The hot weather over the last couple of weeks has liven up the reserve. Whilst the end of the breeding season for the birds has meant the air is no longer filled with bird song, the warm weather has changed the acoustics of the reserve to a gentle buzz and chirp of the insects. If you carefully look at the flowering plants a wide array of invertebrates can be found. The most obvious are the bees and hoverflies (some pretending to be bees) busily sipping nectar from the purple knap weed. One of the strangest is Rhingia campestris, a hoverfly, with a long protruding snout which enclosing its proboscis (tongue) allowing it to sip nectar from flowers other insects cannot reach. These adaptions evolve to reduce competition between different species.
Rhingia Campestris
Helophilus pendulus
Hairy Shieldbug
Not all the action is during the day, with the muggy evenings there is a wide variety of moths abound
White-Lined Dart
Antler Moth
The sun also brings out a range of butterflies particularly noticeable at present is the Wall butterfly regular seen sunny itself on the sea wall on the sunnier days. With the recent warm weather coming up from the south the odd Painted Lady have been pushed northwards, a migrant butterfly from North Africa, which each year moves in to Europe to take advantage of increasing food resources where it will produce a number of new generations.
Wall Butterfly
The first signs of the autumn migration have begun with Swifts leaving our shores early in the month and the swallows finish off their final broods, gathering on the wires around nearby Wigtown, before heading south across the reserve. The first migrants have been through the with two Little Ringed Plover briefly on the flashes out on the saltmarsh. So keep eyes peeled over the next few weeks.
The Warden, RSPB Crook of Baldoon