Great weather for butterflies at the moment with Orange Tip, Green Veined White, Peacock, Meadow Brown, Small Tortoiseshell, Speckled Wood and Small Skipper all seen on the wing recently at Dove Stone.
male Orange Tip on Herb Robert
We have some quite large nettle beds in various places around Dove Stone. Common Nettle ( Urtica dioica ) not only supports butterflies such as Small Tortoiseshell and Peacock but it also supports a great number of other insect life, so it's a good one to grow a patch of in your garden ( did you know that the UK's gardens cover more space than all the National Nature Reserves in the UK ? )
A fascinating thing about nettles is the gall of the rust fungus Puccinia urticata. It's one of those things that is just transfixing to look at it because it looks quite strange - and almost caterpillar like in some instances..Thanks to Sarah for the photo below taken at Dove Stone.
A gall is basically a growth on plants and trees caused by viruses, bacteria, insects, mites and, as here, fungi. How galls work is that they usually attack or penetrate the plant’s growing tissues and this causes the host to reorganise its cells and develop an abnormal growth. So what's the point of a gall ? For the parasitic organism they can provide shelter, nutrients and protection from predators.
Galls have really recognisable forms, so much so that what causes the gall can often be easily identified from the growth alone. Obvious ones that you might have seen are galls on birch trees that look a bit like a nest-like cluster of twigs known as witches’ brooms which is caused by the fungus Taphrina betulina. And there's also oak galls. There are actually hundreds of species of oak gall wasps ( cynipids ) which produce an amazing variety of galls: a single oak tree may support many thousands of galls and each cynipid species creates its own unique structure. So there you go, galls are really quite remarkable things!
Whilst on the subject of the weird and wonderful, take a look at these quite beautiful images of the slime mould Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa on a rotting pine log, thanks to our ''man-on-the-ground-Ken''.
Also spotted by Ken was this Pleated Inkcap Parasola plicatilis:
Back to the birds soon with an update on what's about...