Among the dry grass stems is an insect that looks like a shiny orange cranefly
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Version 0 of 1. During the second world war, this was a base for US bombers and home for a year to Hollywood star Captain Clark Gable. In the late 50s and early 60s, the airfield was inhabited by Thor nuclear missiles trained on the Soviet Union, and then the longest range warheads in the world. Military use came to an end in the late 60s with the sale of the airfield back to the Rothschild estate. A small nature reserve now occupies the northern edge. It is in various levels of ecological succession: some oak and ash woodland, but mostly blackthorn and hawthorn scrub blending through tangles of bramble and briar into rough grassland and, here and there, stonecrop carpeted concrete. Although a couple of blackthorn bushes in the woodland area are white with blossom, in the main the buds are still swelling expectantly. Large queen bumblebees quarter the grassland hunting for suitable nest sites and early flowers, and in the blue sky the diversity of flying insects is growing. Fluttering weakly among the dead, dry grass stems is an insect that looks like a shiny orange cranefly, but with a bulbous abdomen, very long antennae and a head shaped like a small chaumes cheese, each side occupied by a big black eye. Ichneumon wasps of this type are more usually encountered coming to light on summery nights. This however is a spring specialist – Ophion scutellaris – emerging early in the year to locate large moth caterpillars waking from hibernation, into whose soft bodies they will lay their eggs. Among the trees are decaying concrete foundations and a couple of still-roofed brick shells. On the largest of these, where rain water trickles and seeps off the roof and down the wall, there is a 25ft high column of greenery. Shiny rich green straps of hart's tongue fern unfurl and arch in rosettes rooted in the crumbling, moss cloaked brick. Mixed in are several evergreen rosettes of the more typically ferny soft shield fern. Two-toothed door snails hang in the moss like little spiralled ebony stalactites. (Twitter: @MattEAShardlow) |