Susanna's Wildlife Watch - July
In St John’s Garden we are monitoring insect life, carrying out regular “Flower Insect Timed Count” surveys as part of the national Pollinator Monitoring Scheme. It is a pretty easy and pleasant thing to do - basically you sit and watch a patch of flowers for 10 minutes, counting the number of insects that land on the flowers. Last year we did 10 'FIT counts', and the average number of insects we saw per count was 4.2. This year, so far we have done 8 counts, and our average is 4.6 insects per count, so we are seeing slightly more pollinators this year than last. Not a massive difference, but obviously it is encouraging. If you want to start counting yourself, head here to get started.
Marmalade hoverfly tucking into tasty geranium pollen. Photo courtesy of Susanna.
This year, it has been so lovely to see butterflies in St John’s Garden again. In May, I saw a Holly Blue with Polly, sunning itself in the Wayfaring tree behind the wooden bench at the top of the park, and since then Small Whites have been seen dotting around the top bed, and a gorgeous orange Comma appeared one day in the middle of June, and had a sit on my foot, for some reason, before flitting away to enjoy the wildflower garden on Goldsmiths Centre roof. Apparently, the super sunny weather has helped butterflies emerge earlier and survive longer this year across the country as a whole. Let's hope 2025 sees a big bounceback for butterflies. In our small patch, the new little butterfly garden, the pollinator pathway and the edible forest plants will all hopefully help!
On the hoverfly front, we have seen lots of jolly orange Marmalade hoverflies Episyrphus balteatus in the garden. Marmalade hoverfly adults are pollinators, helping plants to reproduce, whilst their larvae eat aphids and so are a great natural pest control. All-round useful things to have around! And I do like their orange stripes. The stripes of hoverflies and other insects are designed to help avoid predation by predators, such as birds.
As well as the Marmalade hoverflies, this year I have seen a lot of Footballer hoverflies in the garden too. Footballer hoverflies Helophilus pendulus like puddles, boggy ditches and ponds. They get their English nickname because of the snazzy vertical stripes on their thorax, which kind of look like football jerseys (though not many clubs seem to actually play in yellow and black actually! Chester FC away kit 2025-26 looks the nearest thing). Their larvae live in water, and have the unlovely name of Rat-tailed maggots. When dipping the wildlife pond earlier in June, we found quite a few of these maggots in the pond, grey and ghostly with their long 'tails', which are actually telescopic breathing tubes. It would have been great to compare what species of hoverfly we had in the park last summer - before we had the wildlife pond - with what we are finding this summer. I wish that I had looked at adult hoverflies more carefully last year. But never mind! We are collecting data bit by bit, as we go along. Great that our yellow and black footballers seem to be flourishing now.
Hope you enjoy spotting a few butterflies, as well as Footballers and Marmalade hoverflies in the garden these hot summer days!
Susanna