We found this larva of a pale tussock moth crawling along the parapet of Prebends bridge, across the river Wear, in Durham. Everything about it warned ‘don’t touch me’. It would present a challenge for most insectivorous birds, although cuckoos, with a gizzard that can cope with irritating hairs, sometimes eat them. Those deterrents inflict discomfort on tender human flesh too; finely barbed and filled with irritating fluid, they can cause dermatitis. Calliteara pudibunda was once a notorious pest of hop fields, which might explain naturalist Gilbert White’s journal entry for O ..read more

 We've been composting garden and kitchen vegetable waste in 'Dalek' bins like this for decades, but this year was the first times that we've had one taken over by nesting black ants.  They moved in during those unusually cold weeks of early summer, probably because the warmth of decomposition in the bins provided the only location in the garden with enough heat for them to breed.  Textbooks say that they need a temperature of 10C to become active and 20C to raise a brood. Watching their progress in the bins has been fascinating because the temperature inside ..read more

 The two commonest craneflies - Tipula oleracea and T. paludosa - are dull-coloured insects but this female orange-sided comb-horn Ctenophora pectinicornis has an orange and black colour scheme that gives it a hint of menace. We found it in old deciduous woodland on the bank of the river Wear in Durham city. The larvae (leatherjackets) of the two commonest craneflies feed on grass roots in pastures but the larvae of this woodland species feed on decaying fallen timber.  As is so often the case, this specimen has lost a limb. Easily shed limbs might well be a last resort escape strat ..read more

 I often whizz past, at 60 mph, motorway embankments that are covered with flowering ox-eye daisies, but it's not so often that I get a close look at these wild flowers in such abundance beside a footpath. This fabulous display covers an embankment in Hexham in Northumberland, on edge land between the railway line and a retail park road. It is absolutely stunning.  ..read more

 These anxious curlews accompanied me on part of a walk in the Deerness valley, County Durham last week. They must have recently hatched young because they were highly agitated, with those yelping calls that they make when anything threatens their nest site.  The weather is cold, wet and windy and they have crow predators to see off. They are nesting fields that I hope will be cut for hay, rather than mown early for silage. I've seen curlews raise successful broods in the same place in previous years, so fingers crossed ..read more

 Some more pictures of the dung beetle described in today's Guardian Country Diary ' Deerness Valley, County Durham Waiting for the clip-clop of hooves to fade away, using a polythene bag as a glove, I picked up a tennis ball-sized, steaming lump of horse manure. Checking that no one else was around – this kind of old-school natural history might seem a tad eccentric to a casual passer-by – I hurried home: I had dung beetles to feed.   I’d found them on the edge of a pasture and, coincidentally, had recently been reading The Sacred Beetle, Jean-Henri Fabre’s century-old account of th ..read more

 At first glance I thought this was a bee, resting on a gorse flower - then I noticed those club-tipped antennae, the un-beelike way it held its wings and its lethargic behaviour. It's a dark birch sawfly Trichiosoma lucorum, one of the club-horned sawflies. Its larvae feed on birch leaves. I found it in this gorse thicket, with birches nearby, on the north bank of the river Derwent at Blanchland in Northumberland ..read more

A field on the edge of Durham city, full of thousands of dandelion 'clocks', waiting for a breeze to carry their plumed seeds aloft.  The final phase in the dandelion life cycle, when the flowers are transformed into silvery spheres, dandelion ‘clocks’ composed of seeds each equipped with its own parachute, is a magical moment when an umbrella of hairs, a pappus in botanical parlance, carries the seed up and away on the wind, to pastures new. At sunrise in late spring, whole fields can shimmer with silvery dandelion clocks as their pappuses expand as they dry in the sun’s heat. Sometime ..read more

 Brittle bladder-fern Cystopteris fragilis in a shady, damp retaining wall in Teesdale, North Pennines. A beautiful, delicate fern with brittle frond stalks, typically found in crevices in limestone and mortared walls in the northern dales. Growing with hart’s-tongue fern in the third picture ..read more

 Ashes limestone quarry at Stanhope in Weardale ceased operations over 80 years ago and has since become a haven for wildlife. The bottom of the quarry is now a lake with a good range of wetland plant species, including mare's tail, reed mace and water mint, and is a breeding site for several dragonfly and damselfly species. The vertical cliff face hosts nesting jackdaws and sometimes its larger cavities ae occupied by less familiar bird species, like this tawny owl that I saw there a couple of weeks ago ..read more