Is this Heaven?

Why is ‘birdwatching’ an accepted term but ‘beewatching’ isn’t? 🐝

24th May vs. 29th June! The growth rate of birds is incredible.

Ajax found an ant’s nest 🐜 I don’t hand feed him at all anymore to encourage him to be independent and not associate humans with food. He now independently forages in the garden and surrounding area, but I do supplement this by scattering cat biscuits and mealworms outside.

I just found one of the UK’s rarest butterflies! This week I am surveying for a long-term farmland biodiversity monitoring project & this little butterfly caught my eye. It’s the Black Hairstreak (Satyrium pruni) which I have never seen before. Sadly, it’s classed as Endangered on the GB Red List.

He likes to ‘help’ me with the gardening.

My copy of @rowhoop.bsky.social book just arrived. Beautiful cover! Can’t wait to read it.

Not all moths have wings! In the UK, there are a handful of moth species with females that never grow wings, even when fully grown. The Vapourer Moth (Orgyia antiqua) is among them. These photos are from when I kept a colony as pets to observe their life stages.

We just launched a solitary bee appeal!🐝

Happy Summer Solstice ☀️

Happy Summer Solstice! 🌸 These #wildflowerhour challenges are always fun but this one I especially like. #PollinatorPals 🐝 Here’s thirty seconds of nothing but insects I saw today visiting bramble blossoms.

One of the rarest butterflies I have seen in my garden is the nationally scarce Brown Hairstreak, which lays its eggs on blackthorn & plum. It has declined by over 50% in less than 60 years and is mostly threatened by loss of hedgerows and excessive pruning of its host plants.

My first Substack article is out! 🦋 open.substack.com/pub/juliettu...

Ajax outdoor feeding station/ lodge installed today. Hoping he doesn’t think the bee houses are vending machines.

New hat. How does it look?

I went out looking for stag beetles, but my trip was only partially successful. Maybe I can rebuild him?

Good morning!

VERY exciting new record for the garden this week! This is the Red-belted Clearwing (Synanthedon myopaeformis); an extremely cool and strange-looking moth whose caterpillars live beneath the bark of fruit trees.

I just made a Substack! I hope to share more long-form content there: Blogs about my research, stories of wildlife encounters, commentary on biological and conservation news, and tips for wildlife photography and how to find wildlife and welcome it into your garden.🦋 substack.com/@julietturne...

I’m not sure this guy really understands the rules of the game…

I’ve been in East Anglia this week, surveying farms and looking at the effects of organic farming on insect and bird communities. Here are some of the bees I saw!

Ajax would like to show everyone this great new stick he found.

Here are three different types of beetle I saw this week! 1. Thick-legged Flower Beetles (Oedemera nobilis) 2. The Wasp Beetle (Clytus arietis) 3. The Fairy-ring Longhorn Beetle (Pseudovadonia livida) 🌼

Am I outstanding in this field or am I just out standing in this field?

My week of ecological research 🐝

Alas, poor Yorick. 🦌

Sometimes fieldwork really does mean working in a field.

Scarlet Tiger Moth season is here! First one looks like it has had a tough day.

Eurasian Magpies frequently cache their food, meaning that if they find something good when they are full, they hide it in a safe place to collect later. Ajax just caught and killed this cricket and then tried to cache it in my armpit.

Puppies come in many different forms. Sometimes they are birds. 🐶

Why is there a little velociraptor penguin shouting at me?

Welcome to my office!

The Four-spotted Chaser (Libellula quadrimaculata).

One of my favourite dragonflies: The Broad-bodied Chaser (Libellula depressa).

I was photographing this incredible Emperor Dragonfly (Anax imperator) laying her eggs at the pond, but she kept being photobombed by the damselflies! 🐉

We spent the morning sitting in the garden doing some birdwatching. ☀️ We saw two great spotted woodpeckers, a blue tit feeding her chicks in the tree, and a pair of wood pigeons mating. Ajax is learning a lot!

Fostering a chick is not for the faint hearted. I wake up at 5am every day now and hand-feed him at least once every hour. I can’t go out anywhere unless I am back in time to feed him. He eats a mix of cat food, scrambled egg, dried mealworms, earthworms, and live insects.

The Scorpionfly (Panorpa communis) is undoubtedly one of the weirdest insects on the British Isles🦂 It’s not a scorpion or a fly, but an insect so different that it belongs to a taxonomic order almost no one has even heard of: the Mecopterans. Unbelievably, their closest living relatives are fleas.

The chances of a bird learning your skills and stealing your job are low but never zero.

Each day, Ajax has some new classes in the garden. Yesterday’s class was Catching Worms 🪱(he scored a B-).

Yesterday marked the end of the official #SolitaryBeeWeek but remember: You can learn about these important pollinators and how to conserve them on any day of the year 😊

Ajax daily weigh-in 💪

I managed to get a good video of the garden hedgehog 🦔 The winning tactic was to go into the garden at midnight, lie on the lawn with torch in hand and a pile of cat food in front, and then wait.

He likes to watch documentaries about birds.

Hello everyone, my small scruffy child is looking for a name. Please suggest 🤍

Good morning. Guess who had me wake up at dawn to feed him a 5am breakfast.

My weekend plans did not involve becoming the proud mother of a baby magpie but anyway here I am.

Happy Solitary Bee Week! 🐝 Did you know that most types of bee don’t live in colonies?

I make tea from a wild plant used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans for medicine and beekeeping 🌿