A new generation of ladybirds

I noticed a patch of ladybird eggs on the tine of a hand cultivator in the kitchen garden.  It seemed an odd place to lay eggs with no food for larvae within easy walking distance.  As you would expect I brought it in to take some photos and waited to see what happened.  For reference the patch of 44 eggs above is about the size of a 7-spot Ladybird and the eggs are about 1mm long. 

The next morning I noticed a spider had moved in and spun some silk.  I wasn't sure if this was setting a trap for the larvae but later that day the spider was gone although some silk remained.

Two days later, early in the morning the larvae were hatching.  You can see that in fact it is the larvae that are yellow and the eggs are white.  Very soon the larvae were turning black.

Less than two hours later all but two eggs had hatched and half the larvae were black.

 At nine hours this was the view with most larvae black.

I put the cultivator out in the meadow overnight, expecting that the larvae would move off to find something to eat but next morning it looked as though they were all still in place.  This is the view at 24 hours after hatching.  The larvae look significantly bigger.

And this was the view at 34 hours and there seemed to be fewer larvae.  The cultivator was back in the meadow between photos so some could have moved away but ladybird larvae are notoriously cannibalistic so I wonder if some of the bigger ones had eaten some of the smaller ones.  Who knows?

By 48 hours they had all gone and most of the remaining egg shells looked to have been eaten by slugs.

Ladybird eggs and new larvae all look pretty much the same and can't be identified to species. As they get older the larvae develop individual markings and can usually be identified.  The eggs are laid over several weeks, mostly from late spring to mid summer.  Elsewhere in the meadow I could see lots of 7-spot Ladybird larvae of different sizes and ages feasting on the blackfly on the knapweed.

And a 14-spot Ladybird larva getting in on the action as well.

I also saw an adult 7-spot Ladybird but I can't tell if it is one of the last generation or the first of the next.  Probably the former.

Stoat news

First a stoat I met while counting dragonflies at Hepple.  I saw it running through the grass pursued by a crow, presumably hoping to steal any catch.  The stoat then ran straight up an enormous ash tree and was searching for bird nests while being mobbed by anxious small birds. My camera was in static dragonfly mode (manual focus, single exposure, slow speed, low ISO, etc) and the only change I could make quickly was to autofocus but I managed a few photos.

In this photo the blur on the right is one of the birds mobbing the stoat.

The stoat didn't find a nest and eventually gave up and ran straight down the tree as agile and as confident as a squirrel.

The stoat in the garden has been frustrating, as stoats often are.  I saw it by the gate with something in its mouth, possibly a kit, and it ran across into the meadow, towards the wall.  I fetched a camera and stood waiting for half an hour in case it returned.  Just as I gave up it came back with a second kit but I missed the photo.  So I fetched a tripod and stood waiting for nearly an hour but it didn't reappear.  It also didn't show on the cameras on the wall so I don't know where it went to.  There are plenty of other log piles, stone piles and brash piles in the copse so it could be that there is a stoat nest in there somewhere.

The cameras can only see the front of the wall and the stoat does appear a few times a week. Mostly it just runs by but sometimes it does a dance.  This is the most recent.

Another taste of what the stoat gets up to.  It does seem to be aware of the cameras.

One time it pulled a rabbit out of the hat, almost literally.  The rabbit isn't full grown and isn't very fresh and this was the only camera that saw it.  You can hear a blackbird alarm in the background.

I live in hope that the stoat will keep the kits in the garden and that they may yet appear on the cameras.

D-day on NestBoxCam

At last some success to report from my nest box camera.  The camera is very low res and now very old.  It was put up in 2009 so the software that runs it is at least 17 years old and the only computer that can run the software is 18 years old (and still works).  Because of all this the pictures and sound aren't very good so I have been thinking of replacing it all, but I have been discouraged by the recent lack of success.  Chicks were fledged from the box every year from 2009 - 2019 (mostly blue tits, once great tits and once tree sparrows).  Since then nothing. There were three chicks in 2022 but they died and in the other years there was either no attempt or no eggs after a nest was built.

In the past winter a blue tit was roosting in the box every night, something I haven't seen before, and I wasn't really paying much attention until I noticed a nest had been built in late April.  On 1st May I could see at least one egg (there must have been two) and the clutch of nine was complete by 8th May.  This video shows what happened as eight chicks hatched on 15th May and grew for the next 20 days.

Fledging was on 3rd June.  In previous years I have watched from the car with a camera but this time I watched on the nest box camera.  Two chicks left while I was in the shower and the next five went quite quickly.  No 8 was very reluctant and was still in the box at 09.30 when I had to go out but it had left by the time I got home.  I was interested to see that the parents were aware that there was still one left, despite presumably being busy trying to keep up with the other seven outside.

Encouraged by this I plan to install a new box with a new camera and new software for much better pictures next year.