Emergence

The invertebrate season begins. Today I spotted my first Buff-tailed Bumblebee of the year, and my first hoverfly - a female Eristalis tenax. I also found some beetles and bugs, including this Hairy Shieldbug, in the Lawson cypress. 

For a couple of hours across lunch time it was pleasantly warm and sunny in the garden, which I thought might bring a few mini-beasts out of their shelters. I even sprayed a little sugar water on the most favoured basking sites to act as an extra inducement. But I was also busy with other projects, and by the time I managed to get back out with the camera the cloud had thickened, the light had deteriorated sharply, and it was spitting with rain. Still, this photo will serve quite nicely to mark the emergence of some of the garden's overwinterers. 

I last photographed a Hairy Shieldbug on 7th November last year, when I posted it as that day's extra, and I commented then that I was surprised to see one so late, because for me this is generally a summer bug. So it's especially notable that the same species is my first shieldbug of the 2024 season, and given its proximity to the place where I found the previous specimen it occurs to me to wonder if it might actually be the same insect. It's a charming thought that I might have captured views of the same bug at either end of its winter sleep, and there are certainly some blotches on the pronotum and corium that look similar in the two photos, but there's no way of telling for sure.

This evening I finished processing Monday's owl photos, and I've posted a flypast sequence to my Facebook page if you'd care to take a look.