A Week of Work and Wildlife

To say last week was a tough week would be an understatement! I ended up working a 75 hour week by working 8 days without a day off and doing several odd shifts of overtime. To my frustration, this gave me very little time for heading down to the patch. But I did manage to do a combined butterfly/bumblebee transect last Thursday and, because I was shattered on my 1 day off, a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon.

In fact, I had to make a huge effort on Thursday to get the transect done. I had been at work until just after midnight on Wednesday into Thursday, I then went back into work for 08:30-10:00 on Thursday morning. After finishing at 10, I then needed to pick up a package from the sorting office before getting back home, changing and setting back out again. All in the knowledge that I was back into work for 15:00 to midnight once again!

Doing the combined transect was much easier than I had expected it to be and got some good counts, which included good numbers of small tortoiseshells and peacocks, plus a couple of commas in Reffley Wood. For the bumblebees, I had more good numbers of buff-tailed and white-tailed bumblebees, a few red-tailed bumblebees,  and (much to my delight) a tree bumblebee buzzing around the edge of Reffley Wood.

The sun was out and I did the whole thing in my shorts and t-shirt. And the lovely day also brought a few extra surprises with this year's patch first singing blackcap and willow warbler. I had a superb view of a basking grass snake, making good use of the top of a fence. The first bee-fly was also seen in the same area. The first tawny mining bee was also seen on Osier Marsh

On the Saturday, I went out with my sweep net and camera just to see what I could stumble across. I had no great plan other than to see what I could find. I caught a wasp whilst I was walking through Osier Marsh and I was kneeling down and examining it closely through my hand lens in an effort to get a positive ID. It was giving me a little trouble as it seemed a cross between several species in the guide book that I had with me. I was so engrossed with trying to identify the wasp, I was startled when I was nearly mown down by a grass snake as it zipped past me. It was so close that it almost slithered over my feet!

Now I do have a phobia of snakes and I have forced myself to seek them out over the last few years. This has definitely helped with the phobia, but any encounters are under my own control. To come across one so close and so unexpectedly gave me quite a turn, but I did manage to stay where I was and watch the snake disappear into the brambles instead of coming out in a cold sweat and running off! It used to be a joke when I was working on Roydon Common in the 90's that my colleagues would sit on the hill and send me out to walk across the common and count the number of times I leapt up into the air to record the number of snakes about. Nobody else would ever find them, but I would frequently stumble across them!

But back to the wasp. I initially ID'd it as a red wasp, but upon further research on the internet, it turned out to be a worker German wasp.

Having finished with the wasp, I wandered over to the Reffley Reservoir in the hope that I might get a photo of a grass snake swimming. I had no such luck, but I did find the year's first cuckoo bumblebee of the year when I found a Bombus vestalis on the bank.

Bombus vestalis