Slow progress

 

I have been doing lots of little bits on the weevil guide, but nothing yet amounts to a sizeable chunk that deals with a single group of species.  It feels like I have little to show for my efforts, but it is useful to know how I am doing.  So I have put two accounts, one to Polydrusus and one to the wetland Gymnetron, and a guide to Sitona here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B008cp9g-Pm8fmx2aE5JUXpkX0czQ2F1bWtJZWZJb1JxM2JLM0djMi1Ea2RWUzluMHNGVGc&authuser=0

I am afraid the Polydrusus is incomplete because I have photos only of those species I have found, so it cannot yet be used as proper guide, although it does have all the metallic green ones.  If you want to take a look at the sample accounts, please download them and leave comments on this post to tell me whether you can happily and successfully identify weevils using them.  It is very useful to know how well they work for other people.  Since I started this, I have become much more forgiving of those who write identification guides.  One of the problems is that those who already know how to identify things often forget what it was like before they had twenty years of experience with the species they are trying to help others to name.  I do not have that problem so much because I have taught myself how to identify weevils by writing a guide, so I am much closer to the state when I knew very little about them.  Nevertheless, I still fear that I do things that work for me and not for other people, so your responses will be useful.  I am still not sure how to lay it out.  I have prepared species accounts in a field guide manner but I also have character tables, which are a bit more structured.  I will try to get some of those up soon.

Turning things over

Winter was back again today.  Not for us the bees at the flowers and the bugs scurrying across small patches of sand warmed by the sun.  Things would be trying to escape the cold and we would have to annoy them a little by exposing them if we wanted to find them.  Time to turn things over.  This can be very rewarding, but I do find that I often need to turn over a lot of things before I find something good.  If there is a way of knowing which logs or stones are going to be sheltering the most exciting insects, I have not yet discovered it.  But I can report two successes today.  The first was Endomychus coccineus.  This is a bright red beetle and by that alone it qualifies as exciting.  It has a rather waxy finish to it, which, together with its vivid colour, make it the beetle that most looks as though it is made of plastic: if it could be trained to sit on a cake it would be a pretty decoration.  Its real lifestyle involves eating fungus under the bark of timber, which is probably better for it than a diet of icing.

Success number two was much more unexpected.  I lifted a stone in the wildlife garden and saw an unusual pale lemon-sulphur slug.  Both Col and I were immediately reminded of a day four years ago when he found Testacella haliotidea on a nearby wall.  This had to be it again.  We brushed off some of the soil, and our suspicions were confirmed when we revealed the small shield-like shell.  Such a meagre shelter could never accommodate the body of its bearer, so Testacella is usually called a slug rather than a snail.

There are four Testacella slugs in Britain.  One of them, maugei, is brown, and the two deep lines on its back are rather far apart where they disappear behind the shell.  Our species, as you can see from the photos, has the lines almost meeting before they vanish.  In the other two, the lines meet before the shell.  Interestingly, the other two are Testacella scutulum and an unknown entity, which may or may not be an undescribed species.

All the Testacella species in Britain are probably introduced.  Our one was noted in gardens in several places by the middle of the 1800s.  It is widespread but patchily distributed, though its real range and numbers are hard to know because it is a difficult thing to find.  It spends most of its time under ground pursuing worms to hoover up, so it is rarely encountered.  At the 2011 sighting, Malcolm described seeing his first shelled slug as 'a childhood dream come true'.  It had taken us four years to get a second chance for any other malacological dreamers.

Purple and gold

    

Narcissus asturiensis

Narcissus asturiensis is an odd plant in Galicia. Throughout its range, which extends east into the Picos de Europa, we are told it is a mountain plant. Flora Ibérica says (50) 1000-2150 m. In Galicia, it is found in montane woods and pastures, but also along rivers at much lower altitudes, as I found yesterday. Today I went to look for it in its highland home. Not far out of San Román, it appeared on the side of the road at the edge of a wood. As is often the case, I spent some time admiring the plants here in case I saw no others, only to find them in abundance over the next 10 km of road, often in grass, sometimes under pines, and occasionally next to late-lying patches of snow. It was as though they were following me all the way to Piornedo.

