Will's Wildlife: Autumn highlights

As summer draws to a close, the number of insects starts to drop, but there are still plenty of things to see if you know where to look. One of the best places is a good stand of flowering ivy, which on a sunny day can be absolutely covered with bees and hoverflies. Luckily for me, there is a cracking clump of ivy flowering just about close enough to The Lodge for a lunchtime visit, which I've spent a couple of lunchtimes this week inspecting.

Initially the sheer number of insects is a bit disorientating, like a falcon with a flock of starlings it can be hard to focus on any individuals and make sense of what's present. Once I'd got my eye in I could see that the vast majority of insects were made up of a few species, honeybees, Myathropa florea, Eristalis pertinax and tenax with a decent smattering of Ivy bees, Colletes hederae, showing that they're well established after first turning up a couple of years ago.

Myathropa florea

Eristalis tenax

Ivy Bee, Colletes hederae

The trick then is to try and spot the different species amongst the swarm of commoner things. Sometimes it's easy, like with the impressively large hornet mimics Volucella zonaria and inanis, other times a fleeting glimpse of something that looked a little bit different disappearing into the depths of the ivy leaves a sense of thwarted excitement. The real holy grail for me this Autumn is the enigmatic Golden hoverfly, Callicera spinolae, an ivy specialist that's restricted to Eastern England.

Volucella zonaria

Volucella pellucens

Bee-wolf taking a break from bee wolfing

So far that ambition remains just that, but on Wednesday morning another one was fulfilled by my trusty moth trap. I haven't been trapping that frequently recently, an energetic 10 month old has made going through the trap in the morning a bit more of a challenge. With the recent mild weather I thought it was worth a try though, and with recent reports of double-digit catches of Convolvulus Hawk-moths on the south coast I made a throwaway comment that one of those would be nice. Unbelievably when I went out to the trap in the morning a magnificent beast of a Convolvulus was sitting calmly inside the trap! This is the first record of a live Convolvulus hawk-moth in Bedfordshire since 2013, a new species for me and a minor celebrity when I took it into the office in the morning!