Final instar

Back at home after spending the day in Wales with the Boy Wonder, and with R having gone back out again to a gig in Birmingham (Bonnie Raitt, if that set you wondering), I took the macro and wandered round the garden for half an hour, to see what I could find. The fierce heat of the middle of the day was receding, and quite a few bees and hoverflies had come out to feed, but I was most pleased to spot a buggy silhouette through the thin leaf of a Norway maple, and to discover on turning it over that I was looking at a final instar Pentatoma rufipes nymph.

The adult of this species, commonly called the red-legged shieldbug or the forest bug, is a large, handsome bug, but it's well camouflaged against the trees in which it lives, and I rarely find one in our garden. Last summer though, I did find a clutch of shieldbug eggs on a leaf of the quince tree (about three metres away from this spot), which on hatching a few days later turned out to be baby forest bugs. During the autumn I swept some small nymphs from nearby nettles, but since then I've only seen two: one last weekend, uncomfortably high up in a birch tree, and now this one in a far more photographable position. They will have overwintered as mid-instar nymphs, and those that survived should now be preparing, as this one is, to undergo their final moult and emerge as adults. After breeding in July and August they're likely to live on into the autumn, but they'll play no part in the lives of their offspring. Both nymphs and adults suck the sap from deciduous trees - especially oak, but also alder, hazel, apple, and cherry - and in commercial woodlands and orchards they're sometimes regarded as pests. Adults may also feed on fruit, and occasionally on smaller insects or their larvae.

The Boy was on especially good form today, and we had great fun with him. I especially liked the moment when he disappeared into the dining room and emerged on his tricycle. "I'm on my motorbike," he said. "I'm going on my holidays. You can't come though, and you can't come," - looking first at me and then at R. "I'm going All, By, Myself."

After this the subject of going on holidays became a running theme, and this came in useful later, when a game B had invented in which we all (including L) had to sit on the sofa with our feet up off the floor because we were being hunted by a bear, turned so serious that he and I wound up hiding in the dining room together, watching for the bear through the French door out into the hall. When he folded himself into my arms and I saw how quickly he was breathing and how wide his eyes were, and heard the tremor in the tiny voice that was whispering in my ear, I suddenly realised that he'd scared himself half to death with his own fantasy, and I needed to defuse the game as quickly as possible. None of my suggested solutions to the bear problem was accepted until I suggested that by now he'd probably gone off on his holidays, but B seized this one and ran with it, and we were soon able to leave our hiding place and go back to the playroom.

While I'd never try to suppress a child's imagination, I think it might be time to introduce a different kind of bear to the Boy's mental cast of characters: the little domestic dramas in Winnie the Pooh don't involve predation, so far as I can remember, and always end up with everyone being friends. I'm seeing another bookshop visit in my seven-day horoscope.