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In East Dulwich, this year, the garden ornament of choice is ... the animal skull. Now this might seem a little macabre, but I find something rather aesthetically pleasing in the form, shape and texture of old bones.It all started several years ago

and was rewarded with the sight of Ledra aurita, a large and curiously shaped plant-hopper I'd never seen before. When I say large, I mean 15-18 mm long, so you can imagine how small most of the others are. It is immediately identified by the two large, broad, flat

At 11 o'clock in the morning, the bowl of Bob-the-Builder pasta shapes was either a late second breakfast, or an early first lunch - whatever, it was interrupted by the announcement from nearly-three-year-old: "Look, there's a magpie". Sure enough

in daylight until nearly 10pm, I now find that it is dark outside whilst I sit at the laptop and do a bit of writing. Now, as I sit with the French windows wide open, it really is very dark out there, but every now and then I catch a glimpse of a pale shape

, and could not make out the distinctive shape of this pretty bird. Of course they are renowned for playing hide-and-seek with observers, hopping round to the other side of the trunk if they see they are being watched. Some years ago I was able to see one very

, using railway sleepers, three high (about 50 cm), to make a raised water body. Triangular in shape, 2 metres long, with a deep corner dug down a further 50 cm and a shallow corner for marginal plants. Three species of damselfly, two species of dragonfly

and lays her pale beige marshmallow-shaped eggs (I estimated about 250), and that's it. Job done.Like most insects, her adult life is very short and with only one aim: to start off the next generation. This was only the second female I've ever seen

in Britain. Although there are about 250 species of hoverfly in the UK, and roughly 100 of them are black and yellow wasp mimics, this one is immediately recognizable by its narrow parallel-sided body shape and the fact that some abdominal segments have two

into me.Centipedes don't have jaws in the conventional sense; instead, they have two long scimitar-shaped fangs. These are evolved from what was once their first pair of legs, and reach from their attachment at the back of the neck right round to meet in a

and empty shell, hollowed out by the minute parasitoid 'wasp', Praon. The wasp eats the tender insides of the aphid, leaving a dry, mummified skin (left). It then burrows out through the underside and spins a disk-shaped cocoon underneath its victim