Buggy

The temperature went back up by several degrees today, though it was still windy, and intermittently wet. R and I did some gardening this morning (eeeurgh), and then I scuttled around the garden after beetles and bugs, managing to find a few subjects and get back to the house just before a ferocious downpour blew through.

I finally managed to photograph the confusable birch and hawthorn shieldbugs in similar settings, and I'm reasonably pleased with this pair of images as a set of reference shots - though they were on different trees, and the light was much worse on the birch bug than on the hawthorn bug. (It was so dark in the corner where I shot the birch shieldbug that every time I lowered the camera to check my photos on the back screen, I completely lost it and had to track it down again.) They're also not cropped to scale, the birch shieldbug being about a centimetre long, and the hawthorn shieldbug around one and a half centimetres. Nonetheless, if you flick between the images I hope you'll agree that there are clear differences between these two shieldbugs, in colouring and especially in shape, and that telling them apart is really just a question of getting your eye in - which I'm reasonably confident that I have now done.

The next trick, of course, is to remember which is which. My own mnemonic is basic, but it works for me: hawthorns are spiky, and the hawthorn shieldbug is the more angular and spiky of the two.