Jet-black Ants

My first day of fieldwork this year involved surveying a carrot field in the Brecks, which took all of 90 minutes. It was really a bit early in the year, but, as ever, there are deadlines to be met...In the end I managed to find a reasonable number of species around the margins, but it'll probably need another visit in the summer before I can be sure that there are no rare arable weeds lurking.

Pete had accompanied me and we spent the rest of the day visiting some other nature reserves and open access land in Mildenhall Forest, Icklingham and Cavenham Heath. I photographed quite a few of the spring annual that are so characteristic of the sandy Breckland soils, but most were only a few millimetres tall. Lots of time spent on my hands and knees! 

At Cavenham Heath we heard an adder slithering off into the heather, and spent a while lurking on the sunny side of a gently coconut-scented flowering gorse bush, which was attracting a good range of insects including hundreds of gorse weevils Exapion ulicis which were emerging from hibernation (see extra). 

At Icklingham we admired some very splendid aged native Black Poplars, gnarled and twisty, with dramatic red catkins. One of the trees was home to a colony of jet-black ants Lasius fuliginosus which are never common, even in southern England. They usually tend aphids for honeydew, and can form conspicuous trails up tree trunks. Here two ants from the colony were checking each other out using scent and touch.