My Cute Little Diplolepis Rosae

No this isn’t a post about Fizz, it is too dark to photograph her.

For the very same reason I am not going to show you this next picture.

This weather has got to break soon, I don’t need bright sunshine just a little more than midnight at midday and a little less rain. Then I will attempt to do this beautiful tree justice. I just know that I can do it better and there is no point in trying to do it today.

So I am stuck indoors, except for walking Poochy. I have been working on my Easy Wildflowers project. That has been on the back burner for some time because I anticipated a down turn in the weather and thought that it would help to fill the winter months. It is nearly that time.

Do you remember our Rose Bedeguar Gall? Robin’s Pincushion?

Well, I found myself writing about roses and one thing led to another.

The little Diplolepis rosae larvae should be going to sleep by now. In late October they stop feeding and go into a prepupal stage (a sort of stage before they become a pupa) and they over winter like that. Then around about February they moult again and become pupae.

Well I wanted to have a look inside a pincushion and this is late October so it seemed like a good time to do so.

This is the one that I left behind (a bit wet and bedraggled)…

and this is the one that I brought home to live with me.

Then I cracked it open to look inside.

Wow! Little animals!

This one with the pretty face is my favourite 🙂

They are not supposed to do anything now until February. I have put their Gall back together and wrapped it in leaves for now and I have put them in a flower pot in an outbuilding so that they know it’s winter.

I haven’t exposed all of the cells, most of them don’t even know that they have been captured. I want to photograph the adult wasp, it is only 4 mm long and I don’t have much chance of finding one in the wild and so I have borrowed some larvae.

In the Spring I will bring them back indoors and put them in a jar and I shall watch them every day. I haven’t figured out how I am going to photograph the wasp yet but I would really like to see one and so I have to try.

So this is my plan for Easy Wildflowers. On our dull winter days I shall work on it and then I shall do a sort of resume of my days work for Tramp and it will look like this.

Hi, today I have been writing about the Town Hall Clock, Adoxa moschatellina and it looks like this…

Have you ever tried to get all five faces into one shot?… because I have and it is not possible.

Anyway I am not going to show you that today but I am looking forward to a bit of summer sunshine on those dark winter days.

I want to get the design right before I invest months of work into it and I am not very confident. What I have done looks good on my PC but everyone sees something different.

I have used thumbnails quite a lot and I don’t really know if this works on other devices. I don’t want to learn CSS so I might just have to abandon the thumbnails.

If you have time then please have a look and tell me if it is any good before I spend months creating a massive pile of ….stuff that doesn’t really work. I may still have to rethink the layout. Say and I shall listen 🙂

Easy Wildflowers

When the sun shines I shall photograph this beautiful tree for you and for me.

Robin’s Pincushion Again

Hi, I know that we have only just had Robin’s Pincushion (Would you like to see an Artichoke Gall?) I found a wonderful Rose today that had every stage of the pincushion’s development on it, including the bones that I haven’t seen before so I just have to post it.

Better still I know where this Rose is and I can visit it throughout the year. I quite wish that I had brought the bones home to dissect and I will probably do that next time I am out there. Expect to become a Pincushion expert if you are following this blog.

Just to recap for new visitors. Robin’s Pincushion is a Gall created by the Gall Wasp Diplolepis rosae. It lays it’s eggs in the leaf bud of Wild Roses and a chemical reaction causes this Gall to grow from the plant material. The larvae of the wasp then live inside the Gall eating plant material until they pupate and then they emerge as mature wasps.

I now wish that I had searched around for the wasp itself, I bet there were some about and us pincushion experts need those photographs.

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…..