Quite why a family of creatures would be tagged Froghoppers I find a little strange but here is one. They are apparently generally dull, brownish in colouration, but we stumbled across what appears to be the only brightly coloured example in Chinery’s Insects of Britain and Western Europe. I say “we” but it’s actually hawk-eyes Carol who normally spots these things. This little chap was enjoying some fine weather beside Le Loir at Luché-Pringé. Cute, don’t you think? Well, I’d call it cute; in fact, I have done. If you want to be formal, call it Cercopis vulnerata.

Maintaining the colourful theme but, I suspect, venturing into the realms of the decidedly less cute for some, particularly some members of the fairer sex, is this rather startling spider rejoicing in the name of Argiope bruennichi. Here are shots of it showing both topside and underside. The underside also shows it wrapping up its lunch which has been caught in the web. The web itself is quite interesting; that white zig-zag construction of silk is called a “vertical stabilimentum”, according to Chinery, and is typical of the species. Quite an engineer, it seems.

A little less colourful, perhaps, but no less interesting IMHO is this Scorpion Fly (Panorpa). I should say these Scorpion flies, I suppose, because there’s no guarantee that these two individuals are of the same species, there being about 30 difficult to separate species in Europe. The wing markings look the same to me, though. It’s the male, regrettably rather unnaturally positioned on the stark white side of our caravan, that clearly shows why they are so named, with a fearsome looking upturned tail, just like that of a scorpion. The more naturally posed female looks a little less like a scorpion hybrid.

Dogged determination gets the job done in the end.

All good things come to an end and Didier retired, surrendering the campsite to new ownership. However, a mere 2 mls/3.5 kms down the road is Arçais where our friends Mike and Linda live. It’s great to visit them and share a little vino, paella, Thai food and so on. Arçais also has a campsite; it’s a little more rough and ready than the one at Damvix but pleasant enough, nonetheless. It’s also has the distinct advantage of being with crawling distance of Mike and Linda. For the last couple of years, we’ve made this our base in the Marais Poitevin.

Another advantage is that our favourite pitch is surrounded by a very productive, when it’s flowering, privet hedge. Fortunately it flowers in late May which is when we are most likely to be there. The trick is to get there before M. le gardien gets out his hedge trimmer and massacres all the highly aromatic privet flowers. Then it is like a very powerful magnetic to a mass of passing wildlife and it is at its most productive, for a nature watcher. In 2010, I saw my first Large Copper butterfly feasting on the privet flowers, and very thrilling it was, too.

2011 seemed to be the year of the beetle. Many, though not all, were found in our favourite privet hedge. M. le gardien  was champing at the bit to cut the hedge back but we got there in time. Leading the band on stage in a rather flashy metallic green suit was Rose Chafer (Cetonia aurata). Catch that in a super-trooper spotlight and the audience could well be dazzled – we certainly were. You can spot the leaders a mile off, can’t you?

On supporting vocals and giving a little bass gravitas to the whole proceedings, was Oxythyrea funesta. I’m afraid the audience is just going to have to learn to deal with the scientific binomial name which could be shortened to O. funesta, there being no common English term that we’ve found so far.

The flashy git on lead guitar just has to have been the strikingly-marked Plagionotus arcuatus. No hiding backstage out of the spotlight for him, with his bright yellow striped suit. Another one with no readily pronounceable English name, either, so just go ahead and scream, girls.

The beetle intended to be the original drummer was to have been the rather subdued Agapanthia villosoviridescens (far left).  However, a  bunch of screaming females was never going to get their collective tongues around a name that complicated – heck, I can’t pronounce it either before or after a drink. So, I’m afraid poor old A. villosoviridescens was seen as something of a hindrance to stardom and a new drummer was hired with the much more approachable handle of Capricorn Beetle (Cerambyx scopolii, in formal circles – near left). Good set of drum sticks!

