Rainfall: 123.2mm

Temp High: 22.8^oC on 21st

Temp Low: -1.4^oC on 18th

Temp Average: 11.2^oC 

There have been a lot of hornets flying around our field maples. They are attracted by the honeydew on the leaves.

We've seen a lot of shedded skins of pond insects around our pond. Today I spotted a freshly emerging insect and watched it through the process. This is a broad-bodied chaser.

We saw our first grass snake in the garden today. He was wriggling across our patio and then spent some time basking on our stone garden.

The male red-backed shrike was still flitting around the garden, enjoying our fences and stone corners.

A pair of red-backed shrikes were around the garden all day. The male was dancing around the female.

We also had another visit from a wryneck.

We haven't found any of our numbered roman snails for some time now and we presumed that the numbers had worn off by now. Today though, Christine found #12 which was first recorded on our patio on the 28th August 2020. The number was quite worn, so we refreshed the numbers. This is our longest-living snail so far.

It was a nice warm day today - it got to 22.8^oC.

While out for a run, we came across this scarlet tiger caterpillar. Unfortunately, he wouldn't unfurl for a photo.

There were lots of insects flying. I have a number of beetles to identify and I recorded a new fly: Anthomyia pluvialis.

Spring is here and 'love' is in the air. I spotted a wryneck in our willow and took a photo. When I checked it out on my computer I could see that there were two wrynecks. The one I saw flew up into the woods to the west of us - so these are probably the same ones that I heard calling to each other in April. I'm now fairly convinced that they're nesting up there so we hope they bring their baby wrynecks to our garden later this year. We've specially cultivated huge nests of their favourite ants.

Two roman snails were also engaged in marital relations under one of our hedges.

Our pond plants suffered last summer from the low rainfall which meant that the pond level stayed really low. The winter has filled the pond up properly but the levels are now much higher than when we put the plants in so some have struggled to get back to the surface. But today our dwarf water lilies have hit the surface and last week we saw the first leaves of water crowfoot which have now begun to flower.

Our toad tadpoles have all hatched are are swimming about across the whole pond. We didn't get any frogspawn this year.

In the evening, this male blackcap was singing at full volume from our hazel tree.

The male red-backed shrike was joined today by a female.

Inside the house, we had three bee moths including the weird-looking one in the photos (which was in the process of inflating their wings - so a recent emergence). This means that these three probably pupated inside the house somewhere having spent their larval stage in a bee or wasp nest somewhere close by. We didn't really notice any bee/wasp nests inside the house last year, so this is a bit of a mystery to be honest - especially as the moths were all found on the ground floor.