{"id":1157,"date":"2008-06-15T00:06:03","date_gmt":"2008-06-14T23:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/1157"},"modified":"2013-11-20T20:39:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-20T20:39:00","slug":"robin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/robin\/","title":{"rendered":"Robin’s Pincushion"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

This was a new one on me. My better half spotted it in the garden while I was out taking more waste to the recycling centre (and stopping off on the way back to take some photos of kestrels).
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It's a rose gall, and only grows on dog roses. It's one of the odder features of the natural environment, caused by the Rose Gall Wasp (Diplolepsis rosae<\/i>) laying eggs in the rose. The plant responds by developing the protective gall around the eggs. The wasp grub develops inside, well protected by the plant growth. Well that's roughly how it works, but the following link has a more technical (and accurate) description of the process<\/a>.
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While on the theme of insects, there were a couple more unusual sightings in the garden today. First is what I think is a blue-tailed damselfly, but the pink thorax isn't something I've seen before. But their colours can vary and I can't work out what else it might be.
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While I was photographing the damsel I saw something else that caught my eye. It was a hoverfly. Nothing unusual in that (we have hundreds of them in the garden), but the size of this one was exceptional, nearly an inch long; and the colours were striking. If my identification is correct, it's Volucella zonaria<\/i>.
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As for my trip out, I was lucky enough to see a pair of kestrels out hunting together. Most of the shots were taken from a distance (and into the sun) but I did manage one where you can see the bird carrying its prey<\/a> (probably a vole). Eventually though I ended up more or less the right side of the light, and immediately below one of them. In this first shot you can see a small feather on the front of its wings. I'm not certain but I suspect this may have something to do with their ability to hover. I read something similar recently (possibly about humming birds), and seeing the photo struck a chord.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Several more shots of the kestrels are in the Kestrel album<\/a> (all today's shots named 140608 xxx).<\/p>\n

Camera note: all the insect life (and gall) were photographed with the Sigma 105mm F2.8 EX DG macro lens. The kestrels were taken with the EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[990,309,1],"tags":[232,1152,142],"class_list":["post-1157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bird-of-prey","category-damselfly","category-uncategorized","tag-insect","tag-kestrel","tag-plant","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}