Raining shieldbugs by Keith Fowler

The year is progressing. All the shieldbugs that we could not find earlier in the year have produced offspring which are now maturing and allowing themselves to be found by our intrepid searchers. Soon their thoughts will be turning to overwintering and repeating the cycle next year. Hopefully by then the Shropshire shieldbug atlas will be well on the way to publication.

Since my last posting there have been three further forays into deepest Shropshire continuing our hunt for invertebrates.

Tasley
The first of the three trips was to Tasley on the north west outskirts of Bridgnorth visiting Trinity Wood, the imaginatively named Brick Kiln plantation and a neighbouring field. This area covered two shieldbugless tetrads. The weather was sunny and hot (in contrast to the weather at the moment which is wet and cold). Trinity Wood is a recent plantation with a mixture of broadleaved trees clearings and wide pathways. Brick Kiln plantation is mature woodland. The field seems to have been left to grow whatever seeds were lying in the soil.

After months of trips finding the odd shieldbug we were overwhelmed. It seemed that every sweep or beat of the vegetation produced at least one shieldbug, perhaps this is where most of the Shropshire bugs had been hiding. We recorded 9, yes nine, species of shieldbug and allies. As this was a remarkable achievement for this group I am going to list them:

Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale    Hawthorn shieldbug
Coreus marginatus    Dock bug
Corizus hyoscyami   
Dolycoris baccarum    Hairy/Sloe shieldbug
Elasmostethus interstinctus    Birch shieldbug
Elasmucha grisea    Parent shieldbug
Eysarcoris venustissimus    Woundwort shieldbug
Palomena prasina    Green shieldbug
Troilus luridus    Bronze shieldbug

However the find of the day was a beautiful cranefly (yes such things do exist) Pedicia rivosa.

















This is one of the largest craneflies we have and it has wonderfully patterned wings and abdomen as I hope you will appreciate from the photograph.

Overall we added 93 invertebrate records to the Shropshire database. All that remained was to pose for the group photograph. Unfortunately the photographer was not quick enough to get into the picture!

Broseley
I did not go to Broseley as I was on holiday and my wife would have been very upset had I popped back for the day. Shame as by all accounts it continued to rain shield bugs. The site visited was a patch of private land that had been turned into a nature reserve and was now looked after by a Friends Group. I had visited the site earlier in the year and found... you guessed it, NO shieldbugs. But in my absence the group did a wonderful job, perhaps I should go away more often.

I was on my best behaviour whilst away, no pots, no nets, no reference books but insects had a way of finding me. This turned up on my fleece in the middle of a busy pedestrian area in Vienna. I am not familiar with species found on the continent but it looks a bit like a Western conifer seed bug.

And joining us on a car we hired was what looked like a Pied shieldbug but is probably Rambur’s pied shieldbug which has only recently appeared in Britain in Kent.

So as I have no more to say about Broseley here are a few more pictures of as yet unidentified insects in Austria and the Czech Republic.

Wenlock Edge
Our latest trip was a return to Wenlock Edge where on our first trip we found a Hawthorn shieldbug within a few minutes of leaving the car park but no more. Unfortunately this record was not in our target tetrad so we returned for a further try.

The weather was fine but being on top of the Edge a little breezy. However our optimism was raised as we found three species of shieldbugs on the way to the recordless tetrad. But was our optimism going to be dashed?

We took elevenses before we had entered our target area; and as I was still on Central European Time I had lunch. This proved to be catching as I noticed one other person tucking into his sandwiches.

Refreshed we quickly entered the shieldbugly challenged tetrad. Beat, sweep, look, sweep, search, beat ... were we to be denied again? Of course not. Although we did not find a lot of bugs we did locate five species.

At the end of the day our resident keep-fit expert told us that we had walked a record 2 miles in the 5 hours we were out. So, shieldbugs, over one hundred invertebrate records and improved fitness, what more could we want? Well we did not find any longhorn beetles and micromoths were few and far between – ah well, you can’t have everything.



Keith Fowler