Berries. Bug. Beautiful!

Every time we collect rowan berries with which to make jelly, we end up with several bright green shield bugs in our bowl of berries, stripped from the tree along with the berries - they are attracted to feed on and shelter in the clumps of bright red berries, it seems! Knowing this, I've been looking, literally for weeks, for a shield bug on rowan berries in our local park, to use in a blip. But this had been to no avail, until today when I found the beautiful green shield bug. Luckily, there is an excellent online identification guide for British shield bugs and I am pretty sure this one is the final (5th instar) juvenile stage of the Hawthorn Shieldbug, Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale. The blurb in the guide doesn't list Rowan as one of the species that this bug prefers but as I find them on rowans all the time, this is clearly an oversight and nobody has told the shieldbugs! I do wonder if they are mistaking one clump of red berries (rowan) for another (hawthorn)!