Peek-a-boo

A fieldwork day, out in the fens. Most of our time was spent in an area close to the town of Chatteris, where there are many elms, including two extraordinarily large and gnarled trees, a rare sight since most of our elms were devastated by Dutch elm disease. Most of the larger elms had a dense crop of fruits, which provided an excellent shelter for a number of insects, including this hawthorn shieldbug Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale.

On the way home we stopped in to do some botanical recording in an under-recorded tetrad for the Fenland Flora project. Despite it being an apparently very ordinary area of intensive arable, we recorded over 140 species, including a small population of wormwood Artemisia absinthium, which is pretty rare in Cambridgeshire. we had a brief foray down the wonderfully named Dogsdyke Drove, where there was a rather ramshackle and slightly sinister-looking business property, and a herd of cattle with a very large bull. They were very interested in us (I suspect nobody usually walks past their field) and then suddenly started charging up and down their fields, completely demolishing a fence in the process. As the roadside fence was rather makeshift we decided that it might be wise to retreat to the car, just in case they decided to charge at us.