Horny hopper...

Today I've been catching up with all sorts of things I'd been putting off for the last few exam weeks. I finally got around to agreeing to take on the post of BSBI Botanical Recorder for South Lincolnshire and also booked a short break for us all in early September, in a cottage near Snape in Suffolk, all before nine am!

I then spent a little time photographing some insects that Pete had brought back from Dorset and thought I'd share this horned treehopper Centrotus cornutus with you all, just because it's such an unlikely loooking creature. The horns are for camouflage, looking remarkably like spines when it sits on tree twigs. It has very round eyes and the mouthparts are like a hypodermic needle and are used for sucking up sap froma variety of plants.

I then took Chris into town to buy the remaining few things he needed for his third year field trip to Abisko in northern Sweden, which starts next week. Insect repellant and sun tan cream were essential, and we also bought walking trousers and a microfleece drastically reduced in a sale :)

Back for some lunch and then Chris and I went out to survey a limestone meadow with seepages and flushes. It proved to be quite exciting because we found two sizeable colonies of flat-sedge, a very rare species around Peterborough, and one which was thought to be extinct on the site. One of the colonies was thriving on the damp trampled public footpath,so I'm not sure how it had been overlooked for so long. I think I might have been the last person to record it on the site back in 1989!

While we were out we'd put Russell into an aviary at the bottom of the garden, so that he could get used to outside sights and sounds. The aviary was originally built for a young injured jay that we brought back from a holiday in Monmouth many years ago, and had fallen into disrepair, but Pete patched it up for Russell. We'd not been home long when Chris dashed out saying that Russell was being mobbed by magpies - seven of them all trying to attack him viciously. Bullying doesn't just occur among humans!