My Blog - Jeff Clarke

Orangy Boom!

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All images unless otherwise stated © Jeff Clarke 2011

I spent Sunday the 30th January leading a Ladybird workshop at World Museum, Liverpool, as part of Merseyside Biobank's
'Identification Training Sessions' programme for biological recorders.

The entomology collections at the museum are seriously impressive and definitely worth spending some time studying. For today's
session I'd also collected a number of live specimens which gave the participants plenty of opportunity to become familiar with
some of the locally found species, this included local scarcities such as Adonis and 11-spot Ladybird.

I think most of the people went away better prepared and with a few handy tips at their disposal when it comes to separating some of the potential confusion species. The main point I tried to stress was that the spotting and patterns on Ladybirds can be variable but
shapes are consistent, which means that some likely confusion species are readily identified, irrespective of the similarity in their patterning. I'd like to express my thanks to Guy Knight the Entomology curator, Tony Parker, Carl Clee and Paul Hill for their
assistance during the session.

Two of the participants, Chris and Ben Miles, phoned shortly after leaving whilst en-route to Lime Street Station, to say they had found a substantial number of Orange Ladybirds hibernating on the stone pillars that surround the park at the rear of St George's Hall.

After we had packed away we decided to pursue this piece of information and sure enough with a little more guidance from Chris
we soon located a massive assemblage of this attractive ladybird (by far the biggest I've ever seen).  We certainly counted 469
separate individuals, though I suspect the real total was well over 500, scattered around on the pillared walls and trees within the
park. This is impressive when you consider that until fairly recently this species was regarded as one of the scarcest in the UK.
Perhaps the most important point is that this fantastic natural sight was right in the heart of one of England's great cities, set
adjacent to some truly beautiful civic buildings. As they used to say in the adverts "The futures' bright, the future's orange".