Following our woes last week at the Granville Country Park it was reassuring and confidence building to be able to leave our cars in a more secure site, by the offices of Edge Renewables in Lea Quarry.
This visit was the next in the series of visits we are making to the quarry to see if we can discern any trends in the way the quarry is recovering from its past. On this occasion we were joined by the Invertebrate Challenge Hoverfly Group, now known as the Dipterist Group (I have changed our name so why shouldn’t they) for one of their outings. In all a dozen assembled in the car park on a beautiful, warm spring day.
We immediately split into two groups with the dipterists going their own way to follow their chosen pursuit. The remainder headed for the “regeneration” area ... or we would have done had some of us not taken so long to get ready. So spiderman set off ahead of the rest of us and we promised to catch him up as soon as possible.
Eventually we were all kitted up and ready for the off. We walked quickly about 5 yards to an area of grassland just off the car park where the botanists decided to hone their skills by identifying the flora of this area. The others quietly searched for invertebrates for a few minutes until it became clear that the botanists were in for the long haul when we made our excuses and left them to it and hurried on to catch up spiderman.
And we caught up with him ... 90 minutes later ... just in time for lunch.
To be fair it was a long walk, about half a mile, and we were constantly distracted by sights to the side of the path. Here are just a few:
Green tiger beetle
Violets and 7-spot
A Stonecrop?
Cowslips
Sloe bugs
The south west facing bank at the edge of the quarry that separates it from the summit of Wenlock Edge had burst into life following the recent spell of warm spring weather. So it would have been remiss of us to walk resolutely past it without enjoying the sight and looking to see what else was taking advantage of the conditions.
As I decided to have lunch the botanists wandered into view and joined us, so we all lunched. It was warm, it was very pleasant and it was very tempting not to move. But we are dedicated and so, with some reluctance, we recommenced our survey. The botanists were soon into action:
(Oops one forgot his high visibility jacket.)
Others continued to look for invertebrates. Amongst the many sloe bugs that were emerging to take advantage of the warmth our chief shieldbug spotter noticed a shiny bug which turned out to be a blue shieldbug.
We made our way back slowly towards a grassland between the offices and one of the woodpiles. This seems to have become the traditional last calling point of each visit. Here some sat down to enjoy the sights and sounds of the day and have a drink, others went hunting. The branches of a Scots pine were beaten and it yielded a large weevil that was identified as a Large pine weevil, a Green shieldbug and a Juniper shieldbug. I suspect that the latter was overwintering in the pine as they are normally associated with cypress like conifers.
Large pine weevil
Juniper shieldbug
At long last the dipterists joined us and we swapped tales of derring-do, great finds, near misses, novel field techniques and so on.
An excellent day in excellent weather rounded off, by some, in a local hostelry to replace lost fluids.
Keith Fowler
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