Home and Homefield Wood

For the first time ever, a flower supplants a butterfly or moth as my opening photo for a post, but it is at least named after an insect. I have wanted to see a Fly Orchid for years and now I have and it was, as they say or rather as T S Eliot says in The Coming of the Magi, satisfactory.

The circumstances are sad. Penny and I had a knowledgable friend, Christopher Hoskin, a gentle and modest lover of the natural world who gave a memorable lecture on orchids last year to Woodstock's natural history society. He also gave us one of the Common Spotted orchids which he bred from seed in a laborious and painstaking process at home.  Here it is:

He had the eye and patience needed for a naturalist and used both to discover a completely unexpected Lizard orchid, an exceedingly strange-looking, beribboned plant which popped up on a humdrum road verge less than half-a-mile from our house five years ago. We went to check on it it this week and there is now a second one flourishing on the other side of the road. The original is left on the combined photo below. We think there may be more but without Chris and with limited time we were unable to find them.

We had a long chat with him after his talk and invited him to join us this year on a tour of some of the sites he mentioned, for his good company but also selfishly because we knew how much his presence would increase our chance of sightings. It was not to be, because he died of a heart attack far too young at the end of the Autumn. The Guardian published an obituary of him here.

Preciously however, he had given us the information we needed to find most of the plants, particularly the only colony of Giant Orchids in the UK which I described in an earlier post and the likeliest places in the Chilterns to find Fly orchids, which I like especially, because they are so delicate and have a very small dot of blue, unusually compared to the usual pinks and maiden blushes of wild orchids in the UK.

Thanks to this privileged information, we have so far seen the Giants as well as the Monkey, Lady and hybrid orchids at Hartslock nature reserve near Goring and Streatley, a wonderful day out on my birthday in May which I also posted about here. When we were there, chatting to a knowledgable couple - we always hope for company at a site because most visitors are more expert than us - we mentioned the Fly orchids at Homefield Wood, another nature reserve run by the excellent local wildlife trust , and they were just heading off to have a look there.

Hartslock haul

We couldn't join them because of the scale and complication of my birthday arrangements followed by a visit to the US to see our younger son end a memorable year as a Loeb Fellow in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. But as soon as we were back, we diaried in a visit, hoping that the heatwave in our absence had not caused early flowering.

We like to combine an orchid hunt with a good walk which was easy at Hartslock because you take the Thames path through the Goring Gap, a particularly lovely stretch. Homefield Wood lies conveniently on the Chiltern Way above Medmenham, scene of 18th century Hellfire Club frolics, so we parked a mile or so away - the narrow lane from Rotten Row has lay-bys in the woods which don't cause obstruction - and wandered steeply downhill through the beech woods. En route we first met a family group who knew the reserve and helpfully lowered our expectations by saying that the orchids were not very good this year because of the early heat. Then a kind South African couple gave us specific directions to the swarm, or colony, of Military orchids which are the main reason for Homefield Wood’s fame. 

And so we arrived at a classic Chilterns woodland meadow, steeply running uphill and bathed in sunshine after earlier dull weather. We spotted the Pyramidal and Common Spotted orchids above immediately and then the Military clumps were exactly where we had been told to look. This orchid used to be widespread in the Chilterns until afforestation plunged its habitats into shade. It was rediscovered on a family picnic here in 1947 by Ted Lousely, a London banker who was a natural history expert and the first person to clock the arrival of American Rosebay Willowherb on London blitz sites. Imagine England without willowherb! What did the Elephant Hawk moth caterpillars eat? 

The first Military were found were indeed past their best

But this paler one (because in shaded I think) was still flowering well

This more typically coloured one had a good show of bloom too

And there are the 'buttons'

I am sure that Lousely’s choice of picnic site was not random. He must have been aware of the chance that wartime tree felling might bring the Military back. Yet Homefield Wood is still one of only two places in the Chilterns were the orchid is known, and there is only one other site in the UK, in Cambridgeshire. 

It was now our turn to be helpful to others, a delightful couple from Sherwood in Nottinghamshire whom we directed to the Military which still had flowering pink petals with the double row of crimson ‘buttons’ which account for the name. We told them that our Holy Grail was really the Flies and shortly afterwards, the wife directed us to a solitary Bee orchid, another delicate species which is seldom obvious to see. 

We parted company but then, as I was photographing some unrelated budding plant a little disconsolately, there was a distant shout of “We’ve found them!” Our kind new friends had walked a good quarter of a mile uphill to another small meadow with coppiced trees, where I don’t think we would have ventured, and come back specially to tell us and lead us to the spot. 

If you visit in the next few days, both types of orchid can be found relatively easily provided you comb the meadows as the excellent wildlife trust has put discreet wire cages round some plants, as above. This is primarily to protect them against rabbits but there is constant concern about other threats. The orchids were kept secret for over 30 years and we are privileged indeed to be allowed to see them and need to treat them with great respect. 

Pic courtesy of Google AI

I have gone on long enough and you can read more knowledgeably online about the Fly’s extraordinary success as a decoy for the Digger Wasp which attempts to mate with it and thus achieves the vital pollination. The flower even emits the necessary pheromones as well as using its appearance to attract its flying swain. After all this, I will simply list the latest flying arrivals in the moth trap, all delightful but all expected at this busy time of the year.

