Natural graffiti

Wednesday 12th February 2025, Nils Quarry

Snow Flea update – none were found.

On this occasion we visited Nils Quarry in Pontesbury.

The site has had a chequered history. Its first use was as a quarry for quartzite. When the quarry was exhausted it was used for landfill. Now the landfill has been capped and nature allowed to take over.

Much of the site is woodland, and many of the quarries are only accessible by hacking your way through thick vegetation, their quarry faces peering through the tress mockingly saying “You can’t get to me!”.

The main quarry floor and, presumably, the capped surface of the landfill is now grassland.

As you can see from the photograph the grassland has been cut and, apart from a few tufts of grass and other vegetation, was very short, providing very little shelter for any creatures that wished to overwinter in that habitat.

Whilst most of the group headed off to the grassland to see what they could find in that area and its surrounding vegetation a couple of us headed into the woodland to look for Polytichum moss.

And we found some, a whole bankside’s worth.

This was scoured for some time but very little was found in residence, certainly no Snow fleas.

Having given up on the moss, attention was switched to some bramble nearby which was more fruitful, delivering us this Dotted border moth.

This is a male.

How do we know?

Easy…

It has fully developed wings.

The females of this species are flightless, although they do have substantial wing stubs.

Returning to the grassland and rejoining the others we caught up on what they had found in our absence. 

A pair of ladybirds, Rhyzobius litura (on the left of the following photograph) and 16-spot (on the right).

Photograph: David Williams

A pair of Scarlet tiger moth larvae.

Photograph: David Williams

A gall on ground-ivy known as the Lighthouse gall, caused by the larva of the fly Rondaniola bursaria.

Photograph: Nigel Cane-Honeysett

A ground beetle, Bembidion aeneum.

Photograph: Nigel Cane-Honeysett

And a tiny wasp that has defied identification to date.

Photograph: Nigel Cane-Honeysett

Now that we had returned would they find anything else.

The answer, of course, was “Yes”.

Another tiny ladybird, Nephus redtenbacheri. In the following photograph it is placed next to a 16-spot ladybird to give you an idea of its size.

Photograph: David Williams

At the end of the grassland furthest from the entrance was a picnic table. 

And we drifted towards it, spotting a 7-spot ladybird on the way.

Photograph: David Williams

The picnic table was a suitable spot for lunch, but we first checked out the nearby pool. Newts were spotted as they broke the surface of the water to take in air. They evaded our photographers’ efforts to capture this.

But here is the pool.

Lunch was declared and everyone magically appeared from wherever their wanderings had taken them.

We have no gong or whistle, but it happens every trip.

we then had the "lunchtime vac.", giving everyone a chance to huddle up and share some mutual warmth.

Photograph: Liz Roberts

Wandering back from an exploration of the woodland one of the group came across a couple of fungi.

The first was Candle-snuff fungus.

Photograph: Liz Roberts

And the second was a Scarlet elf cup.

Photograph: Liz Roberts

Unfortunately, there are two very similar fungi which look like this and cannot be separated to species without examining microscopically the spore it produces. This is not something that we undertook.

After lunch we wandered beyond the grassland into the woodland.

The path was very wet, muddy and difficult to walk on, but we persisted, pausing frequently to check out the vegetation bordering the path, finding a couple of beetles.

A hister beetle, Onthophilus striatus.

Photograph: David Williams

And a staphylinid beetle, Metapsia clypeata.

Photograph: David Williams

The day then rather fizzled out. Very little more was found, and we returned by various routes to the grassland and the picnic table.

The table was inspected closely to check for lichens.

Photograph: Nigel Cane-Honeysett

Then after “One Final Vac” we headed home.

On the way out of the site we spotted a bench that had been made from a tree trunk and noticed it was decorated with natural graffiti, generated by the larvae of the Ash bark beetle.

Photograph: Nigel Jones

My thanks to Shropshire County Council for granting us permission to do what we enjoy doing and the photographers for their excellent images and allowing me to use them in this report.