Insects as well as birds are on my mind just now. As I said in my previous post, about my recent camping experiment, I find the summer months less productive in terms of bird photography but find compensation for this in the butterflies, moths, bees, flies, beetles and more that surround us during this season. But why am I showing insect photos when this is a birds site?
Insects and Birds – an interdependent network
Many birds depend on a good supply of insects for their diet, and the health of the entire ecological system within which all birds live is dependent on having a vibrant insect population. Interdependency (and conflict; see my earlier robin and dunnock story, not to mention predation by one bird on another) between different bird species is something we should try to understand, but birds and insects also go ecologically hand in hand. As we’ll see this not only applies to those which are primarily insectivorous like the Stonechat in the image at the head of this post with both an adult fly and a larval grub in its beak.
Insects – What a Vast Variety!
For the rest of this post I’m going to add insect images just to illustrate something of their vast variety. At present more than 25,000 different species of insect have been identified in Great Britain. Worldwide that figure is well over a million … and still counting! A small proportion of these have been studied in depth by entomologists, but about the majority relatively little is known. Here are just a few of those I’ve been photographing recently.
This grass moth, Agriphila straminella, in my experience is usually found hanging upside down on a stalk of grass, but while looking for insects in woodland near the River Derwent at Isel I found this one perched horizontally on a leaf, making it much easier to photograph. It is a day-flying micro-moth only a little over a centimetre in total length so on your screen it will be considerably magnified.
There are many species of Ladybird. This one has seven spots. They are important in the agricultural world because they eat smaller insects that would damage many crops.
It would be easy to go on and on showing the variety of insects, some attractive in appearance, some ugly and some downright scary. However, I’ll finish this part of the post with one more, a hoverfly, which all too often people mistake for a wasp.
The Study of Insects
The more I learn about birds (and that’s a never-ending process)the more I see the links between birds and insects. The dependencies are so great that as well as constantly reading more ornithology I find myself also spending prime time in reading entomology, the study of insects. It’s not that I want to become an expert entomologist. I guess I’ve left that rather too late in life. But understanding the connections between birds and insects (indeed the three-way connections between birds, insects and plants) is important simply to understand the lives of many birds.
Insects in Bird Diets
The 19th century poet Wordsworth once wrote a poem about a robin and a butterfly. In it he rebukes the robin for chasing such a beautiful insect, but of course the robin needed to eat and insects were his food.
Questions constantly come to mind such as, “What about that Stonechat which I often see on a perch with an insect in his bill (see the header photo above)? Does he have any particular favourites, or will he take any insect that’s available?” “Just as some birds have favourite seeds do others have favourite insects?” Has anyone ever studied that kind of question? There must be literature about this. I surely can’t be the first to ask.
Many bird species are primarily insectivorous but also, and especially in the breeding season, others that are chiefly seed eaters will search out spiders, flies and beetles, indeed a wide variety of insects and other invertebrates, to enrich the diet of their rapidly growing young. This is, for example, true of Goldfinches.
More Resources
My copy of the WILDGuide to Britain’s Insects is certainly coming off the shelf more often now and I’ve just ordered the more detailed one in the same series, on British Hoverflies. Last year I got a family birthday gift of a Field Guide to Bees, and as I move on to another paragraph here’s one that it helped me with.
It has been good in the past few weeks to see a variety of bee species busy at their vital work. This one is an Apis Honey Bee but there are 270 species of bee in the British Isles, and many thousands worldwide. It has been interesting to see how many I could photograph successfully during a single walk.The answer is “Not many” as the operative word is “successfully”; they move from flower to flower so quickly.
The Insect Beauty Parade
I guess the old saying is true that, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and I’m sure that every family of insects has its enthusiasts, but surely the real beauties are the butterflies. Certainly, to my mind at least, no study of insects could be complete without getting some understanding of the lives and ecological roles of the Lepidoptera, which of course include moths
And now as I close, a butterfly picture of two Meadow Brown butterflies. I saw them meet about half a minute before this photo was taken. It didn’t take long for them to settle do to their important work, the continuation of their species, ensuring that we have butterflies next year. Each one plays an important niche role in God’s great system of the natural world.
Insects Galore – Flies, Moths and More
I have many more photos of insects that could be shown but I must draw this post to a close. Hopefully without losing the site’s focus on birds I’ll add more posts later. Flies of various kinds, especially hoverflies, have become something of a side interest recently, and I mustn’t forget beetles. They also are an important part of the avian food chain. Maybe I’ll do a post about the Red Soldier Beetle. Then I’ve been seeing more moths than in the past, probably not because there are more around but simply because previously I’ve not been noticing them, both moths of butterfly size and micro-moths.
Another thing I didn’t know until very recently is that there are not only winged insects, but whole families in which the wings are nigh on invisible and others which are genuinely wingless such as bristletails and silverfish as well as wingless aphids and lice, even wingless ants and wasps.