Of course, no tour can be staged without a considerable amount of support in the background. These guys in the fancy striped suits weren’t actually in the back ground, but they were on the grounds of Linda’s allotment, a.k.a. the farm. In England, these would start alarm bells ringing and be a cause for great concern. Pretty though they may be, they are a pair of incredibly destructive Colorado Beetles (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) – and they appear to be mating. Yikes!

Stay in France, guys. Please don’t come on tour in the good ol’ UK.

Yesterday, I tried my plan for the first time in vengeance. I have a couple of dubiously identified Fritillaries and wanted to see what I could decide using the wonderful illustrations of Mr Lewington in the French book. I thought I had a photo of a Knapweed Fritillary so I looked up the scientific name in my old English Field Guide: Melitaea phoebe. Off to the new French publication’s index for Melitaea phoebe. It listed three Melitaea species but none of them were phoebe. There were several Mellicta species (also Fritillaries) but none of them were phoebe either. I’d fallen at the first hurdle.

On the good ol’ InterWeb, I eventually found a French butterfly website talking about a Cinclidia phoebe. Arghh! Back to the French index and, sure enough, there was Cinclidia phoebe and it was, indeed, the Knapweed Fritillary, or Mélitée des centaurées, as the French prefer to call it.

I contacted a very helpful man on one of the French butterfly websites (Butterflies of France) about the naming. He had not heard of Cinclidia but found it (on the InterWeb, of course) “in a historic context”. He also went on, very helpfully, to confirm my suspected id.

Scientific names are supposed to help cross language boundaries and ensure that we are all talking about the same thing. That only works if we all use the same name. Variable scientific names get us nowhere, it seems to me. I seem to have a more modern book but not the most recent names. Even the main name in France is Melitaea phoebe.

Oh, and just to add insult to injury, inside the front cover of my new French publication I spotted this:

L’édition originale Anglaise a paru chez HarperCollins Publishers sous le titre: Collins Field Guide of Butterflies of Britain and Europe.

Marvelous!

At least the distribution maps are corrected, though.

Ultimate, that is, as long as you can run a decent film scanner. About 8 years ago I had my first, much loved Fuji Filmscan 200 when I upgraded my PC to my only very recently superseded Sony Vaio laptop running XP. The outgoing machine ran Windows ‘98. I connected my scanner. Nothing, nada, nichts. It wouldn’t work. Nor would it ever because nobody had written drivers for it beyond Windows ‘98. I now possessed a Fuji boat anchor 200. I bought my current Minolta Dimage scan 5400 and plugged it in via the handy (and faster than USB 1) FireWire (IEEE 1394) connector. I could scan again and with far superior results. Great!

As and when I could be bothered to invest the time and effort, I would scan in some slides until I had enough to almost fill a CD, then release valuable hard drive space by burning a back-up disk. It was laborious, each slide taking upwards of two minutes. (I was selective – I did NOT do them all).

When I moved to digital, CDs were pretty much useless; each image being about 12Mb, I needed DVD capacity. The process however, remained the same: upload instead of scan, save the images on the hard drive until I had a DVD’s worth, burn my back-up disk and release space on the hard drive.

I recently finally replaced my Sony Vaio with a splendid new Dell XPS 8300, a machine with a 1.5Tb hard drive. This is way more than enough to hold all our current CDs and DVDs of photos put together. I began reading the disks back in. Oddly, the reading process for a CD seems considerably slower and noisier [ ] than for a DVD, despite the reduced capacity. I can only assume that the DVD drive has trouble with older technology. Weird! However, I finally arrived at France 2008, my first disk from a digital snapping trip: “Cyclic Redundancy Check” was the unwelcome message that greeted me. A what?! The file names supposedly on the disk were listed but, try as I might, I couldn’t read them in. I tried the old machine in case it was some incompatibility with the DVD drive unit: “Cyclic Redundancy Check”. I tried my Dell Inspiron craptop [now seemingly a laptop once again courtesy of a new hard drive]: “Cyclic Redundancy Check”. Oh bother, or words to that effect!

