Beetlejuice

No! You are not coming on my blog again. I don’t care what tricks you can do!

Look. I really don’t care!

Go on then. Just do it, I am ready.

DOH!

I WASN’T READY!

It is a good trick.

Please give a Red-headed Cardinal Beetle some love.

They are driving me nuts with their constant demands for attention.

Beautiful Redhead

This is a post about the Red–headed Cardinal Beetle, a black beetle with a red head. Apparently this beetle is often confused with the Lily Beetle (Black head) and the Black-headed Cardinal Beetle (Black head) so a key identification feature to look for in the Red-headed Cardinal Beetle is a red head.

I took these pictures a few days ago and I was holding out for a few more before I posted them but since then it has rained steadily every day.

You should be able to find them easily if you live in the UK. They like to sunbathe on leaves in the hedgerow or woodland edge and they are easy to spot, large and red, the phrase “like a sore thumb” comes to mind. But a sunny day would be best.

They are fun and they want to be photographed.

They like to tease. When they are thinking about flying they open their elytra very, very slowly.

Giving you plenty of time to line up the shot.(The elytra are hardened fore wings, beetles have four wings like most insects but the front pair harden into wing cases)

When they do fly they don’t go very far, often just to the next leaf.

I get so frustrated when a beetle just stands there and won’t move.

“Go on then, take lots of pictures. I’m interesting.”

So I love this little fellow.

Red-headed Cardinal Beetle, Pyrochroa serraticornis. A large red beetle with black legs and black toothed antennae it also has a red head. It is a predator catching other insects as they fly past. It is quite poorly camouflaged and I am guessing that it’s colour is intended as a warning to birds that it probably tastes bad or is poisonous. It flies from early May until the end of July.

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..