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

Felled by a woodpecker

One of our big plane trees (Platanus x hybrida) was felled by high winds yesterday. The tree had broken half way up, with the top half leaning on the bottom half. 

It was complicated to bring the whole lot down safely. When I did, I discovered this woodpecker nest at the point at which the tree had broken:

The woodpecker (we have both the Greater Spotted Woodpecker, Dendrocopos major, and the Green Woodpecker, Picus viridis) had drilled into the soft plane wood and had taken most of the strength out of the tree by building such a large nest. The nest is 10cm wide, at a point at which the trunk is only 24cm diameter, so woodie had dug a nest almost half the tree's width.

A Greater Spotted Woodpecker is just 22cm tall. This tiny David felled a 20 metre Goliath of a plane tree.

The Woods go Dung

Turning over a new leaf

 The forest here grows very thick, so we've put the donkeys to work reducing the woods to, er, manure.

The woods go dung

Donkeys are efficient, but ruthless. They will strip the bark off anything small enough, and chew their way through almost everything else.

Barking mad

Arran loves it.