My cunning scheme had now failed – being a digital set of images that I’d deleted from my hard drive, there being no slides available to rescan and my “back-up” being useless, I’d lost a set of photographs. Everything I read said that some recovery can be attempted from a CRC failure on a hard drive but not on a optical storage device. We did find a piece of software called CD Recovery Toolbox which claimed to be able to perform some level of recovery from a bad CD, though, so I tried it in desperation. After 12 hours running it was 50% of the way through the disk and all the most recent images that it claimed to have recovered were useless. Not its fault, I’m sure – the recording was just rubbish.

All was not lost – some photos had apparently been faithfully recorded and were recovered, though my ancient laptop with Ubuntu did it in less than an hour under my manual control. It wouldn’t, of course, recover any .bmp files ‘cos they are Windows only. Anyway, I have some images back but it’s a lesson learned. One back-up ain’t enough for anything critical.

Oh yes, and once again I can’t run my film scanner on the new machine straight away because the new machine doesn’t have a FireWire connection. Must go and buy another USB cable.

A well as being a brilliantly sunny day, it was a bone-achingly cold day. Much as I may not have been able to concentrate or operate the camera properly, I do prefer bright and cold to the more usual nondescript, drab grey alternative. Being a heathen (i.e. not a National Trust member), we had to pay for me to get frozen but, though the over-hyped snowdrops were something a disappointment – the expected carpets of white never revealed themselves – the winter garden was quite interesting, even for one who prefers their nature to have a pulse. The winter garden has quite an assembly of plants that provide colour without their leaves. In fact, I suspect that the leaves might actually detract from the display.

To give them the benefit of the doubt, there is a guided walk to see snow drops which, we think, goes to other areas of the gardens where they may well be carpets of white. I’ll never know – I wasn’t prepared to hang around until 2:00 PM t find out. My toes were beginning to feel as frostbitten as this leaf looks.

However, snowdrops there were, even if in relatively modest clumps. It is, I imagine from the festival dates, still early in the season. Neither of us seemed too sorry to climb back into the car to warm up, though.

Doubtless we’ve been spending too much time in the south of France.

One of these characters certainly was from summer – July in southern France, though it does occur in England. Since I am self-confessed moth numbskull, I resorted to iSpot for identification help. Little did I suspect the interesting debate that would ensue. First of all, here is my subject. I performed my usual rudimentary attempt at identification and came up with Copper Underwing as a suspicion. What I didn’t spot right beside Copper Underwing, was Svensson’s Copper Underwing. The two are, it seems, v. difficult to distinguish in the field and, I’d suggest, pretty much impossible from a simple photograph. Furthermore, the reliability of some of the so-called distinguishing features, is disputed. The problem is, perhaps, best illustrated by giving a flavour of the experts’ comments:

A very complex debate, with some stating no characteristics distinguish these reliably, only genital. If you are going to try and come up with an ID, … it’s necessary to look at ALL the published characteristics to come to a decision taking everything into account, including fore-wing, hind-wing, palps, etc…

Examination of the underside of the hind-wing on a fresh specimen is I think currently regarded as the only valid way to separate them. If it is not fresh then dissection may be required.. [Ed: ]

I believe some say that even hind-wing (both upper and underside) are invalid ways of separation; however I haven’t done any research or seen any sort of proof.

I think the situation is if it has the features of Svensson’s (copper extending up the underside of the hindwing) it is one. If it has the features of Copper Underwing, then dissection is probably necessary. . [Ed: ]

There are a few species (e.g. November moths) where you can extrude the relevant features (on a male at least) on an anesthetized specimen and do it with a hand lens.

You get the idea – certainty appears to require the killing of the hapless creature or, at the very least, anaesthetizing it to drag its genitalia about, I presume with tweezers or the like. No thanks! I’d much rather see it in all its incognito glory. poor old Copper Underwings! I will be satisfied to refer to this as a [Svensson’s] Copper Underwing. I’m also happy to think that I got the right [aggregate] identification.

