The ground has dried out a bit, the sun has decided to shine quite a lot, and there are definitely more buzzy flying things about... So it must be time to move on from slug and worm hunting and onto bug hunts!
Also, just as I sat down to write this, a little brown spider dashed out from under the skirting board next to me and grabbed a sleepy fly which was sitting on the floor. David Attenborough should have been narrating, but it was pretty cool anyway...
There are loads of great resources out there, including a competition open to all primary school age children from the Royal Entomological (studying bugs) Society (hence the picture above) and Association for Science Education: This is usually a schools competition but is open for everyone now- prizes include a school day visit from people with loads of different insects to meet! The closing date is 20th June 2020 so plenty of time to get hunting...
The Woodland Trust have a nice minibeast identification sheet and bug hunt hints for younger hunters, while the RSPB have a great explanation of how to make a pooter to catch interesting bugs.
If you want to look in a bit more detail, there are so many bugs it can get a bit overwhelming. For the etymological entomological purists, there's the British Bugs site, while the Amateur Entomologist's Society has lots of identification pages. But actually, we've found putting a description of mystery bugs into Google is often a good way to find images and identification of the bug in question (last year's best spot for us was hundreds of cinnabar moth caterpillars feeding on a patch of ragwort- they're really rather startling)- and that's another lovely site if what you'd like to look at is butterflies and moths.
Happy holiday hunting!
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