Good morning you lovely blogger-ers!
I hope that you are enjoying this bank holiday Monday! Rye Meads is open over the bank holidays so do come over and enjoy a lovely walks - and perhaps see the most royal of birds... the kingfisher! I'm wearing red, white and blue flowers in my hair today as it is the Jubilee long weekend!
You can pop over tomorrow and help us celebrate by creating our very own "Bug-ingham Palace"! We will be creating a fantastic minibeast home from 11 am- 3pm, click here for more information.
Talking of minibeasts...Over the weekend we had our Springwatch with the RSPB weekend - we went pond dipping and minibeasting and more!I wanted to show you some of the fab creatures we found while minibeasting over the weekend.
We walked around the reserve looking at wildlife in the vegetation either side of paths, and we went into our special minibeast areas and looked under logs - you may have seen the round logs with handles on? Well they are minibeast homes!
In the vegetaion we saw spiders, harvestman, ladybirds, ants, slugs, beetles, caterpillars ands loads of cuckoo spit. Keep an eye as you wonder round - there is quite alot to see! It was raining a little when we went out so we didn't see dragonflies, damselflies. butterflies and shieldbugs, but usually there is lots around on the plants to keep looking!
Cuckoo spit is a frothy liquid that starts to appear on stems and leaves in late spring/ summer. It's not actually any thing to do with cuckoos, it's actually produced by a young frog hopper.
The froth is produced by the nymph, for a number of purposes - it hides the nymph from view of predators, it insulates against temperature fluctations, and stops the nymph from drying out. When they are in the froth the frog hopper is only 4-6 mm long. When they are fully grown they are small brown insects - they can jump long distances when threatened. This is a picture of the froghopper Philaenus spumarius, from the RSPB's A to Z of a wildlife garden.
Theres some great snails along the paths.
We even spotted some caterpillars under some leaves - not sure what makes they are, any ideas?
Under the logs we saw worms, slugs, snails, millipedes, centipedes, woodlice, spiders, bettles, earwigs, ants, and newts!
We have smooth newts (or common newts) Triturus vulgaris at the reserve, they are fab creatures... Have a read of this from the RSPB's A to Z of garden wildlife:
Common newts are nocturnal and spend the day hiding under large stones or compost heaps. From mid-October they hibernate, emerging again in February or March. Males seek out females and entice them by wafting a glandular secretion.
The male drops a packet of sperm (spematophore) near the female, which she collects. A week or so later she lays up to 400 eggs on broadleaved aquatic plants. The larvae hatch, and during the next 10 weeks change completely, or metamorphose, into juvenile newts.
So cool. Some of the young (this one was about 3 cm long) hide under the logs.
One of the types of beetle we spotted was a lesser stag beetle Dorcus parallelipipedus.
They can get up to about 3 cm long.
We saw quite a lot of woodlice, have a look through the pictures below.
Woodlice shed their skin! Here you can see the shed skin in white, and the just shedded woodlouse - you can see the front half of the body is slightly dull!
Pill woodlice roll up into a ball for protecion - you can see the over lapping plates giving it protection all over.
These small white woodlice surrounded by red ants are ant woodlice. They are very small, up to 4 mm, and usually with within ants nests underground. It is thought that the ants are happy sharing the homes as the woodlice may keep the nest clear of droppings.
See you soon,
Louise