Hieroglyphic Ladybird

A second ladybird post in a row but I thought I ought to share this.  It was quite a week, starting off with the discovery of a Scarce 7-spot Ladybird.  I signed off last week's post by saying "Hieroglyphic Ladybird is top of my wish list.  Do let me know if you know where I can find one - and expect to see a photo here if I do."

And the very next morning I found one, or two to be precise.  I called in to Havannah Nature Reserve, a couple of miles from here, just to have a look around because it is a local ladybird hotspot, great for conifer specialists such as Striped, 18-spot and Eyed Ladybirds.  It is predominantly lowland heath with a lot of heather and gorse and Scots pines, a rare habitat around here, but Hieroglyphic Ladybird had never been recorded there so I wasn't at all expecting to find one.  And then there it was in my sweep net.  It was quite active so I took few photos in the net but before I could get a more natural-looking background it flew off.

It is quite a lot smaller than a 7-spot Ladybird and the colour is old gold with the markings you can see, which must have reminded someone of Egyptian hieroglyphs.  After it had gone I carried on my search and ten minutes later, to my amazement, I found another one.

Later that day Chris Barlow, a noted local naturalist and entomologist, found two more and the following day James Common, our local ladybird expert, found another so there is obviously something going on.  Until a few days ago Hieroglyphic Ladybird was the rarest, or least often reported, conspicuous ladybird in the North East Ladybird Spot.  Within the past two or three weeks there have been several records from the Durham Coast as well so things are changing.

There are also lots of Heather Beetles at Havannah, something Chris says he has never seen before, and Hieroglyphic Ladybirds and their larvae eat Heather Beetle larvae.  The habitat is right so the supposition is that this year's fine weather has encouraged the establishment of a population of Heather Beetles and the Hieroglyphic Ladybirds have found them and taken advantage.  With luck both will become established.  On Sunday I went back and Chris found another one which he kindly allowed me to photograph.

I think that's enough on ladybirds for a while so we'll have something completely different for my next post.

Scarcely believable

This was third time lucky.  I have twice before been to look for a Scarce 7-spot Ladybird without success.  As its name suggests it is rare and it is almost always found close to, but not in, a wood ant nest in woodland or heathland.  This was in Harlestone Firs near Northampton, somewhere I often went on my bike over 60 years ago.  I had found a Formica rufa nest near the sawmill before so I went straight there this time.  In the bracken and a small fir tree very close by I soon found about a dozen 7-spot Ladybirds but they were all the standard Coccinella septempunctata.  There was another nest, or part of the nest, a couple of metres away and from the bracken there I quickly had twenty 7-spot ladybirds in my sweep net.  As I checked them all one was slightly different - a bit smaller, a deeper red with larger black spots, and a slightly more domed shape.

The key to the identification is that is has four small white triangular marks underneath at the base of its middle and hind legs whereas Coccinella septempunctata has only two in the middle. It wasn't easy to photograph but was better with the ladybird in a small glass specimen tube.

The Scarce 7-spot Ladybird goes by the wonderful scientific name of Coccinella magnifica.   It is a handsome beetle and was happy for me to take a few more photos.

I also tried to get a photo of the two species side by side but the flash didn't fire as the 7-spot Ladybird (L) walked by the Scarce 7-spot Ladybird (R).  The photo was totally underexposed but it is astonishing how Adobe Lightroom can recover this image from the Olympus OM-1 RAW file.

There are still several British ladybirds I haven't found.  Hieroglyphic Ladybird is top of my wish list.  Do let me know if you know where I can find one - and expect to see a photo here if I do.

More action on WeaselCam

It has been a quiet summer but now things are warming up in the trail camera box.  After the female weasel moved her kits I was hopeful of seeing her again.  She made two brief visits to the box in one day, followed by the stoat the next day, so I put a mouse in the top pipe as a lure. When the weasel came back she could obviously smell the mouse but to my frustration, and presumably hers, she couldn't find it and eventually gave up.

