Twofer

It was dark and stormy today, though it didn't actually rain until I was half way round the garden on my lunchtime invertebrate hunt. At which point, as I knew I already had usable images, I called it quits. I spent the afternoon at my desk, trying and failing to restore it to some kind of order, but being thankful that I wasn't out in what by then was pretty fierce weather.

I swept this juniper shieldbug out of the Lawson cyprus, and then gently encouraged it onto a leaf of the nearby photinia so that I could take its photo. It was having none of this though, and scuttled off along the stem to a leaf axil where I couldn't get a clear shot. It was while I was trying to get a better angle on it that I suddenly realised there was a leafhopper only a couple of centimetres away from the shieldbug's tail, and I just managed to take advantage of this unexpected two-for-one offer before the hopper swivelled itself round to the back of the stem, and then sprang away into the depths of the shrub.

By this time the photinia was lashing from side to side in the wind, like Baby B dancing to Row, row, row your boat, and the shieldbug's stem was too high for me to be able to stake it, so I devised a Heath Robinson solution: pegging two stems together so that they braced each other, and hanging my monopod from the peg to pull them down and out towards the front edge of the shrub. This didn't stop them from moving, but it did slow them down enough to give me a sporting chance of getting some flash photos.

It's only about three weeks since I last posted a juniper shieldbug, but I'm making this my main image tonight because, despite the flash bounce, it's a much more descriptive photo than the previous one. One of the items on my to-do list is to buy a new speedlight and a good diffuser such as the one made by Cygnustech, but it may be a while before this action rises to the top of the pile, so for now I'm still working with my ring flash.

Superficially, the juniper shieldbug is quite similar to the birch and hawthorn shieldbugs, in that all of them are predominantly green and red, but while the other two are fairly easily confused (by me, at least), the juniper shieldbug is pretty distinctive. It's the least red of the three species, with little to no red marking on the abdomen, and the curved pinky-red markings on its corium (the leathery section of the wings) are diagnostic. You can also just about make out a dark cross mark on the membranous area of the wings, which neither the birch nor the hawthorn shieldbug has.

The hopper is another Acericerus, which seems to be the second commonest leafhopper genus in my garden at the moment after Empoasca. Paler and less well marked than Acericerus heydenii, it's going to be either A. ribauti or A. vittifrons, and while I plumped for A. ribauti with the female I found on Tuesday, I have a feeling that this male is probably A. vittifrons. I'm basing this on nothing more than the fact that his antennal palettes - the lumpy bits on the ends of his antennae - look fairly large in relation to the overall antennal length, whereas in A. ribauti they're much smaller. If I'd captured him face-on I'd have been able to identify him more definitely from the shape of his dark facial marking, but sadly he only allowed me this single profile shot.