30 Days Wild - day 23

Only a week left now of the 30 days wild project and today was a really cloudy day, threatening to rain all the time. So we have stayed close to home and mainly been on caterpillar watch. I did catch my youngest daughter wandering around the garden with a bucket of rat tailed maggots that she had fished out of the wildlife pond to get a closer look at.

These are the cinnabar caterpillars, they are 6 days old now and starting to go a slightly yellower colour and have lots of black spots. No stripes yet!

This is one of the rat tailed maggots my daughter was looking at, it is the larva of a drone fly.

30 Days Wild - day 22

Today we went out for a nature walk but all the excitement was happening at home. I have mentioned before that the children keep chrysalises that they find whilst digging in the garden, most of them have hatched into yellow underwing moths already.

This morning we had a huge surprise in the chrysalis box, an Amblyteles armatorius, a type of Ichneumon wasp. There are over 3000 different types of Ichneumon wasp in Britain alone so exact identification is quite a challenge.

This is a parasitic wasp which lays it's eggs on moth caterpillars, the larva then feeds on it's host until it dies and the wasp larva then pupates to become the above wasp.

This wasp hatched from a chrysalis obviously made by the caterpillar as it looked exactly the same as the other chrysalises, so the wasp continued it's life cycle after the caterpillar pupated.

These are the chrysalis cases that a lesser yellow underwing moth hatched from, as you can see they have kind of been burst from.

This is the chrysalis case that the wasp came out of, as you can see the outer chrysalis is exactly the same as the ones above the only difference being the method of hatching. The wasp has chewed a neat circle all around the top and popped the lid off. Fascinating!

I'll leave you with a photograph of the Amblyteles armatorius warming itself in the sun outside after it was released.

30 Days Wild - day 21

We have bravely ventured out on a night expedition to bring you this species of spider, as it only comes out after dark, the walnut orb weaver.

I find this spider oddly mesmerizing and quite beautiful, it is a spider that is capable of biting people. This one is living in one of our insect hotels and the one below is living on the chicken coop.

It is probably not well known due to the fact it only comes out after dark, so it is much harder to see and may go unnoticed by many people. Hopefully now you may notice this after dark hunter next time you are out late.

30 Days wild - day 20

Today I bring you an update on the cinnabar caterpillars, they are now three days old and getting larger as you can see. The leaf they hatched on is now half gone.

They still haven't got their orange and black stripes yet, but we will keep you posted on their progress.

Caught this little bee feeding nearby just after the rain. We had seen hundreds of bees earlier at the allotment, there is a vacant plot near our plot and at the moment it is filled with poppies and bees. Wonderful to stand and watch!

At home later in the day, the children noticed that the rain had brought out many snails and decided to have a snail race. Snails are one of my daughter's garden favourites.

30 Days Wild - day 19

While we were walking along the bottom of the cliffs we noticed something skimming along the top.

We decided to watch for a while and try to get a better look, what we found was a small nesting colony of sand martins. If you look closely in the photograph below you can see a row of nesting holes in the top of the cliff.

We watched the parent birds bringing in food for a while then as we were leaving down a small country lane we spotted the adult birds hunting for food, skimming the hedge rows. It was amazing to watch and at times they just passed above our heads. I took a short video clip to share with you here.

30 Days Wild - day 18

Today we went rock pooling, it was a lovely day apart from being a little chilly but many different types of shore creatures were found including some mystery items photographed at the bottom of this page.

We arrived first thing this morning just as the tide had started to recede and expose the many rock pools.

We spotted many kinds of crab, from the very small red crabs to the slightly larger see through ones.

Also one or two very large green ones that no one wanted to pick up for fear of nipping.

We also found some small hermit crabs in all different kinds of shells.

One of the hermit crabs was having a bit of a crisis with it's shell, it appeared to have a shell which was a little too large and it kept coming right out of this shell and trying to steal one of the other crabs shells.

We were a little worried about leaving it in the rock pool in a shell less state as it would be vulnerable so we hunted around and found lots of empty shells and left them in it's rock pool...just in case it liked one of these better.

The rock pools were full of prawns, some quite large and a few fish like the one below, out of the water for a second for a photo.

There were literally hundreds of winkles, this one is near a sea anemone.

Now to the mystery objects... we found a couple of jelly like objects, one was white about six inches long with what looked like white eggs inside. The other was like a mass of jelly elongate blobs or tentacle shaped things. We don't know what these are for sure so if you have an idea please let us know. Please see photo below.

30 Days Wild - day 17

The moment we've all been waiting for has finally arrived, the cinnabar moth eggs have been hatching all day! We have watched for most of the day, it has been extremely exciting.

At first there were just one or two tiny caterpillars just a few millimetres long. If you click on the photographs to enlarge them you can see the empty egg cases looking like little bubbles and to the left of the hatched caterpillar another one eating it's way out of the case.

Then there were a few more, yellow when they first emerged and covered in tiny hairs. No sign of the familiar orange and black stripes yet.

The children have been so excited to be able to witness this first hand, you can see the caterpillars have started to eat the ragwort as they are filling up with a green colour.

Not many left now, this photograph was taken at around six a few hours after the first ones emerged. You can see that some of the caterpillars have eaten a lot and are mostly green, others which have just hatched are still yellow.

I wonder how long it takes for them to get their stripes... I guess we'll just have to keep watching.