A couple of days later I put in another mouse, this time in one of the bottom pipes, and it was found straightaway, but by a different weasel, this one a male.  Notice how he immediately checks the coast is clear and then looks for a second mouse before taking it away.   He didn't go far because he was back 20 seconds later for another look round.

And he was back again four more times in the next 20 minutes, obviously convinced I had hidden another mouse somewhere.

The size difference between these two weasels isn't obvious at a glance because they are so active but here is a side by side view of the female (L) and male (R) searching the bottom left pipe.

With a male weasel and a stoat around in the garden I think either or both could have prompted the female weasel to move her kits to a different nest.  I don't think they can be far away and they might yet appear on the camera. 

A stoat visits WeaselCam

Two days after my last post on the weasel moving her family a stoat again appeared in the garden and this time came into the weasel box and was captured on camera.  I had wondered if the weasel might have been provoked into the move by a stoat and I think this makes it more likely.  A stoat would be a threat to a weasel.

Stoats are generally reluctant to enter camera boxes, including mine, even though mine has extra large outside entrance pipes (160mm).  This one I think is female because of its size - a male would be even larger.

Unusually the stoat went through and then came back through the box, common behaviour for a weasel but something I haven't seen with a stoat, although there have been very few stoat visits.

The stoat looks very big compared with a weasel and gave me the opportunity to have fun with making a composite photo from two frame grabs.  This is the female stoat with a female weasel. The two animals would be more similar in colour but the lighting was different on the two days. You can see why the stoat would present a danger to the weasel.

And the female stoat with a male weasel.

A female stoat is about 250g, a male weasel about 120g, and a female weasel about 60g.  A male stoat would be about 350g.

This was by far the best view so far of a stoat in the camera box.  I hope there will be more to share soon.

Mrs Weasel moves house (and takes the family)

Another exciting day in the garden.  I saw a weasel dash across the drive by the gate, carrying something in its mouth.  Guessing it might be a kit I ran for a camera and the weasel returned within a minute or so, too quick for a photo.  Another minute or two later and it was back with another kit.  Being a weasel it was moving fast and the photography was difficult.  I was panning the camera but the weasel stopped as soon as it heard the camera so I overshot.  As soon as I found it again through the viewfinder it was off under the gate.  I didn't see it return but a couple of minutes later it was back with a third kit and the process was repeated.  I waited for ages but it didn't come back again.  The photos aren't technically very good but this was amazing to see. Here are the best of what I managed - all the rest are blurred or only show half a weasel (or none at all).

Weasels produce 4-6 kits in a brood and can have two broods in a year so given the timing I expect this is a second brood.  I only saw three kits moved but I could well have missed more at the beginning of the move.  A weasel will move its litter to another nest if it is disturbed or if there is a shortage of prey.  I wonder if this one had been nesting in my weasel wall, which has two built-in weasel nest boxes, although she shouldn't have been disturbed there.  I haven't had a camera on the wall this summer as there has been little activity in the camera box.  I checked the nest boxes last winter and they didn't look as though they had been used last year.  I have to partially dismantle the wall to get at them so I'll wait until the end of this year before having another look.  In the meantime I'll hope to see young weasels in the garden or on the trail camera when these are a bit older.

I also saw a stoat a couple of weeks ago and managed a couple of photos through the window - it isn't very big so may be a youngster.  I wonder if a stoat might have disturbed the weasels.

PS.  If you looked at my last blog on Roe deer on the otter bridge early and the videos wouldn't play it was because I had forgotten to activate them.  It was fixed later that day and the videos will play now if you haven't seen them.

Roe deer on the otter bridge

The trail cameras are set primarily to keep an eye on what the otters get up to but they record whatever comes into view.  At the moment fewer than 1% of recordings are of otters.  Non-target captures in late spring and early summer were mainly of young birds, especially water rails, moorhens and mallards, but there are plenty of mammals as well.  They now outnumber the birds and in perhaps ascending order of size they are common shrew, water shrew, bank vole, wood mouse, field vole, brown rat, grey squirrel, red fox, badger and roe deer.