Specimen number two is more recent and decidedly nothing to do with summer. Last week it flew into our kitchen and took a shine to the shiny white door of our dishwasher. Regrettably it wasn’t any more adept at emptying it than are we. Once again, I was fighting with Townsend, Waring and Lewington to come up with a likely identification and, once again, here’s the subject of my intrigue. After a couple of “probably not”s, I thought I had it: a Spring Usher but there were words in the book that were clearly not designed to inspire confidence:

… Variable, but with wavy outer cross-line and curved inner one, sometimes forming edges of pale central band. May also be dark brown and almost or entirely uniform. …

This much variability is a real pain for an amateur moth numbskull; I needed iSpot again to help. It seems I was right, though. Another all-too-rare moth feather in my cap. [The female, BTW, is flightless – not a wing in sight.]

Now, Spring Usher, I’m good and ready for you to do your work.

“Hmm, please migrate me to ADSL2, then“, I rejoined, based upon this being less upheaval [see below].

They did just that and, after the obligatory 1-2 week settling down period, I was getting a pretty consistent 2.3Mb download speed. Better – not great but better.

One of the things putting me off migrating to fibre had been the fact that, apparently, the fibre router needs to be connected into a master phone socket (which we didn’t have, anyway) rather than an extension socket, as in my current setup. For laptops on wi-fi, that’s no problem but my old desktop would become an effective boat anchor. It was with this in mind that, after much mulling over and fretting, I eventually ordered my new Dell XPS desktop complete with a wi-fi card, pretty much at the same time as I bit the bullet and ordered an upgrade to a fibre optic broadband connection. Brave boy!

This, of course, required a new router which PlusNet supplied as part of the 18-month contract. As well as coming with a BT OpenReach engineer to sort out the master socket issue, It came with what appeared to be comprehensive instructions about getting connected. Interesting reading: not only would Mr. OpenReach be fitting my master phone socket but he would also fit a fibre modem into which the router gets plugged. Both modem and router would need power. Two power sockets, yikes! It gets more and more difficult. Do I have two spare sockets near where a master phone socket should go? No, of course not.

Long story short, he turned up and, by running a cable round a couple of doorways, we found a suitable site with enough power points. He went to the road box to switch us over to fibre and returned to get the router bit done. No Internet connection. Internet at modem: OK. Internet at router: not OK. Much head scratching – “I’ve only ever fitted  BT Homehub, not one of these Netgear contraptions”. With a cheery, “you’ll have to call PlusNet”, he left.

To be fair, I knew the instructions mentioned connecting the router and making tea whilst waiting for 15 minutes for it to install itself. Mr. OpenReach had been a bit hasty. It did eventually come up … but, it came up with a different SSID from the documentation and unsecured. A swift phone call to PlusNet support soon had us in teh router configuration panels changing a few of the relevant settings. We were back on-line … and secured.

Out of evil curiosity, I went to www.mybroadbandspeed.com.uk and ran a test: 20Mb download, 1Mb upload. Completely unexpectedly, the service appeared to be twice as fast as the estimate. Intriguing.

I will keep my eye on it, we’re not that close to the box.

It arrived yesterday, on the same day as this brand spanking new desktop. It must have been delivery Wednesday, because my Amazon-supplied spindle of 25 DVD RWs arrived as well. 3 out of 3 – great!

Carol’s camera arrived by Home Delivery Network. There was a tracking number for the shipment and fascinating it proved to be, too. I couldn’t resist diagramming the camera’s journey on Google Maps and here it is, below. There are two flags on the map, the northernmost of which is Amazon’s warehouse at Ridgmont, Bedfordshire. The slightly more southerly flag is our house, also in Bedfordshire. The red line is the cameras journey calling in first at Newton Abbot, Devon, then Hitchin, Hertfordshire (still further away from us than it began), before pitching up chez nous.

Fascinating stuff, modern logistics. (There, I’ve always wanted to use that word properly.)

