Thorny

Seriously - what is going on with the weather? After the unseasonably warm weekend, I went to bed last night thinking that I'd need to water my new front garden plantings this morning, to make sure they didn't dry out. But this morning I slept later than I'd planned, because there was no light to wake me up, and when I finally stepped out into the garden the wind had swung into the north-east, and it was bitter. As was I, quite frankly, because it turns out that by the second half of the week I'll be needing to cloche those new plantings overnight, to make sure the frost doesn't take them.

Having dug out my plastic cloches, I layered up and went on an invertebrate hunt. The only bee I could find in the entire garden was an Early Bumblebee queen, who looked about as irritated as I felt, and only allowed me blurry record shots. At this point I decided to do a little light delving, and had instant success when I found what I think is a Tremulicerus vitreus leafhopper in the Lawson cypress. I popped it on the photinia that grows next to the cypress, and it allowed me quite a few photos before springing off back into the tree. The huge conifer in the wild garden (identity unknown) then provided me with a Hawthorn Shieldbug, and a very small and rather nondescript beetle which turned out to be a Larch Ladybird. The hopper and the ladybird both being new records for my garden, I decided that I could now afford to stop bug-bothering - but as I walked back towards the house I couldn't resist giving the honeysuckle that grows through our big laurel hedge a quick shake, and dislodged this Lesser Thorn-tipped Longhorn Beetle.

I'm always delighted when I find one of these beetles, because I love everything about them: the extravagant antennae; the thorny points on the ends of their wing cases; the thorny protuberances on their wing cases and pronotum, which are designed to look hard and sharp, but are at least partly composed of hair tufts; the thunder thighs; and the cunning way their eyes curve around their antennal insertions. All this in a package that's no more than 7mm long - this little beetle is quite simply a babe. By the way, their colouration is said to make them look like bird droppings, which I would have said was ridiculous, except that I have on occasion looked straight past one for exactly that reason, only to back up and identify it at the second take.

My five best garden finds of the day are all up on my Facebook page, if you'd care to take a look.