I did not make it to Piornedo. Just outside of Degrada I was passing a bank where, judging from the flattened grass, the snow had not long melted. I was now accustomed to Narcissus asturiensis and Primroses Primula vulgaris on the roadsides, but I was startled here by the unmistakable image of Erythronium dens-canis, a plant I thought I would have to look hard for. It is like a shocking version of Narcissus cyclamineus: no modesty or subtlety here. It shares the swept-back petals, but they are garish pink-purple, like a black cherry yoghurt. At the base, a halo of white surrounds a star whose rays are yellow or dark pink or both. Unlike the daffodils, Erythronium does not hide its reproductive parts under a skirt. Brazenly waving from the mouth of the flower are six tentacle-like stamens, each topped with a deep blue anther, and in the middle a long forked snake-tongue of a style sticks out defiantly. The leaves are blotched with morbid black-purple. If it were three metres tall, it would not make a bad model for a triffid.

There was of course more Erythronium further along the road. Having found the two star plants I was hoping for, I began exploring the woodland. A trail took me a short way into a Hazel and Holly wood, where Erythronium and Narcissus astureinsis grew by the path. Stinking Hellebore Helleborus foetidus was with them. This seems to be a common plant here; I had noticed it in the woods as soon as I left the motorway and started on the winding roads through the hills.

At the bridge over Río do Ortigal I followed the track, still covered in snow in places, as it climbed up through oak woodland, with more Holly and Hazel. Narcissus asturiensis was still here, but it was scarce except in small clearings or where the trees were less dense. Like daffodils in British woods, it seems to do best where it gets a bit more sun. The field layer in more shaded parts had Bilberry Vaccinium myrtilis, Great Wood-rush Luzula sylvatica, Bramble Rubus fruticosus, Stinking Hellebore Helleborus foetidus, and a few shoots of Spurge-laurel Daphne laureola, with Opposite-leaved Golden-saxifrage Chrysosplenium oppositifolium on wetter ground. The north-facing pastures below the track were still covered in melting snow, its water flowing down and soaking the sunnier fields below. There were thousands of large daffodil leaves here, Narcissus pseudonarcissus subp. nobilis by report, but the plants were still a long way from flowering. By now the sun had left the valley in shade, so I made my way back round to Degrada to try to catch the evening light on the Erythronium before starting the drive back.

In search of the wild

There is something right with the world if you have a Firecrest singing outside your bathroom. My first morning in the rainiest part of Spain was dry, bright, and sunny. I had fortuitously arrived with the first warm days of the year, even though my timing had nothing to do with the weather. A few weeks ago I was I was planning an early expedition in search of a delightful daffodil in Galicia. Then some cat pictures got the better of me and I was diverted to Andalucía. Now I was back on track for an encounter with Narcissus cyclamineus.

The second week of March appeared to offer the best chance of catching the last of this early flowering daffodil, and the first of a couple of later flowering ones. It also offered a chance of being too late for the one and too early for the others. However, this morning was full of promise, so I headed south in search of two species that I knew grew by the Praixa Fluvial at Melide. It was there that I saw Narcissus cyclamineus under trees on top of the river bank, accompanied by Narcissus asturiensis and one Narcissus bulbocodium. The site is a riverside park with sun loungers and paddling pools, and it looked just like any park that has been planted with cultivated daffs. This was not how I wanted to encounter a plant that was supposed to be a lost treasure. It felt like a jewel of the Iberian flora had become a cheap trinket in an urban amenity planting.

I needed to see my plants somewhere a bit more wild, so I decided to test what I had been told by some Galician botanists: that I could find cyclamineus along any river in the south of the area. On the map I could see that about 5km away the road came close to the Río Furelos again, so I chose this as my first stopping place. It immediately looked promising. Eucalyptus plantations have taken over much of the land here, but where they meet rivers, there is often a narrow strip of oaks and poplars with a woodland field layer. As soon as I got out of the car I looked down the slope and across at the far side of the river through my binoculars. There I immediately saw the unmistakable yellow tubes of Narcissus cyclamineus.

