Mystery Trees and Bugs

 While walking along the Spey, I saw a tree I could not name and when I went for a closer look, there was an interesting looking bug on the leaf.

With some searching on the internet I found a similar picture which named it as Hawthorn Shieldbug - so it really is a bug!

Hawthorn Shieldbug nymph
https://www.activenaturalist.org.uk/shieldbug/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Hawthorn-Shieldbug-2-768x856.png

Asking for advice from the FaceBook page of the Inverness Botany Group, Highland and Moray Wild Flowers, produced confirmation from Stephen Bungard, who has his own blog, Plants of Skye, Raasay & The Small Isles .  Stephen seems very knowledgeable on all sorts of things - flowers, fish, insects...

I know very little about Shieldbugs, but there are plenty of sites to visit.  What I saw was not the adult but one of the younger stages - a nymph - and as they grow and shed their "skins" they change their appearance so can be tricky to ID. Here is a good set of pictures. The Hawthorn Shieldbug has the rather unpleasant scientific name of  Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale.

The mystery Cotoneaster growing in the centre - with the red berries

Now that the bug was named, there was still the tree to be identified. I had no joy trying to name it from my books, but again I was given help - it was a Cotoneaster (pronounced Co-TONE-ee-aster).  Looking in one of my doorstop sized books (Stace: New Flora of the British Isles) listed 86(!) species.  Luckily I was given pointers from Stephen, and Ian Green (both Vicecounty Recorders with the BSBI) that it was probably Hollyberry Cotoneaster (C.bullatus) or Bullate Cotoneaster (C. rehderi).  In order to decide which, I went back and took a sample twig with berries and eventually decided it was probably Hollyberry Cotoneaster.

Hollyberry Cotoneaster

Hollyberry Cotoneaster leaf and stalk

Hollyberry Cotoneaster leaf with hairy underside

Since then I have spotted a few of these trees in people's gardens along Glen Road.  I have Wall Cotoneaster (C. horizontalis) growing in my garden from a bird-sown seed.  It is covered in bees in the summer and has red berries and orange red leaves in the autumn.

Wall Cotoneaster

The herringbone pattern of the small branches coming off the main stem is typical of this Cotoneaster.

Wall Cotoneaster

Newtonmore Primary School has a hedge of a more upright Cotoneaster but I think I will leave identifying that till another day!