February 2022

February! The long short! It was grey, wet, never ending and…

…much more unsettled than December and January, with a couple of storms to contend with. Most notably storm Eunice, which we were told threatened to be the worst storm seen in Bristol for around 30 years. Whilst it did hit some areas of southern England hard, Bristol got off relatively lightly, as shown below in time lapse of the peak storm period (14th February 2022).

The boys are back in town!

We noticed the first male frog calls on the 2nd February and these have been on and off all month. No frog or toad spawn spotted during February (although this isn’t particularly surprising), fingers crossed for March. It seems the number of frogs calling is very much reduced again this year. We are starting to wonder if the new housing development at the end of the garden has impacted on the ability for amphibians to reach us. This would be a shame and perhaps an unintentional, if not unexpected, result of the development.

New Species!

Whilst Hairy Bittercress won the race to flower first this year, closely followed by Hazel, both are rather unimpressive as flowers go. But the 2nd February saw our first dandelion flower, surely one of the more attractive flowers and there have been one or two more since.

However this was topped by a new species we introduced to the garden on the 30th January 2022, having taken some with the owners permission from a site not to far away. We are only confirming it as a new species now as we wanted to ensure it survived the relocation. It certainly did, so welcome to the garden Primrose, the left hand imaged taken on the day of planting (30th January 2022) and on the right as it first flowered (27th February 2022).

Then came a series of new invertebrate records, thanks to some fun with the microscope, so a garden welcome to…

…our favourite woodlouse yet, the Common Striped Woodlouse….

Our first photographed Bristletail – albeit one not in very good shape…

We finally got a photograph / confirmed the identity of the centipede Geophilus flavus.

We are getting rather found of weevils, so great to find this tiny fella, 3mm long, Leiosoma deflexum…

…and, as always, good to find another arachnid, this time an Orbatid Mite, unfortunately we have no idea what species it is or even to which family it belongs…

This wasn’t the only arachnid worth mentioning either, for an old friend popped up under a roof tile, a woodlouse spider nestled comfortably in a web for the winter…

Firsts for the year…

The 27th February was a glorious day, and lots of garden tidying up was done, during which time we recorded a few firsts of the year. A single wren hoping about on the back fence. Our first buzz in the ear as a flesh fly turned up. The wolf spiders are back in force, searching for an early meal amongst the detritus along the back fence.

And finally a Brown – Green Shield Bug? There’s always something new to learn about wildlife! We came across this little fella tucked up in a folding chair left out over winter in the garden…

For a while we thought we had another species of shield bug on our hands, but as it turns out, Green Shield Bugs over winter in this brown form…

There is potentially one more NEW species to add, but its another introduced species and its survival is less likely. Whilst visiting a woodland in Mendip, mostly felled due to ash dieback, we came across a patch of displaced Lichen on the ground. Having only recently logged into an interesting Plantlife* webinar on Lichen identification, I recalled the speaker stating that with a piece of chicken wire, it was sometimes possible to encourage loose lichen to attach to a new tree. So I bagged the homeless symbiont and brought it home to hopefully live on our Hazel. We didn’t have any chicken wire so we used some strands of garden wire instead and hopefully this will hold it in place long enough for it to attach…

So as Februarys go, not to dull! Looking forward to March and Spring time for sure.

DC 07/03/2022

*Plantlife are a UK Charity focusing on the protection of plants and fungi around the world