Little bumble beetle in the Vennelyst Park
As a field biologist or just plain nature interested, you quickly get a feel for which animals you can usually expect to encounter in the cities. This is true, whether you are looking for birds or insects like butterflies, bees and beetles.
When you thus walk through the city’s parks on a sunny day and examine flowerbeds and bushes, you expect to see both admirals, small tortoiseshells, honeybees, garden bumblebees, double-banded hoverflies and so on. All very common animals that thrive in urban green areas and private gardens.
However, being the nerdy types we are, we of course hope that something rare should pop up amongst all the common types, but rare animals are unfortunately exactly that: rare! And therefore, the probability of finding them is also quite small, which just makes it even more fun when it actually happens.
As part of a project at the Natural History Museum, the biodiversity of hoverflies and bees in Aarhus was to be examined. This meant that the museum staff regularly went on trips with nets and catch trays to collect animals at selected locations throughout Aarhus. One of these sites was Vennelystparken just south of the University and near the centre of the city. A beautiful green area with two small lakes, which in summer offers plenty of flowering perennials, bushes and trees.
Amid the expected throng of bees and hoverflies, which were flying around among the flowers in a blackberry bush, a little black and yellow striped creature suddenly appeared which did not quite fly as anticipated: the flight was more slow and lazy and somehow more "clumsy" than the way hoverflies and bees usually fly. Somehow, this creature did simply not fit in with the animals that usually fly around in the Vennelystpark. The net quickly caught the little creature and there was great joy when the animal appeared at the bottom: A small, furry beetle with yellow and black markings on the carapace – a small hops beetle. This is a rare beetle in the Danish nature and a creature you certainly had not expected to fly around in a park in the middle of Aarhus.