Long gone are the insect-rich days of high summer as Lower Lodge settles into the bounty of autumn. Just a few butterflies were hanging on today in their tatters, including what are likely to be some of our last Common Blues and Meadow Browns of the year (especially after the ferocious squally storm that swept through later in the afternoon).

Common Darters were on duty, as they are likely to be until November, mopping up the last few flying insects. There was also a single Platycheirus albimanus hoverfly, and an Ivy Bee at rest on an oak tree – quite a surprise as there is very little Ivy around the reserve.

With flowering almost done, it was over to the autumnal fruits to provide colour. Hawthorn in particular was radiant with its masses of berries, drawing me in to look more closely at the leaves, with the tent-mines of the micromoth Phyllonorycter corylifoliella, and a harvestman Opilio canestrinii nestling among the ultra-spiny terminal shoots that have been galled by the gall-midge Dasineura crataegi. Although presumably under-recorded, the latter has only one Essex locality (near Dedham) shown on the NBN Atlas.

And so to the Oaks, which occupied most of my walk, demonstrating their prowess as a powerhouse of biodiversity, some sprouting Hen-of-the-woods and most of the saplings at least liberally coated in Oak Powdery Mildew.

So late in the season, the leaves have done their photosynthetic job, so leaf coatings, munchings, mines and galls are probably no problem to the trees. And galls in particular were everywhere, each caused by a near-identical tiny gall-wasp. Now is the time to search under the leaves for spangle-galls, and as usual Common Spangles were easy to find.

Most years, Silk-button Spangles come a close second in abundance, but as we have found elsewhere this year, they seem few and far between. In fact among the hundreds of leaves I examined, I found only four with Silk-buttons, and Smooth Spangles, often quite hard to find, outnumbered them manyfold. The vagaries of the life of a gall-wasp and its interactions with the weather and the tree!

Another species we are seeing much more of this year is the Oyster Gall, erupting from the leaf-veins, whereas Cherry Galls seem fewer than usual:

And then there were the bud-galls: Marble Galls and Artichoke Galls, both rather less frequent than we expect, and Cola-nut Galls, if anything more abundant this year. And only when looking at the galls did I notice the Opilio canestrinii staring back at me…

Spiders were another group I found by searching leaves for galls. There was a Flower Crab-spider, more usually seen sitting on flowers waiting to grab visiting pollinators, a Cucumber Spider and a Bleeding-heart Spider …

… plus the signs of other species, here the web of a Xysticus crab-spider and the Sputnik egg-sac of Paidiscura pallens.

And leaving best until last, I turned over one leaf and found this wonderful creature, my first ever caterpillar of the scarce woodland moth, the Festoon, sitting among presumably its feeding scrapes. Looking like an alien life-form, it was a real thrill to find, and while the adult turns up in many moth traps in the area, to have proof of breeding is always exciting.