Tracker

I had an appointment this morning at the eye clinic at Stratford Hospital, where I have to be checked periodically because in a small proportion of people one of the drugs I take for RA can cause retinal damage. Because they have to dilate your pupils to get a really good look inside the eye I was told I wouldn't be able to drive for several hours afterwards, so R drove me into town, which required what these days is an unaccustomedly early start for us both. It also meant that we could meet up for coffee afterwards though, which was by some distance the nicest part of the morning.

The good news is that the consultant was quite happy with the state of my retinas; the bad is that the developing cataract in my right eye falls into what he called a "grey area": it's bad enough to be affecting my vision, but not yet bad enough to make me clearly eligible for surgery. So he's passing the buck on that one, and sending me to the cataract specialist for his verdict. If this referral was to happen in the near future I think the verdict would probably be "Go away", but the appointment that pinged into my NHS app at lunchtime is five months from now, by which time I may be a more obvious candidate for surgical intervention.

After coffee R went to check out the MAD Museum, while I rampaged around the riverbank circuit between the Old Tramway and Lucy's Mill Bridges, to work off some of the tension that had built up during my hospital check-up, and improve my step count. For once I was glad to be under a Tupperware lid of cloud, because my pupils were still so dilated that every time I glanced skywards my eyes began to water, and I spent most of the walk alternately scowling at the path and squinting sideways at the river to check for birds. 

Back at home I took the macro out into the garden, where most of the usual suspects presented themselves, but not much else - right up to the point when I spotted a small yellow and black Something that I didn't recognise, sitting on the cut end of a sedge leaf. My first thought was sawfly?, but a second glance told me it was a parasitoid wasp of some kind. (Top tip: if it's wasp-waisted, it's one of the Apocrita - that is, bees, wasps, and ants.) 

Solitary wasps are tricksy little things, and yellow and black Ichneumonids are mainly unidentifiable from photos; but the Obsidentify app suggested that this might be one of the Exenterus species, and an expert in the British Ichneumonidae group on Facebook suggested I should try Exenterus adspersus. And I have tried it, extensively, but with frustratingly little success, because it's barely ever recorded here and almost nothing appears to have been written about it. Just about the only thing I can tell you is that the documented Exenterus species seem to lay their eggs on the larvae of sawflies, which are then parasitised and ultimately killed by the wasp larvae. I guess that would make these wasps popular with gardeners of the finickier type (if those gardeners knew of their existence), but personally I'd rather have sawflies than immaculate plants. Not that I mind an Ichneumonid either - especially when, as in this case, it offers me my favourite photo of the day.