A swift investigation showed that desktops are becoming something of a rarity. Some companies produce only laptops, it seems, while others are switching to the all-in-one desktops. The all-in-one approach doesn’t fit my office layout and, more to the point, I don’t really want an all-in-one which might well all-breakdown-at-once. Dell seemed to have a well specified home desktop: an XPS with an Intel i5 processor, 6Gb RAM and a 1.5Tb hard drive. Despite reservations caused by my recent experiences with a less than reliable Dell Inspiron 1545 Craptop, hopefully now fixed with a shiny new hard drive, I took the plunge ordered one, complete with a wireless card, expecting soon to be forced into a re-sited router.

More correctly, I tried to order one. About five seconds after submitting my attempted order, John Lewis Partnership Card security department was on the phone saying they’d rejected the charge ‘cos there had been some fraudulent charges put through on computer kit recently. I should be pleased that they were so vigilant, I suppose, but at the time it was a bit of a trial. I explained to Dell and they put the charge through again. My order was accepted. Phew!

Being a special configuration with a wireless card, my machine was built to order – in Poland. After a few days I got a note saying that it was completed and ready for shipment with a UPS tracking number. UPS, goody – I’d be getting a visit from one of those bitch-ugly, brown UPS vans! My machine left Lod, in Poland and pitched up in Tamworth. Right country, at least. The next day it made its way to Luton.

Today it arrived chez moi aboard the expected bitch-ugly UPS van and here I am writing about it on it. I’m writing on my also new Logitech wireless keyboard (complete with wireless mouse) and what I write is being brightly displayed on my super new 23 inch widescreen Dell monitor. Commissioning this little lot was a relative breeze.

So far so good and so far, impressed. Let’s hope the 1.5Tb disk is more reliable than the 500Gb that came in the Craptop.

Cutting a long story short, my Inspiron failed several times more requiring yet more re-installations of Windows 7 from scratch to encourage it back into life. After the second such instance, Windows began issuing a less than comforting message: “Windows has detected that your hard drive is about to fail” together with offering to enter a system back-up process. I stopped putting anything critical on the machine and continued to live with it. It began to look as though I did, indeed, have a dodgy disk drive perhaps with some bad surface areas on it. By running a chkdsk to fix/bypass bad areas and stopping windows doing updates, the machine seemed to stabillize.

Foolishly, about a week ago, thinking that chkdsk had fixed my problem, I became complacent and started letting Windows update itself. Mistake! I went for my fourth re-installation of Windows within a year. I had a new wrinkle: “Windows cannot be installed on this partition because the hard drive is about to fail”. Hmm? Curiously, it allowed me to go ahead anyway and I was back up and running – until I shut down, that is. Upon restarting, an even more worrying message began to appear: “No hard drive detected”. I withdrew the hard drive and re-seated it just to make sure. Still no joy. Dead in the water!

I spotted that my drive was a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500Gb and that it did not seem to enjoy an enviable reliability reputation. Failures were relatively commonplace. One write-up suggested that 2.5inch drives >300Gb might be generally unreliable. Technically the machine should still be covered by its one-year warranty from somebody, either Dell or Tesco direct, but I really couldn’t be bothered to jump through those hoops. It looked as though, for £50-ish I could get a replacement hard drive. I wasn’t scratching the surface of 500Gb [Ed: looks as though someone had scratched the surface, though ] so I thought 250Gb would do fine and just may be more reliable.

Spotting a review on trusty ol’ Amazon for a Toshiba 250Gb disk saying, “I used it to replace a failing drive in my Dell Inspiron 1545” ( ), I ordered one. It arrived yesterday, three days ahead of schedule on free delivery, and I slotted it in. I installed Windows 7 for a fifth time in a year; no message saying it couldn’t be installed because the disk was about to fail. I booted up and started installing a few applications: no message saying Windows had detected that my hard drive was about to fail. Here I am writing about it on my revived machine.

I took a good deal of pleasure whacking my old Seagate hard drive with a large hammer:

“Windows has detected that your hard drive has disintegrated.”