Reports of members’ activities and sightings
The speckled bush crickets in my garden are getting bigger, but also more difficult to find for some reason. When they are tiny, they can easily be seen in Welsh Poppy flowers, where they show up nicely against the bright yellow petals. Now they are growing up, I have to hunt around for them more.
Jean Thompson writes: When we moved to Oxfordshire three years ago, we had to rent for a few months in Long Hanborough and often walked from there to Church Hanborough via a footpath between fields.
John C. Writes: Not feeling very energetic yesterday – Monday – morning, I decided to spend an hour or so sitting quietly in the small ‘meadow’ area at the bottom of Sue’s garden to see what invertebrates, if any, would visit the flowers.
John C writes: Even though it’s spring, it hasn’t felt like it for the last couple of days and we spent another damp Sunday afternoon at Pit 60, which, as usual, was not without its rewards.
Maggie Collins writes: Spring seems to be here at last and at the moment the heavy rain is holding off. Jill T called on me to say that Large Red Damselflies were hatching in her pond….
John C. writes: Whilst everyone else was heading off at high speed in the hope of tea and cake at Chastleton House on last Sunday’s walk from Adelstrop, I was lagging behind, turning over wet logs in the hope of finding (what else?) slime moulds. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one interested in them.
One of the first signs of spring is to see a butterfly – a brimstone or perhaps a small tortoishell. But where do they come from, and why do they emerge so soon?
John C. writes: When a fight started in the playground at school the shout of ‘Bundle!’ would go up and everyone would pile in. Well, kids probably couldn’t get away with that these days but the coots at Pit 60 clearly don’t know anything about that.
Lindsay Fisher writes: Most noticeable fungi appear in the autumn, but last month’s wet weather produced quite a crop of eye-catching specimens in Witney’s Deer Park Wood.
If you don’t share my enthusiasm for the microscopic weird and wonderful, there’s no need to read on!
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