March bugs!!

Photos taken:
Late March
[ CW: spiders ]

The bugs are back!! Yahoo! It's only really in the last year that I've properly been paying attention to the bugs in my garden, so I wasn't prepared for how much I would miss them over the winter. It's still pretty cold out so there aren't many bugs, but I managed to find a few towards the end of March.

First up is this Golden Dung Fly, also called the Yellow Dung Fly. They're very cute, and fluffy!

Despite their name only the larvae exclusively eat dung, whereas the adult flies will mostly prey on other smaller flies, which I kinda got to see in action! I didn't see any successfully catch prey but there were loads of dung flies hanging out in the grass and waiting on dandelion heads ready to pounce on any small insect that landed nearby.

Close up photo of a fly. Its body is covered in golden yellow hairs and has thick dark spine on its legs. Running down the top of its head and back are stripes of colour ranging from light grey to dark brown.

I also managed to photograph my first isopod of the year! This one was constantly moving and twirling its antennae around so most of the photos came out blurry, but I think this species is Porcellio scaber. It's probably the most common woodlouse here in the UK, and it gets its name from the bumpy texture of its exoskeleton.

I used to follow these around the garden as a kid; it's just very fun to watch them wander all over the place.

Photo collage of a pinkish-grey woodlouse climbing over some stones. The legs and underside of its body are very pale, looking almost transparent.

Next is this moth which was resting on the patio on a cold and very windy day so I imagine it was trying to warm up its wings before flying off.

In person it looked like it had fairly plain greenish-white wings, but up close they have a lot of details! I particularly like the yellow stripe running up the tip of its wings and how the wings themselves are patterned like a large cluster of pixels. It kinda reminds me of Conway's Game of Life...

[EDIT: This is actually not a moth, but a butterfly! I would say this is an easy mistake to make, but this particular butterfly species is the extremely common cabbage white butterfly. I just didn't recognise it due to its wings being closed.]

Two photos of a small fluffy moth resting on stone pavement. Its wings have ridges running down them and are patterned with lots of tiny pixel-like dots.

Finally, I found this cool spider!

I thought she might be velvet spider at first because her abdomen has a beautiful velvet-like look to it, but now I'm fairly sure that this is black lace-weaver. They're normally a nocturnal species but this photo was taken in the daytime because I accidentally woke her up. Sorry!!

Some of the wooden panels on the decking have broken so I lifted one up to see what was inside, but there was only a few worm casts and this spider who groggily crawled out into the daylight for a few minutes before crawling back into the dark. She thankfully didn't seem too bothered, just dazed.

Two photos of a black spider surrounded by dead leaves, stones, and soil. It has thick legs and the hairs lining its abdomen look like dark-blue velvet.

The photos make the spider look quite big here but she was fairly small, at most only a few centimetres in length. That is admittedly bigger than the average spider I see around the garden though. One last thing of note is the safety line of silk you can see in the left image. I'm not sure what it's attached to, maybe the underside of the decking.