--- It might just have passed you by but National Ragwort Awareness Week finished last Sunday aiming to inspire you to roll your sleeves up and wrench the plant out with its roots and destroy it before it poisons horses - however, where would these bonking beetles go! From my observations the red soldier beetle seems to favour the attractive yellow flowers of ragwort for procreation, and I’ve even thought of contacting David Attenborough about this - you must’ve noticed on the tele how he loves to peer at all manner of creatures getting it together.

--- Without doubt the Ragwort shouldn’t be in fields with horses or end up in dried forage, because equines die painfully from liver damage - but I snapped the following ragworts on Lancashire wasteland like old landfill sites or pathways many fields away from the hoofed ones, and didn’t feel the need to deprive the cinnabar moth caterpillar of its home. I do remember spending a whole day pulling up ragwort in a horse field in Merseyside nearly 20 years ago when I worked for conservation group BTCV. I was with my good friend and colleague who’d pulled himself via self-imposed rehab from heroin and cocaine addiction, and his brother-in-law who’d recently gone clean. He kept remarking how he couldn’t believe he was in a field pulling ragwort for a whole day instead of his recent lifestyle. He liked it.

--- Look how hairy these caterpillars are as they munch the ripening buds. The moth itself has attractive black and red colours and flies about in the daytime. But I didn’t see any to take photos.

--- These caterpillars take on the alkoid poisons of the ragwort as they eat it and so they can afford to advertise, with loud patterns, how bitter tasting they are to potential predators like blue tits. Are they football or Dennis the Menace jumpers?

--- This photo shows the weird sucker feet of caterpillars in general, something that fascinated me as a child. It also shows a spider lurking under its nest cobbled together from caterpillar droppings, ragwort buds and parcels of its prey, some of which still dangles.

--- Butterflies also like them.

--- As do hoverflies.

--- The ragwort has its own Act of Parliament about when it needs to be controlled. This is a 2003 amendment to the Weeds Act of 1959 which also includes two types of thistle and docks. These creeping thistles at the margins of a barley field near Adlington the other day were swarming with butterflies as soon as the sun came out following heavy thunder rain.

---- It was nice to see one of the butterflies was the dainty but endangered small copper. It has steadily declined by a quarter in recent decades as grassland becomes more intensive and rubs out its sorrel herb foodplant. The field showed a good compromise between good agricultural productivity alongside biodiversity at the margins, and thistles are loved by birds like goldfinches and linnets too who eat the fluffy seeds.

--- And there among the tussled thistle heads were another couple of those bonking soldier beetles! I hadn’t carried them in my pocket, honest!

Posted on Environment Times Online on 23rd July 2010, photographs taken by Duncan Ashcroft (copyright) on 21st and 22nd July 2010.