Bugs of Maentwrog

You never know what you will find and sometimes you will never know what you have found. I was busy weeding my garden when I sensed I was not alone, like a small periscope, some form of beetle kept rising out of a column in the grass. I made a short film of it and an expert suggested, from what little could be seen, that it might be a dung beetle.

But if I was a dung beetle I wouldn’t have chosen my sheep-free veg patch.  Does my beetle travel long distance to collect its dung? Yesterday I placed five balls of sheep poo just outside its hole and they are still there today ....  so, maybe it’s not a dung beetle.    

I was walking through the nature reserve with Molly (our dog) as she chased her frisbee through the bracken sending up a swarm of insects with the most enormous antennae. After sifting through many pages of my British Insects I feel reasonably confident that these were Nemophora degeerella (Adelidae).

Buff Tip

A bit further on was a Buff tip moth, perfectly camouflaged as a birch twig, but fifty metres from the nearest birch it was a bit of a giveaway on the bracken.