Longhorn Beetle

THIS LONGHORN BEETLE, Strangalia, is something that I don't remember having seen before. Not as big as I've shown of course, but as long as my thumbnail and with 'horns', the antennae, almost as long again. The wing cases are the colour of a not quite ripe banana and the shape of a toucan's beak. It works its way across a sunlit umbel of Hogweed, nibbling the pollen. The hogweed is growing by a shady lane alongside the canal, next to a small disused quarry, now overgrown with trees and bushes.

It opens up its wing cases, quickly unfolds its wings and flies on to another hogweed. The larvae of this beetle live in decaying tree stumps.

Amongst the Oilseed Rape, now heavy with long, pointed seedpods, there are drifts of Poppies and some Mayweed. The poppies are brilliantly coloured anyway, but viewed through sunglasses they leap out as if they are fluorescing.

A new deadnettle flowering by the canal looks, at first sight anyway, like Black Horehound.

Meadow Brown butterflies are on the wing along the towpath.

Richard Bell,
wildlife illustrator
E-mail; 'richard@daelnet.co.uk'