 Narcissus cyclamineus is an outstanding daffodil. It is unlike any other species. For one thing, it is identifiable, as I found out today, from at least 30 metres away if you have binoculars. It reminds me of a giant yellow cranberry, with its spiky swept-back petals and its long beak-like trumpet. If you asked me to draw you a cartoon of a daffodil in a wind tunnel, it would look like this. It is a plant of wet places, and riversides seem to be where it is most at home. Here it was growing under ash Fraxinus, oak Quercus, and poplars Populus among the ubiquitous brambles and Wood False-brome Brachypodium sylvaticum. Primroses Primula vulgaris and Lesser Celandines Ranunculus ficaria kept it company. A little further upstream I found more clumps of it, plus one Narcissus minor subsp. asturiensis and one Narcissus bulbocodium.

Narcissus cyclamineus properly in the wild.

Narcissus minor subsp. asturiensis.

Narcissus bulbocodium and Primroses

Native woodland along the banks of the Río Furelos. Home to at least three daffodils.

A walk down to another part of the river took me along a track covered in tiger beetles, very active in the heat of the sun and ready to fly. There were no daffodils on this stretch, but so far I had a fifty percent success rate. By the end of the day this had turned to sixty percent. The last stop was in a particularly brambley thicket down a very steep bank below the road. Waiting at the bottom of the bank there was a small stream and a lot more bramble, but in the gaps and under the arching thorny stems were thousands of golden yellow tubes on stalks, glowing above the dark, quaking silt of the woodland floor. An uninviting, unfriendly, and unremarkable location; this was no park planting.

The trouble with spiders...

Over the last week it has felt like spring has arrived.  It is still standing in the corner with its coat on looking as though it might decline the invitation to sit down and make itself at home, but nonetheless, it has at least shown up.  To celebrate, I have been hitting trees.  Some of these have showered me in Birch Catkin Bugs Kleidocerys resedae that have found Scots Pines suitable places to spend the winter while waiting for birches to get some leaves and catkins back.  Among them have been a few nice things.  Today they included a Box Bug Gonocerus acuteangulatus and several ladybirds: Seven-spot Coccinella septempunctata, Larch Aphidecta obliterata, Heather Chilocorus bipustulatus, and the prize find of Cream-streaked Harmonia quadripunctata.  I have seen this three times before according to my records, but I could not remember any of the previous encounters, so when one fell out of a pine today it brought a satisfying smile to me.  This beetle was first found in Britain in 1937 in West Suffolk.  The plantations of the Breckland are just the place where an immigrant pine-loving ladybird could establish itself.  They are also just the place where it might be introduced with trees.  So Harmonia quadripunctata could be a natural colonist or an accidental importation.  Or both.  It has managed to spread west and north, and it is now well established in eastern England, with outposts in the south-west and in Wales.

The wing-cases of this species are edged with a streak of pale cream, interrupted by two black dots on each side: a distinctive pattern among our ladybirds.  Some individuals have another six spots on each wing-case, others, like today's insect, are plain red above.

Last week's beating produced more netfuls of Kleidocerys resedae, and this rather lovely spider.  A green abdomen with two horns on the top endeared it even to Andy, who does not take well to arachnids.  There are three such British orbweavers with prominent bumps on their backs.  The field guides tell me that they all have distinctive palps, but they offer no other advice for separating them. This is one of the frustrating things about spiders.  If a species has a distinctive palp or epigyne (the reproductive bits), the authors of some guides often have no more to say about them.  Many spiders resemble one another or are so variable that the palps or epigynes are the only way to separate them.  However, there are species or groups that have distinctive patterns or shapes that could help name them, but these features are not mentioned in the text.

British Spiders by Locket and Millidge is the only guide that is helpful enough to start off by telling me that there are three big orbweavers with humps on their back.  It is also forthcoming with non-palpal information, so despite my spider being an immature male (and therefore not having identifable palps), I am going to call it Gibbaranea gibbosa.  According to the book, male gibbosa are sometimes green and they have an all-dark sternum, both of which match my spider.  The other two humped orbweavers are Gibbaranea bituberculata, only ever known from one place in Berkshire and not seen for decades; and Araneus angulatus a rare spider, found only south of London, which has a yellow mark in the middle of the sternum.  Is this cheating?