Two of seven Peppered moths which I took to a friend's garden in Oxford

Ditto with these three hawks

Turnip moth

Rufous Minor I think

A nice pairing: White Ermine and Bright-line Brown-eye

Barred Straw

Spectacle - quaint little guy

Common Plume - the T-moth

Another nice pair - Dark Arches, top, and Light Arches

Little and large: a pug (too trickily similar to one another for me to ID) and a Willow Beauty

And another Light Arches, on a prettier background

Phew, that's it! Thanks very much for reading this far.

Pink flush

Elephant Hawk moths are pouring in at the moment along with the biggest influx of Peppered moths I have experienced since we moved from Leeds to Oxford in 2013. Both are very familiar to me but never lose their charm and interest; hence the photo above. The colours are both bright and subtle and have surely inspired artists and designers, especially of textiles. And although few people see the adult moth, unless they are lucky enough to have a light trap, the elephant trunk-like caterpillars are quite often discovered in late Summer on Rosebay Willowherb or creeping quite rapidly about in search of somewhere to spin a cocoon and pupate.

On that score, Penny and I have just been over in Massachusetts to celebrate our younger son's year as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University and we came across this happy family of caterpillars in a communal web on the sand dunes of Cape Cod.

It was cold and rainy but a couple of guys came past and I asked them if by any chance they were entomologists. This rather startled them until I explained about the caterpillars in which they took an interest. After some thought, they said Nope, no idea. 'Fraid we're birders' and I thought was it. However, the following day we were crossing a zebra to an oyster bar in Wellfleet when the car which had courteously stopped for us rolled down a window. A head poked out and said: "You're the entomology guy we mat on Morris Island!"  Small world!  I'd meanwhile done some overnight Googling so was able to tell them the catties belong to the Eastern Tent moth, which live in a bundle but sally forth three times a day to feed (just like most of us).  I passed this on but couldn't go into detail as the car behind was getting a bit impatient.

The moths' habit is exactly the same as these ermine micro moths', spotted here in their own tent on a walk in Wiltshire. The moth is small but the caterpillars are tremendous spinners, responsible for the webs which you sometimes see engulfing entire trees and occasionally cars parked for too long beneath them.

In the trap meanwhile, I have more newcomers for the year, all old familiars but very welcome, each and every one:

Clouded Silver

The Flame - the only moth which sometimes really does make a beeling for your ear

Brown Rustic I think

Burnished Brass form juncta with the metallic sheen dividing the brown crossband

Marbled Minor aggregate (because the various forms are so similar)

Udea olivalis micro with the sinister head of an...

...ichneumon wasp - horrible creatures (by human standards) which lay their eggs in other insects' larvae which the growing ichneumon children treat as living larders. Ugh! 

Orange Footman - a delicate little pill of a moth

And finally the lovely Treble Brown Spot, very small but with delightful patterns and colouring

Eyeing me up

I'm back at the moth trap after ten days away and plenty of guests are arriving in spite of the unsettled weather. Some of the eggboxes were a little damp this morning but this glorious Eyed Hawk moth was unaffected and went along docilely with my photo session on a delphinium.

Here he or she is below as I found him or her when I lifted the trap's lid; a handsome moth but with no evidence of the glorious colours on the top hindwing. There's a reason for that: the deterrent effect on a predator when the wings are suddenly flashed. Whether their 'eyes' create the appearance of an animal to a bird, I do not know, but they certainly do for a human observer.

My other hawk this morning was an Elephant, very common but also very beautiful. And then there was a procession of interesting moths of all shapes, sizes and colours:

A Dark Arches with its familiar jagged marks, a moth which will come in large numbers over the next month or so

Common Marbled Carpet with its subtle markings and soft colours

A Small Magpie micro (one of seven in the trap) and a Cinnabar, both toxic to birds and consequently well-painted with warning colouration

A Peppered Moth and a Willow Beauty

And in a brief break from moths, a Common Carder Bee. The name comes from its habit of making a soft ball of wool for its eggs in a process much like the carding of wool into threads and fibres 

A Dot moth - guess why - and below a Barred Straw with its angular wings like a Lysander aircraft from the Second World War.

A Dwarf Cream Wave and, below, two more of the mini-invasion by Small Magpies

Outside the trap in nearby foliage were this Brimstone Moth and the White Plume micro below - a moth often disturbed from long grass during the day

A Riband Wave - the type with a clear as opposed to grey riband

One of the baffling pugs whose ID sadly eludes me. Help appreciated

A handsome Brown Rustic in excellently fresh condition

A Heart and Dart, one of the first moths to come to my trap over 20 years ago when my report attracted attention from a soap shop in New Yark also called Heart and Dart.

The lovely Burnished Brass, form aurea with the central band complete rather than divided by 'brass' as in the other form, juncta

A Light Emerald hobnobbing with another Willow Beauty

A male Pale Tussock on the trap's bulbholder and below, the same moth from the other side.

And finally a richly-coloured Silver Y to conclude the guests. What will tonight bring in?