I can’t believe it was last August when I last wrote – things went frantic with the jewellery of course – as soon as the kids are back at school and everyone’s hols are over, people start buying little treats to cheer themselves up … and thinking about Christmas! So I didn’t draw breath until early March.
Before the Autumn, I’d managed to do a bit of amateur pruning, jam a few cuttings of things that looked near death into some trays of garden soil, and pulled up some lumps of weed runners from under the gravel in the areas nearest the door, but that was about it. Needless to say I’ve been weeding, pruning, (and thankfully planting!) ever since. More anon.
Anyway, on to the interesting insect: yesterday night, the lack of light drove me in from the garden at about 11, and I flopped at the computer to ‘work’ (involving a lot of looking at plants and seeds), and this huge (ish) exotic-looking beetle fell off my arm on to the keyboard. It was bright green, with orangey-red markings, and looked like an animated fuchsia! I just stared at it as it crawled over my numpad, as the most striking thing was its shape – a sort of curved long triangle with curlicues; rather like a leaf, in fact.
Robert Brown Hawthorn Shieldbug
Image is a cropped version of ©Robert Brown’s vibrant photograph on trekearth.com of a Sheild Bug taken in Cumbria in 2004 – the only one that matched the colour of mine!
I vaguely remembered seeing a picture of it in a gardening book somewhere, under ‘Pests’, but I couldn’t bear to kill such an ‘un-British’ looking exotic. I pawed around for my camera, but of course the battery was dead, and as it was starting to flap around, I grabbed it in a handy tissue. It immediately started vibrating, so strongly I almost dropped it, but I raced for the the garden and got it out safely.
I was rather excited in a ‘I may have done something bad’ way, as I’d never seen one before, and wondered if it might be ‘reportable’ – that I’d unleashed a terrible horticutural plague or something. All searching for pictures of green beetles brought me lots of our standard brown n black things, with the odd metallic green small ones, until I happened upon a post somewhere of someone asking about a shield-shaped beetle he’d found. An insectoid expert from a ‘true bug’ website came to the rescue – turns out it was a Hawthorn Shieldbug. Not a beetle at all. I found there were two varieties; Birch and Hawthorn (the larger), and mine matched the measurements of the latter, although all but one (RobBrown’s) of the online pictures showed the markings as a sort of light brown.
The interesting bit (yes, I’m getting there), is that these are apparently now becoming rather scarce in Scotland. Evidently not in Edinburgh – perhaps they’ve decided, along with ‘Location, Location’, that it’s the best place to live in the UK.
Having also bagged two welterweight slugs today as well, I feel I have every right to be unbearably smug and sleep the sleep of the Just.
Cru
x
~*Text ©Cruel Lady 2009*~
http://www.redscorpiondesign.co.uk
