The allotment that Margaret and I have looked after in Cam for the last 18 years is beginning to look very promising after the long cold winter. Our broad beans are just showing their heads and promise a good crop, voles and pigeons permitting. Margaret’s narcissi are blooming profusely, and a particularly early rhubarb given to us by neighbor Roy Chinn is threatening numerous crumbles.
However, it is the emergence of my ‘big fat female’ which has given me my biggest thrill. Each year one particular carpet proves to be the sun lounger of choice for our slow worm matriarch and for a couple of weeks she can be found hiding beneath this cover every day, warming gently in the spring sun. She has been there now for 10 days and it will not be long before her fabulous brazen babies spread quietly across our plots. Sheer magic!
Not quite so magical are the forty or more harlequin ladybirds that I have just seen basking in the sun here at Robinswood Hill. It was only in 2006 that Margaret saw the first adult ever recorded in Gloucestershire in our garden (her picture is above). Now they are widespread and the colony that I have been watching has passed the winter sheltering beneath an information sign.
Harlequins are attractive, but they are not native and are as partial to dining on our native ladybirds as they are on any other insect of the right size. The spread of this insect is a text book example of an animal invader and is a frightening indicator of what might be in store for our native wildlife beset by climate change and isolated on shrinking habitats.
The systematic recording of this alien is extremely well recorded in www.harlequin-survey.org I recommend this site as an example of how just how good species recording can be when the power of the web is properly utilized.
Read last year's slow worm post here.
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