Ten of us gathered at the "pavilion" in Wollerton, an innocuous looking small brick building with a notice board at the side of the road. It does have, however, a drop kerb onto the pavement to provide parking space for half a dozen cars.
Am I old-fashioned in calling it a pavement? I note with bemusement that many signs proclaiming a blockage to this means of pedestrian progress often use the term "footway". Referring to my dictionary I note that both are British words: pavement is "a raised paved or asphalted path for pedestrians at the side of a road"; footway is "a path or track for pedestrians". So all pavements are footways but not all footways are pavements. Well that's cleared that up. Out of interest you may wish to know that my spellchecker does not like the word "footway".
We eventually left the cars and walked with some purpose to the wetlands. To get access we had to cross a bridge over the River Tern. Whilst most of us crossed without giving the structure much of a glance to do what we wanted to do:
Some were drawn to the concrete and wood of the bridge:
They spent a long time peering at this and that, taking photographs and generally having a good time. And the subject of their fascination?
Lichens.
The wood and concrete were covered in them.
A family of mute swans on the river took no notice.
We dragged ourselves away from the bridge and made excellent progress, moving fifty yards or so along the grass footway to a small clearing overlooking one of the pools that was quite a sun trap. Coffee was taken.
The swans are the same family. Apparently they had climbed out of the river and walked to the pool whilst we were moving along. Perhaps our activities had attracted their interest.
There was plenty of figwort about and sightings of the figwort sawfly were plentiful.
Another visitor that came within camera range was the "fold-wing" cranefly Ptychoptera contaminata:
.We moved on.
To a spot that I had visited three times before last year.
I found the female of a planthopper that I could not identify. (Females can be difficult or impossible to identify to species.) All my attempts on those occasions to find a male were met with failure. So I was determined to find one - although I could never be certain it was the male of the same species unless I found a pair in the act of making more! I gave the area a thorough search and found a candidate male which turned out to be a small striped planthopper called Anoscopus flavostriatus (no photograph as it is too small for my camera but you can see it on the British Bugs web site here.)
Flushed with possible success lunch was taken.
Refuelled and refreshed we continued on our merry way. The first thing to catch our eye was a Brimstone butterfly that was clinging on to a flower head.
Another butterfly was a skipper. I await confirmation as to whether the black tips to the antennae indicate that it is an Essex skipper.
Other finds were:
A Narrow-bordered five spot burnet
A burnet pupal case attached to a grass stem
A striking hymenopteran that no-one was keen to identify!
A sloe bug (or hairy shieldbug, if you prefer) juvenile
And a full grown adult Birch shield bug
As we rounded the end of one of the pools to make our way back to the start we noted a Flowering rush.
And on some fleabane to hoverfly Eristalis arbustorum:
The footway brought us back to our starting point and again the bridge proved a focal point as the group relaxed for a few moments before making our way back to the cars and home.
My thanks to Jim Cresswell and Peter Hodgkinson for providing photographs to supplement my own in this piece.
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