Gras beetles

I'd happily have used any of the images in today's Facebook post for my blip tonight, but these asparagus beetles and the black and yellow longhorn are both new records for the garden, which makes them especially pleasing. I have photographed Rutpela maculata in the past though, and therefore knew exactly what I'd found on one of the cotoneaster bushes, whereas I'd never seen an asparagus beetle before, and had to use my app to find out what these were. Even if they hadn't been in cop, that fact would have pushed them to the top of the leader board, but the bug porn points really clinched it for them.

Here in the Vale of Evesham, which claims to be the hub of the asparagus universe (except that the locals call it sparrowgrass, or simply gras), it's unlikely that these little chaps would be popular with many people - or indeed that I would, given that after our mini photo shoot I left them to get on with their lives, rather than reaching for an insecticide spray, or picking them off their perch and dropping them in soapy water. In my defence, they're sitting here on a wild asparagus plant that self-seeded in our back yard a few years ago, so they won't have far to look for their larval foodplant. It only occurred to me as I was writing this that I should have been checking the base of this plant for shooting spears... but it's probably too late now. You win some (beetles) and lose some (gras).

After the asparagus beetles and the spotty longhorn, the third surprise of the day came when I was looking for viburnum beetles, and found instead an immature male Southern Hawker - so fresh that his wings were still soft and reflective - about two metres away from our little 50-gallon patio pond. R and I spent quite a while searching both ponds for an exuvia, but we didn't manage to find one, and given that Southern Hawker exuviae are over an inch long and quite hard to miss, we were left perplexed as to where our new resident could have come from. He appeared to be determined not to move from his perch in the viburnum, however much attention we forced on him, so it seemed unlikely that he'd flown far to get there. Pleased as I was to see him, I'd really have preferred him to move on, because an extended family of house sparrows roosts right next to the viburnum in an old clump of honeysuckle, and I fear that his impersonation of a twig isn't going to fool them when they start looking for breakfast in the morning, but getting a ladder and moving him up into a tree would have been an intervention too far, even for me.