Deer aren't the most exciting subjects on trail camera because they usually don't do much but the kids are charming.  They are now a couple of months old and still have some of their camouflage but they find the bridge a bit of a challenge because it is built rather like a cattle grid. If you have dainty hooves it requires a bit of concentration to get across safely.  Here are mother and the twins all managing easily this time.

Here one of the kids has discovered the camera.

Here is one of the twins showing how not to do it.  After falling through a couple of times it came back to have think but realised it was left behind and had to try again.  You can hear it squeaking as it set off a second time.

The last video shows one of the kids on the bridge.  As I said, roe deer don't do much but it is quite relaxing to watch if you have a couple of minutes to spare.

The Greater White-toothed Shrew

Well here is something new.  A new mammal, not only to my trail cameras but to the UK.  This is the Greater White-toothed Shrew (Crocidura russula), first discovered in this country only four years ago.  It came to notice when a photo of a shrew brought in by a cat in Sunderland was posted on Facebook (as you do) and was noticed by local mammalogist and ecologist Ian Bond. It looked different from any of our native shrews and was subsequently confirmed to be a new British species.  How it got here is not established but looking back at earlier photos of dead shrews(!) it has probably been present at least since 2015.

You can't see the white teeth unless you have a live-trapped or dead individual but the Greater White-toothed Shrew can be identified by being medium-sized for a shrew, having grey fur, large protruding ears, white hairs on its tail and a distinctive nose profile described as looking like a Womble or a Clanger (if you are young enough to remember those).  The zoomed-in screen grabs from video freeze-frames aren't the best quality but this is the nose shape and large ears,

and here you can make out the white tail hairs.

All these are clearer on the video.  These few clips are all I have so far and because we are looking at shrews they are fairly brief.

The camera box was placed in a scruffy area close to a hedgerow in Elemore Park, only a mile or so from Easington Lane where the original Greater White-toothed Shrew was first recorded. Although it is within Sunderland metropolitan borough it is closer to Durham.  A few interesting observations about the recordings: all were in daylight and Greater White-toothed Shrews are known to be mainly diurnal in habit; there were a few Common Shrew recordings but no Pygmy Shrews, a few Field Voles but no Bank Voles; and no Wood Mice, which is a surprise.  I had enough videos of Common and Greater White-toothed Shrews to make this short slow-motion comparison video.

The Greater White-toothed Shrew is a resident of much of Western Europe and some of the Channel Islands.  It was discovered in Ireland in 2007 and is causing concern there because as it spread it has completely displaced the native Pygmy Shrew.  The small mammal ecology of Ireland is different from ours as there is only one native shrew, one mouse (Wood Mouse) and one vole (Bank Vole, accidentally introduced in the 1920s).  The Greater White-toothed Shrew lives at much higher densities than the Pygymy Shrew and probably out-competes it by eating all the food.  Since its discovery here a monitoring programme has been put in place by the Mammal Society, mainly involving barn owl pellet dissection, to monitor the spread of the Greater White-toothed Shrew and its effect, if any, on the Pygmy Shrew - the small mammal ecology of Great Britain is different from Ireland as we have a wider range of small mammals and predators. In Ireland this is classed as an invasive species but although there is now evidence that the Greater White-toothed Shrew is spreading across County Durham the effect on Pygmy Shrews is unknown so here it is a non-native species.   Genetic analysis suggests the Sunderland shrew came from France and not from Ireland.

Our three native shrew species, Common Shrew (Sorex araneus), Pygmy Shrew (Sorex minutus) and Water Shrew (Neomys fodiens), all have red-tipped teeth whose enamel is strengthened with iron.  As a reminder, here is what they look like.  The Common Shrew is chunky in build, has only a medium length tail and is tricoloured on the sides, dark, medium and light.  The Pygmy Shrew is very small and slim with a long furry tail.  The Water Shrew is large and is black and white.

I am grateful to Anthony Hindmarch, the Elemore Park manager, for the opportunity to site my camera - we were primarily looking for weasels and voles so at least we found a field vole.  I hope to see more Greater White-toothed Shrew videos when I next check the camera and I'll post an update here.