The Leonard Cohen spider, and much more besides...

Hello folks, and welcome to what will be my 290th post since the very first in December of 2010. I have lots of things to share text-wise, but photographs may be a different prospect, given the restrictions of the weather and the pandemic.

Anyhow, let's see how we go, and Happy, Hopeful, New Year. 

How about we start with  news about Recluse spiders. Two species new to science have been discovered , one of which, Loxosceles coheni, has been named and dedicated to the memory of the famous Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist Leonard Cohen.

I know...I know! How dare I kick off with an arachnid story? 

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Erm....it was just about a month ago now that I started this update and wrote what you see above. Then, things conspired to keep me from adding to the update (mostly computer problems) but anyhow, here I am again and intend to bloody well stay until this IS complete!

How about a question that you may not have considered?

Back in the 1960s, Winifred Doane, an entomologist working in Nigeria found a fly which was really fat. She became the first person to study whether insects do indeed get fat. 

Insects get fat for very much the same reason people do. It’s a mixture of genetics, diet, even the bacteria which live inside the insect. If you feed the insect a high calorie diet, either sugar or fat, they’re going to get fat just like a person. The same principles-even the same molecules-work for insects.

Vespula vulgaris - A female Common wasp

I think this big female wasp that I recently came across as she was out collecting nest material, was probably my first real insect of this year.

Now this next photograph...

...I could pretend was a cool after-dark shot of a ladybird out hunting. I could...but they don't call me 'honest John' for no reason, and so what it actually is, you will be pleased to read, is a photo of a ladybird I took having forgotten to turn the flash on! My full moniker is 'honest, heedless John'. At least, I think that's what they call me, I forget now.

When I left my trail camera overnight in local woods, I was hoping for an SD card full of images and videos the next morning: the only thing I actually caught on camera was the arse-end of a fox as it disappeared from view...

             

I did do much better with a badger sett that I had been watching though...

I have been observing this sett for a couple of months now and until recently, it seemed as though it was not in use. I even set up the camera one night without any luck. It's quite a large set, with at least 6 entrance/exit holes. 

Prior to setting up the camera again, I re-visited and there did seem to be signs of activity this time. Here is where I think they have been scratching around looking for earthworms etc...

And so I positioned the trail camera in what I thought was the best position and captured these images one night...

              

As you can see from the stats, this was just before 5pm when I captured this first footage: not quite fully dark, but dark enough that the camera used night vision.

 This next video shows one of the badgers having a good scratch...

              

Once again there is another badger with quite distinctive markings, as there was in the last sett I photographed...

              

I apologise that the quality is not better on these videos, but I only have a very basic trail camera at present. I also had to crop some as the action was a fair distance away. I then had to reduce the size of the vids to add to the blog.

I think this big fella, who was by far the most active of all the badgers I caught on camera that night, is another Leucistic individual, suffering a partial loss of pigment.

I also got this sweet footage of a couple play-fighting...

               

I think I had about 63 videos across the night! Most unusable of course, with just a fleeting glance of a badger. Even the rain that came early morning did not deter them from being out and about feeding. The last footage I captured was just before 7am the following morning.

And that about wraps it up for this particular update; we just about have time for one of these before we go...

Perhaps instead of challenging you to tell me what you think this is, I'll instead share what I think it might be: I am fairly sure this is the pupa of a tachinid fly. 

It could well be 'Triarthria setipennis', a species that attacks and parasitises other insects, including earwigs. I will be sure to let you know if I do get an answer though, because I have the specimen in a pot to observe.