My 10,000 Birds colleague Corey mailed me to ask what I’d been up to lately (as I’d been noticeably absent from the blog). Well, to tell the truth, I’ve hardly left my house for about a fortnight. I’m still off work with my back (which, thanks for asking, is much better and I should be back at work on the airline and adding to the world’s carbon problems by the middle of next week).

What it means is that I’ve not seen a bird worth mentioning and I’ve been spending rather a lot of time getting to know my garden instead, at least when it’s not been raining (some people wonder why us Brits are obsessed by the weather - you should try living here and you’d soon know why!). As a newcomer to the 10,000 Birds stable I wasn’t sure how much blogging on insects readers could stand, but Corey’s ‘ bug’ posts have been consistently (and deservedly) well-received, so I’m hoping that no-one is at saturation point just yet and present my own observations - made on a startlingly sunny afternoon - below…

…So, a couple of days ago I spent about two hours lying on our front lawn by the tiny triangle of cultivated stonecrop (Crassulaceae), Campanula, and Chives Allium schoenoprasum in the photo below, just watching what was coming and going - and it was fascinating…hoverflies, flies, bees that I would have thought were flies if I hadn’t been looking so closely, bumblebees, ichneumon wasps looking for something to parasitise, ladybirds, ants, one or two caterpillars, and what I think is a beetle larva.

It struck me as I lay there that when I think of birds I tend to think in ‘macro’ terms - huge movements of birds flowing up and down the globe with the changing seasons - but by making myself look at this ’small corner of our small corner’ I was thinking in ‘micro’ terms: some of these invertebrates will live and die without ever leaving this flower-bed, will hunt and be hunted within the bio-boundaries of these few plants, in some cases will find everything they need to exist within a few feet of where they were born in fact. Go down even further and there will be nematodes and truly tiny creatures that never stray more than a few centimetres from an epicentre that encompasses their entire existence: unseen, unremarked upon, unacknowledged, yet determining the fertility of the soil and - at that moment at least - determining how relaxed and content I felt.

Remarkably important lifeforms in fact, and as the UK conservation group Buglife so wonderfully describe them - “the small things that run the world”. Yet with one turn of a fork, a decision that an expanded driveway would be easier to look after, a clumsily taken short-cut, or even one moment of carelessness with a lawn-strimmer this little world could be upset, altered or destroyed without us disconnected humans giving it a second thought: hugely relevant given the ongoing and vociferous arguments here in the UK that because of our lifestyles and ever-growing population we “need” far more houses, “need” to develop parts of the greenbelt, “need” to put our needs above everything else’s…

Fascinating and thought-provoking my sojourn in the sun may have been, but it also proved to me just how little I know about the wildlife in my own garden (for example I rather casually label one of the photos below as "White-faced Bee" but until about an hour ago I never even knew that such an insect existed!). Having spent eighteen years working for an airline and spending most of my time actively searching out birds all over the world, I figured that I’d neglected the local invertebrates but still had some sort of a handle on them - but no, I’m not even at the end of the metaphoric six-foot pole when it comes to knowing what actually lives just outside my front door.

It’s a bit shameful really - but, then again what’s a day without learning, even if what you learn is that you still have a ridiculous amount to learn?

Our first tortrix moth - Cacoecimorpha pronubana, the Carnation Tortrix, an adventive species first recorded in the UK in 1905.
For more info go to UK Moths.org.

Red-tailed Bumblebee Bombus lapidarius, one of our commonest bumblebees at the moment.

Male Hylaeus sp (White-faced Bee sp). On cultivated Stonecrop.
Many of the small white-faced bees are now rare and threatened by habitat change and pesticide use.

Andrena sp? (A tiny mining bee species not much bigger than a raisin).

An Ichneumon wasp species - a parasitic wasp that in all probability was looking for the small bees above.

The Marmalade Fly Episyrphus balteatus - a very common hoverfly.

14-spot Ladybird Propylea quattuordecimpunctata. Ladybirds (or ‘Ladybugs’ as many 10,000 Birds readers will
know them) come in many colours, but this is one of the more striking UK species.

Probably a moth caterpillar - but I have no idea which species. On Chives.

I noticed that many of the seed capsules of some cultivated Campanula had small round holes bored in them: opening up a capsule revealed this larva inside - probably (I think) a beetle larva of some sort. I’ve collected three capsules and will keep them to see what eventually emerges…

Lying there listening to bees buzzing and watching Swifts flying overhead (and flicking the odd curious ant off my arm back into the grass) was a hugely enjoyable way to spend some time.

I’m just saying, in case you’ve got nothing to do tomorrow (and you live somewhere where it doesn’t rain all the time of course)…