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My weekend has been very busy.

On Friday night I cooked for my family; as usual, cooking new dishes meant I was a little late in serving (I made a shallot compote and I used rather large shallots which took longer to cook than I anticipated!) but I think it was worth the delay!

On Saturday we had an early start to go into London and buy a dedicated macro lens for my camera. My Flickr friends recommended getting a Sigma 105mm, so now I can take reasonable photos at a much further distance than I could previously. Once I get some extension tubes I hope to take photos of smaller insects, like leafhoppers and ants.

After buying the lens I went into the museum to try the camera out:

An unidentified Cercopid taken using a Sigma 105mm Macro lens © The Natural History Museum

Very shortly I will be leaving to visit Wicken Fen and shall go insect hunting with the new lens. I’ll post some new photos and the photos I took last weekend soon.

Langdon Hills is the country park that I visited most when I was younger, so I am fairly familiar with it. When I started thinking about good locations for regular insect hunts it seemed like a logical choice.

Langdon Hills is situated in Essex, close to the town of Basildon, and is composed of two areas known as One Tree Hill and Westley Heights. I looked through some local history books at work and managed to find some information on the formation of the park and preservation of the surrounding land.

Back in the late 1960s, as the government was planning the expansion of housing in Basildon, there were a number of housing neighbourhoods removed from original plans due to opposition by residents who were defending the beauty spots and land around the park (Lucas, 1991). In 1989 the Essex Naturalist Trust took over management of Langdon Hills countryside and made it a nature reserve following a large donation from Herbert Langdon Dowsett. Currently, Langdon Hills is managed by the Thurrock Ranger Service.

Last Sunday was my first visit of the year. I took only my camera with me and soon wished that I had taken some collecting containers and trays. Whilst searching through the leaf litter I saw some interesting beetle larvae, but they were moving too fast to photograph.

Although the weather has been getting better there were few flowers out, but I did see the bluebells poking through the earth getting ready to flower.

I did see some interesting bee behaviour, with seven or more individuals (of what looked like the same species) investigating an area of bare ground next to a tree. The bees occasionally wrestled when one got too close to another, but they didn’t seem overly aggressive towards each other.

I expect that I will see many more insects at the park in a week or so.

There should be some accompanying photos soon.

Reference:
Lucas, P. (1991) Basildon. Sussex, Phillimore & Co. Ltd.

I recently came across Beetles in the Bush, an excellent entomology blog written by Ted MacRae. I particularly liked the use of taxonomic post categories to organise families into their respective orders and will start using it in my blog because it’s such a good idea.

Earlier this week I finished organising my insect records from last year in Excel. I was thinking about putting them into Access because it’s much better suited for such data and I may start building an Access database over the weekend. Another thought occurred to me, which was that there must be some freely available programs, perhaps some which can make use of Google Maps/Earth and Flickr. Do you know of any?

Finally, a little bit of eye candy:

Red and Black Shield Bug - This pentatomid caught my eye amongst unidentified material collected in Ecuador. © The Natural History Museum

I have been meaning to try and make a focus stacked image after being inspired by some of Lord V’s photos and his various photo stacking guides for the freely available CombineZ programs, made by Alan Hadley.

A focus stacked image is a composite image with a better depth of field, made by combining images taken at different focal distances.

Orellana nigriplaga (depth stacked image)

This image is the result of combining the images below.

Preparatory images for depth stacking

I would recommend trying CombineZP, especially if you work with something like pinned specimens. I will be posting some more depth stacked images soon and might experiment with some landscape images.

This specimen is part of The Natural History Museum collection and was taken for a research request. © The Natural History Museum

I’ve been reading some blogs and came across two interesting posts and two new blogs:

A Cybertaxonomy Discussion: Vince Smith has posted a blog response to concerns a fellow taxonomy blogger (Roderic Page) has with Scratchpads, the online taxonomy database used by Vince & the NHM, and the potential for redundant data and time wasting when trying to gather information from multiple Scrathpads. Instead, Page sugguests using Semantic MediaWikis which would be able to deal with human-language queries on bulk taxonomic/entomological information, such as “Which Hemiptera might I find in Essex during July?” or “How many beetles are there excluding weevils?”.

Whilst I don’t want to reiterate the posts, I am inclined to agree with Vince’s view from my experience with taxonomists/entomologists at museums and people who are happier working with paper rather than computers. With so much taxonomic information not readily accessible in any form I think Scratchpads & similar more traditionally organised databases will become more commonly used before the more (conceptually) advanced Semantic MediaWikis.

Scanning Moths: There are some excellent scanned images of moths over at cicindela,  which have even managed to capture individual scales at a reasonable resolution!

I’d recommend visiting cicindela as the author as plenty of other good photographs.

Cincindela and iPhylo have been added to the blogroll.