and thus is not time, the natural world will eradicate all of our remains. Just a few nuclear dumps – the rotting hulks of the submarines at Faslane - will continue to glow out the message that once, a slightly intelligent ape lived here. Slightly intelligent, but not clever enough.