I’ve heard of blue bottles, but this is a green bottle. It eats pretty much the same things as blue bottles – dead and decomposing plant and animal matter. Here it is resting innocently on some grass. I wondered whether it was going to drink the dew on the grass and found out that adult flies have a more varied diet, including pollen and nectar. Also, they are attracted to flowers that smell like carrion, and the colour yellow.
The Green Dock Beetle appears to be relatively common in the watermeadow. It feeds on dock and sorrel. Here it is on some bindweed, but there is a dock leaf skeleton next to it.
I spent the morning trimming round the alders we have planted along our back fence. One of them had got strangled with bindweed and had its stem/trunk broken. I weeded a lot of bindweed and stinging nettles and chopped down the hollow stalks of Hemlock Water Dropwort that were leaning against the back fence. I strimmed a pathway across the bank and around the alders so that they had a nice wide margin round them. They are growing fast but were only 1-2ft when we planted them in April. Now they are 2-4ft, but still prone to getting hidden and tangled in the undergrowth unless we keep a check on it. Whilst I was over the other side of the stream, I saw a brown type of damselfly, but didn’t have my camera with me. So, I went out with my camera later and managed to take some photos of grasshoppers and butterflies.