The Lyons Share

Almost ten years ago I carried out an NVC survey of Cliffe Pools reserve in north Kent when I worked in the ecology department of the RSPB. Now I am off sick today and found myself looking through some old photos hanging around on CDs. The most striking of which is this grass, Annual Beard-grass. This strange looking grass is listed as nationally scarce but I saw more of this in this one place than I have seen since and before combined!

I believe the centre photo to be the hybrid between Annual Beard-grass (left) and Creeping Bent (right).

In fact, I notched up masses of new species there. Lots of rare coastal plants such as Borrer's Saltmarsh Grass (below), Curved Hard-grass, Sea Clover and Toothed Medick.

I stumbled across the nationally scarce b Rosy Wave which I have not seen since.

Birds were good too. I found my only ever Blue-headed Wagtail.  A Terek Sandpiper turned up within hours of me being on site and there was a nice twitchable Trumpeter Finch a few miles down the road.

I also saw the Shrill Carder Bee Bombus sylvarum which again I have not seen since. I have not been back to Cliffe since 2005 and I really should. It is a cracking nature reserve with dynamic communities. I do hope the rare early successional habitats there a still thriving. If only I was more switched on to beetles when I was there!

As some of you may know my back has been playing me up this week and I have been unable to work for the last three days. Bored silly and stuck in the flat I resorted to sorting out my Flickr account and came across a photo I took in Summer (May/June) 2005 at Cliffe Pools of a pyralid moth. I didn't ever come up with an identification that I was happy with and I have just come back to it and I think it's the rare immigrant/occasional resident Sciota adelphella. I went for a second opinion but was told it was not possible to separate it from Pempelia formosa from my photo. 

Having nothing better to do and realising it's the only way I am gonna add anything to my list when I'm house-bound, I searched around online for some photos of each. Have a look at the links above. In all the photos of S. adelphella, the central white wavy line is slightly closer to the head than it is to the wing tips. The distance between the two white wavy lines is far greater than the distance from the outermost wavy line and the wing tip. In P. formosa, the central wavy line is slightly closer to the wing tips than it is to the head. Also, the distance between the two wavy lines is about the same as the distance between the outermost wavy line and the wing tip. It also has a black slash mark between the two wavy lines and seems to roll itself up in a tube more. These observations are only based on a number of photos I have found online, I have no experience of either moth.

If I had the specimen, I think I would be more confident but as it was nearly six years ago I have to rely on the photograph. What would be great is if someone out there reading this knows the answer. I also have no real idea about who exactly is reading my blog so I thought it would also be a good test to see who's reading! Any moth-ers in the Dungeness area should be familiar with these species so please let me know what you think.