Eyed Ladybird

I did a couple of hours of brutalist gardening today, clearing an area of scrub and then cutting back a philadelphus, and it all left me in an appropriately grim mood. My disposition wasn't helped by the fact that there was almost no visible insect activity anywhere in the garden (and we have a lot of garden), and in the end I decided that if I wanted to photograph something interesting I was going to have to do some beating.

Over the past couple of years I've come to realise that I don't much like beating for bugs - they aways seem quite shocked when they land on the tray or in the net, and sometimes they come down badly and bend a wing or something, which always makes me think I should have left them to get on with their lives in peace. But I had literally nothing on camera, so I set to work - tapping very gently on a few selected tree branches, with a tray held up just below the tapped branch, to see what I could dislodge.

Unsurprisingly most of the creatures I displaced were beetles and bugs, and equally unsurprisingly every single one of the hoppers got away from me before I could extract a container from my pocket and pot them. But there were a couple of surprises, the first of which was the number of mature Red-legged Shieldbugs that came out of the trees in the wild garden. As far as I'm concerned July is still shieldbug nymph season, and they have no business being fully developed, though British Bugs gives July to November as the season for mature Pentatoma rufipes, and I realise that the long hot spell we had in May and June has allowed many inverts to progress through their developmental stages quickly. I started to fret that the invertebrate season is running away towards an early close, and I was only slightly mollified by finding a late-instar Birch Shieldbug nymph in the photinia.

On a more positive note though, I was wowed by this ladybird, which I tapped from a low branch of a big conifer in the wild garden. I'd never seen one before, but immediately recognised it as an Eyed Ladybird. This is the UK's biggest native ladybird, at 8-10mm long (the 7-spot Ladybird, for comparison, averages 6-8mm). This one has the classic appearance you'd expect, with fourteen cream-edged black spots (fifteen, if you count the half spot on the fore edge of each wing case) on a russet background; and black and white markings on the pronotum, which allegedly (if you use your imagination and squint slightly) form the letter M. However, on reading the excellent Bloomsbury Field Guide to the Ladybirds of Great Britain and Ireland, I discovered that this is one of those annoyingly variable ladybird species: the ground colour may be red, there can be up to twenty three spots, with or without pale surrounds, or the spots may be entirely pale with no black centres, or there might be no spots at all. There's also a melanic form, though that's said to be rare. In the circumstances I count myself lucky that this one was so easy to identify.

The Eyed Ladybird is predatory, feeding on aphids. It's a conifer specialist, and is especially associated with Scots pine trees - though this one emerged from what I believe is a cypress, rather than from either of our pines. The same tree gave up a Larch Ladybird earlier in the year, which makes me think that ladybirds may be relatively flexible when it comes to habitat. The Eyed Ladybird is described as common and widespread, but it's said to be declining, possibly as a result of changing forestry practices. However, like many tree-dwelling species it's probably under-reported, and if it's happy to live in any old garden conifer rather than being tied to pine forests, it may actually be doing better than the scientists fear.