The Autistic Naturalist: April 24th Mousehold Heath

Thanks to this lockdown, wildlife watching has been restricted to my local park. Catton Park is a nice place, don't get me wrong, but I felt like going somewhere different. So today, I took my 'within walking distance' walk to the limit. That is, I went to Mousehold this afternoon. Ok, it is not that far away, but it is still much further to walk to than Catton Park, which is just a few minutes to get to. Mousehold is just a tad longer, but I'm not complaining.

It is a nice day for a visit with the sun out and there's not a single cloud in the sky. Annoyingly though, despite the lockdown restrictions in effect, it seems that many families are here treating today like a summer holiday at the beach with them lounging around the Vinegar Pond with buckets and spades! I'm here for my daily exercise like the government requested and they are lazing around, allowing their kids to play around the pond. Some people!

Green Hairstreak

Anyway, I was on a bit of a mission. I wanted to find a couple of Mousehold specialties; green hairstreak butterflies and green tiger beetles. I was told via email from Will the Mousehold warden that the first green hairstreak was seen recently. They can be pretty tricky to spot at times as their green wings blend in with the green of the gorse leaves. Of course, the gorse flowers themselves are bright yellow and the heath looks fantastic at the moment, glowing brightly as the sun in their beauty. These flowers are what the butterflies in question love the most and the best place to search. A short search around the bushes was all it took until I found one. And it was rather obliging as I got extremely close to it without it flying away.

These small butterflies emerge around May, so this was one of the early ones. They also rarely perch with their wings open, not that you are missing much anyway. The green underside is more attractive than their boring brown upper side in my opinion. When they perch on a gorse flower to feed on the sweet nectar, they usually point one side of their closed wings upwards in the direction of the sun like a green solar panel. Only hairstreaks seem to do this, other butterflies open their wings in order to sun themselves to absorb the warmth to power their cold-blooded bodies. A strange observation I've heard is that hairstreaks rarely switch sides and, like someone who is either right handed or left handed, the same goes to these butterflies on which side they'd use. If this is true or not, I'm not sure but I bet every amateur butterfly fanatic will be studying their hairstreaks much closely to which side of their wings is facing the sun from now on.

Green Tiger Beetles mating

Not long after seeing my hairstreak fly off, I was quickly on the hunt for green tiger beetles in the bare surrounding ground. A sand wasp caught my attention at first, but then I noticed something fly upwards a few metres from my feet. In just a few minutes after my green hairstreak encounter, here was my green tiger beetle. And it wasn't the only one. I found a good few more. They may be very small, but what they lack in size they sure make up for it in being one of the most fearsome and most attractive insects on the heath. Tiger beetles are one of the fastest beetles in the UK and pounce on their prey with lightning quick speed and devouring them even quicker still within their menacing jaws. A real gem of an insect that many people walking the heath wouldn't even know was just beneath their feet.

Also seen at Mousehold today were willow warblers, holly blue butterflies, large whites, peacock butterflies and a very quick glimpse of a lizard before it darted beneath the undergrowth as soon as I saw it. There were also hundreds of tadpoles in the Vinegar Pond, which the children were trying to catch.