The Lyons Share

Body parts

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Wednesday, 2 June 2010 20:04

Today I took the day off work and was privileged enough to accompany Peter Hodge to visit a site (I'd rather not name it I'm afraid) and look for beetles and other invertebrates. We had a fairly slow day to start with, highlights that included the cranefly Tanyptera atrata, the click beetle Ampedus elongantulus and Ischnomera sanguinicollis. A couple of Spotted Flycatchers and a few Mandarins provided the avian saproxylic interest. It was not until the end of the day when we found some extensive areas of red rot and soon saw a number of bright blue-purple elytra which I was told were Helops caeruleus (middle photo). Then I found a large, flat, black elytron with pale spots and it was clear this belonged to the massively rare Variable Chafer Gnorimus variabilis (top photo). There was a record from this site in the form of a head capsule roughly five years ago so it is great to confirm the sighting. Within ten minutes I had found another left-hand elytron and then Peter found a head capsule/pronotum! This species is as rare as it gets really, RDB1, part of a BAP grouped statement and now known from Windsor Forest and this site in Sussex and that is it! the final body part was an elytron of a Stag Beetle (bottom photo). To finish off the day, I finally saw the nationally scarce longhorn beetle Anaglyptus mysticus, photos to follow tomorrow hopefully. This goes to show how much beetling can be done with left over body parts. Awesome.

Posted in beetles, birds, deadwood, flies