July

Common lizard (Zootoca vivipara)

Female common lizards are currently laden with eggs, having mated in spring. They spend long periods basking on rocks, fences or open ground to warm their swollen bellies. The eggs hatch internally, and the brood of half-a-dozen little black lizards is ‘born’ this month or next.

Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria)

In boggy places such as streamsides, ditches and damp verges, you may catch the mouth-watering aroma of marzipan this month. It’s a tall plant, with beautiful cream sprays of frothy flowers, and is usually buzzing with a variety of hoverflies and other insects. Intriguingly, not only were the flowers once used to flavour mead, but they were also harvested as a hangover cure.

Stoat (Mustela erminea)

These russet-backed, cream-bellied mustelids are not rare, merely stealthy. Usually, all you’ll see is a flash of brown as one streaks across a path or country lane. But if you’re lucky, you might spot a female hunting rabbits or voles in broad daylight for her kits, born in April or May. Near the den, the young can be very playful, chasing one another around dry-stone walls and old rabbit burrows, practising the pounces on which they will depend when they soon disperse.

Common swift (Apus apus)

You may hear the sound of their screaming parties (that’s the technical term), where squadrons of swifts tear helter-skelter around rooftops at dusk. These boisterous social gatherings include breeding pairs and non- breeders, becoming more frequent as summer wears on and the birds’ August migration approaches. The swift's scientific name, Apus apus, is an example of a tautonym, where the genus and specific name are the same.

Common knapweed (Centaurea nigra)

Together with white clover and marsh thistle, it was found by a team led by the University of Bristol to be one of the most important British wildflowers for pollinating insects. Common, or black, knapweed is a widespread grassland plant, and thrives in gardens – you can grow it from seed. After flowering, the seed heads are popular with goldfinches and bullfinches.

Painted lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui)

Numbers of this large, migratory species usually peak between May and July – keep an eye on thistle, knapweed, ragwort and red valerian – and mass invasions occur roughly once a decade, so one is overdue.

Cinnabar moth (Tyria jacobaeae)

Demonised as a ‘pernicious weed’ dangerous to livestock, common ragwort is often overlooked as a valuable food plant for dozens of insects. Among them are cinnabar moth caterpillars, which sport bold orange and black stripes. It was long thought that this coloration was purely a warning, to tell would-be predators that the larvae have sequestered toxins from the ragwort and stored them in their skin. But Bristol University research showed that the dazzling colour scheme has a second function: from a distance, it also provides camouflage by helping the caterpillars to merge with their ragwort background.

Fasciated Spear Thistle

Taken In Trefonen on 6th July 2022 by Ruth Dawes

Fasciation (pronounced /ˌfæʃiˈeɪʃən/, from the Latin root meaning "band" or "stripe"), also known as cresting, is a relatively rare condition of abnormal growth in vascular plants in which the apical meristem (growing tip), which normally is concentrated around a single point and produces approximately cylindrical tissue, instead becomes elongated perpendicularly to the direction of growth, thus producing flattened, ribbon-like, crested (or "cristate"), or elaborately contorted tissue.[1] Fasciation may also cause plant parts to increase in weight and volume in some instances.[2] The phenomenon may occur in the stem, root, fruit, or flower head.
Some plants are grown and prized aesthetically for their development of fasciation.[3] Any occurrence of fasciation has several possible causes, including hormonal, genetic, bacterial, fungal, viral and environmental causes.