Mug shot

I didn't have much time to do bug pestering today, because R and I had a meeting in Evesham this afternoon, for which I spent part of the morning preparing. Before we went out I awarded myself forty minutes in the garden, which wasn't really enough time to do more than canter around, checking odd corners, but did produce a handful of nice finds. I was especially pleased to discover that one of the corners - dark and wet - has at long last generated a few fungi on some rotting wood, but I wasn't happy with any of my photos of them, so I'll have to try again another day. I dislodged quite a few leafhoppers from various trees, including a rather striking green and red one that I'd have liked to get a closer look at, but I was using a beating tray rather than a net, and most of them used it as a trampoline and pinged away into hyperspace before I could pot them. I did manage to capture and photograph a nice Acericerus ribauti, but he ruled himself out of contention for tonight's post by being almost identical to several others I've blipped recently.

Having said which, this is an Issus coleoptratus nymph, and is probably a close relative of the one in last Friday's post. I don't want to reprise all the information I gave then, but I really like this full-face portrait, which I took as the tiny beast was marching across the garden table towards me. I'm not sure how something that's only about 2.5mm long and lives on plant sap can manage to look threatening, but it was definitely making me a little nervous as it advanced. Maybe it's the slightly mad red eyes that were doing it, or perhaps it was simply a fear that the bug was about to jump at me - not that it would have caused me a personal problem if it had, but I wanted to maximise its life chances by putting it back in the ivy from which I'd extracted it, and if it had leapt I'd almost certainly never have found it again. In the end I got my photo (though it took a while because I had to keep retreating every time it stomped inside the minimum focus distance of my macro lens), after which I persuaded it off the table and into a pot, and then back out of the pot onto a nice big leaf. At which point it did hop, but as far as I could tell it just moved deeper into the ivy.

This evening I had to decide whether to man up and go to choir practice - for the first time since last month's bout of Covid - or admit defeat and quit the season. This decision used up quite a bit of my available bandwidth over the course of the day, but I'm happy to report that I went, and survived.