The day I fell in a bog

I was in Guildford for the weekend visiting my boyfriend- with sunday being pretty good weather (November, and didn't need coats! Not expecting a snowy winter this year...) we decided to head out on an adventure and see what we could find
Heading north out of Burpham (where his flat is), we walked along Clay Lane towards Jacob's Well and Worpleston. The area was completely new to us; the only reason we knew of Worplesdon is because the train from Woking stops at Worplesdon sometimes. There are vegetables growing on the platform too, which is pretty cute.

About halfway between Burpham and Worplesdon is Whitmoor Common, our adventure spot of the day. Whitmoor Common is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on the edge of the Bagshot Beds, a sandy soil formation. A mix of sandy and peaty soil means that there's a mixture of dry and wet heathland plants on higher and lower areas. It's fairly big, and pretty boggy in the winter- especially this Sunday, when it had just rained all day Saturday. We had to take a couple of backtracks heading into the common, because it was just absolutely impassable without wellies! The mud and puddles meant I got some pretty cool macro shots with my camera though.

Despite balancing somewhat precariously to take these, it wasn't until we were walking back along this path a bit further up that I fell over. I was pretty lucky that I mostly just got a bit wet, and not absolutely coated in mud. We carried on though, finding a slightly less sodden path- and a rope swing too, which we quickly took advantage of!

Heathlands always have very diverse flora; there are the big plants like heather (and each heather is slightly different- you don't have just 'heather', there's also bell heather, cross-leaf heath and ling, so quite a range!) and a few trees like silver birch. It's very easy to miss the smaller plants though, that are extremely varied once you actually start looking. It's the smaller plants that allow such a high diversity of other organisms to survive on heathlands too- bees, ants and other insects really depend on smaller plants.

The heath turns into wet woodland at the northern edge. Perhaps it wasn't supposed to be quite as wet as it actually was. The lichen makes quite nice patterns on the north side of trees where it's colder and moister; there's less on the southern side of trees because it's more prone to drying out in bright sunshine.

You can see the orange lichen on the north side of the trees

By the time we made it out of the woods, it was starting to get quite cold and dark- the evenings draw in so quick these days! Just made it home before a few drips of rain.

AES Insect Show 2014

One of the big insect events on my calendar has always been the Amateur Entomologists Society (AES) October show at Kempton Park racecourse. Because I've been at uni for the past 3 years, unfortunately I've not actually been able to go for ages- but this year, now I've graduated (argh!), I've not been up in Birmingham this weekend, and was able to go! Annoyingly, the weather was pretty horrendous, which made getting there and back a bit tricky, although the show itself is thankfully indoors. We managed to just about avoid the rain!

The AES show happens once every year, and basically it's an entomologist's heaven. Both floors of the building are packed out with stalls, selling a range of live and pinned insects (and spiders, plenty of tarantulas), books, art, shells and scientific equipment like nets, collecting jars and the like. It's pretty fantastic, and I've not come across anything else to quite the same scale or quite the same focused interest on insects.

The favourites to sell I think perhaps goes to the tarantulas (there are a lot of spider stands), but there are also tons of snails, millipedes, stick insects, praying mantids... and a couple of other rarer things, like katydids, grasshoppers, scorpions and hermit crabs. There were some pretty impressive boxes of snails, that kept trying to escape out the sides!

As a member of the Phasmid Study Group (PSG), I always make a bit of a beeline towards their stand at this show. Especially since I haven't been able to get to their meetings quite as regularly recently (again, due to being in Birmingham for university), it was quite nice to check out how the stand looked, and who was hanging around. Nice to see some of the old familiar faces.

 

One of the most popular things to sell at the AES meeting is pinned out insects- beetles and especially butterflies make up the bulk of these. There are some lovely blue morpho butterflies, atlas and other exotics, as well as native peacocks and the common brown species; wall, meadow and speckled wood. There was one stall that was selling pinned bullet and fire ants, which sold out of the larger soldiers very quickly after we got there and had a bit of a wander round.

I'm not such a fan of the dead specimens, but there are always loads of live ones to keep; there were quite a few very nice millipedes that really caught my eye, but alas, I haven't really got the space for any more than the one tank I already have (pink-legged millipedes). I rather fancy some nice orange ones one day though...

It was a pretty great day, and even managed to not spend a fortune on insects. And we didn't get soaked either! 

River Wey

This week I've been in Guildford, enjoying the last of the gorgeous summer weather we've been having! It honestly hasn't felt like October at all- I went for a long walk along the River Wey with the bf on the 3rd, and we barely needed our hoodies until 6-7pm at night, when the sun was starting to go down!

The River Wey Navigations are a 20 mile waterway that runs through Surrey, made navigable through widening of the river channel and installation of locks along its length at various points. There are also a few big weirs along the river as well, used for measuring current and such. The river splits at a few points, creating a navigable channel and a smaller one- we had our lunch between the two at about 3pm, a good 7 miles down the river from Guildford.

The towpath was really flat and easy to walk along, which is how we managed to walk about 15 miles in total... quite a feat, after setting out at lunchtime with just a vague "let's go for a bit of a walk and see how far we can get"! One of the most interesting things we came across was Newark Priory at Pyrford, a fantastic old ruin that we certainly didn't expect. Despite trying to work out a way to get closer than a view from the riverside, unfortunately it's on private land, so this is the best view you can get of it. The crows made the picture even better, flying around in big clouds every time they got into arguments over whose bit of rock belonged to who.

We came across quite a lot of other interesting wildlife too on our walk- damselflies and dragonflies are prevalent at the moment, with the blues amongst these the most striking. There were kestrels hovering over the marshy fields near Pyrford; we were lucky enough to see one dive down to catch some prey, but unfortunately it came up empty handed, something it was quick to loudly bemoan from a nearby telegraph pole shortly after. The normal moorhens, mallards and mute swan were around too, although no coot today.

Eventually we did make it back to Guildford, although it took us a good 7 hours or so... a bit of a longer walk than we expected when we first set out! Really nice though, and an awesome end to a lovely summer.

Someone else didn't make it back home so safely...