Dull with heavy showers.
A colony of sawfly larvae on Alder. These are currently about 3mm long.
Ergot is a highly poisonous purple fungus that grows on grasses and cereal crops. This specimen is on dead Sweet Vernal Grass.
The seeds of Meadowsweet fall off in bunches of 5-8 seeds that roll and bounce away for dispersal.
I've seen very few Ox-eye Daisies this year. The summer has been atrocious.
Another fungal gall. This is Taphrina tosquinetii on Alder. The fungus causes the leave to pucker upwards, leaving cavities in the lower surface which increase the area available for spore production.
I saw this tiny white dot moving around on the Alder leaf and only on magnification did it resolve into a tiny fly with a white face.
A check on the sawfly larvae that I have been monitoring on the Hedgerow revealed that they had shed their skin one more time and have now taken their final form. Research by european specialists has revealed that this sawfly larva is undocumented in the European literature. This is not all that unusual: sawflies have a complex life-cycle that is difficult to replicate in captivity, so it is quite common that an adult sawfly has been documented, but its larvae have not. This is expected to be the case in this instance. The best guess is that it is an undocumented Nematus sp. larva.
I also found this little (8mm) Ichneumonid searching leaves on the same branch.
