The Lyons Share

Found a few nice fungi recently while walking around Graffham Common. I noticed what looked like a dirty oyster on a birch stump (not the usual place for an oyster) and when I turned it over noticed it had quite striking lilac gills. I was pretty sure it was Lilac Oysterling after a flick through the books and thanks to Martin Allison and Andy Overall for confirming, A new record for the site. Here it is from above.

Also new to the site and only the second time I have encountered it was Plums & Custard, it's not rare and very distinctive so I don't know why I have encountered it so infrequently. These grow on dead pines so it's not surprising that it's found at Graffham Common. The photos didn't come out so well, these are really attractive fungi.

Last Saturday I took the Sussex Fungi Group around the good bits of Ditchling Beacon (which probably tripled the site's fungi list) and was pleased that we came across Toasted Waxcaps in several areas. This is my 21st waxcap and a subtly beautiful one. It really does seem to be limited to chalk-grassland in the county so is a really good indicator.

Wow! What can I say? I've long wanted to get to grips with the balance between the commoner Chalk Fragrant-orchid and the scarcer Marsh or Dense-flowered Fragrant-orchid (above) at Ditchling Beacon. So I arranged to meet up with one of the commoners who just happens to be a leading specialist in orchids! Dr Phil Cribb and a local chap called Ben met me in the car park and we soon started counting orchids. We were not expecting them to be doing quite so well. With around 3250 counted in a couple of hours and this doesn't even cover the whole site! They are bigger, darker, more densely-flowered and slightly later flowering. They are probably just peaking or going over as we speak so if you want to see this wildlife spectacle, then go and see them this week/weekend. You can smell them just by standing among them, they smell a bit like parma violets. This orchid is listed as RedList but Data Deficient. I wonder if this is the most significant colony in Sussex now?

The bottom of the big slope at Ditchling is pretty hard to get to but this is where they are at their best. Hundreds growing in the holloway there that usually has none. It must be something to do with the crazy climatic conditions we have had over the last four months.

And here is Phil with his magical counting finger. It's really hard to see from this photo but this was perhaps the densest area of all.

And here is possibly the main pollinator for this plant. Six-spot Burnet. It's proboscis is covered in the orchid's sticky pollinia.

Here is a Marsh Fragrant-orchid on the left and the Chalk Fragrant-orchid on the right. We saw less than ten chalk!

It wasn't just these we were counting and mapping. We were also looking for Musk Orchids. They are not doing quite so well this year. We have counted 75 in the quarry or Tae's Land this year already but only saw 18 today on the main slope. These are tiny, heavily designated orchids. Being Nationally Scarce, S41 and RedListed Vulnerable. I tried to get a decent photo of the two species together but this was the best I could do. Actually I think that's a pretty cool photo, I can't help feeling the Marsh Fragrant-orchid is looking down disapprovingly at it's more diminutive and drab cousin. Saturday I am off to Heyshott to do the same thing. I wonder if they're doing as well there too?

Excuse the poor quality photo but I had to share this one. Last Sunday was our third Ditchling Beacon Conservation Super Squad and as my back is anything other than super, I was on light duties. Which involved finding wildlife to show the team on a freezing cold day. I had a go with the suction sampler in the quarry at Ditchling and picked up a tiny (1.5 mm) spider. It wasn't until I got home and looked down the microscope that I saw this...

I am still terrified of ET as a 40 year old 'man'. I've gone all jittery looking through photos just to write this post. Anyway, money spiders with freaky heads are pretty cool but this one is really weird. What looks like nostrils are actually one of the four pairs of eyes. The palps (External Testicles) were pretty weird too. This is Panamomops sulcifrons (my 373rd arachnid). It's a bit of a chalk-grassland specialist but what's strange is that I didn't pick it up at all last year during a survey there, in fact there were only three species of spider with conservation status that went into the management plan. Even though I was using a suction sampler in that exact same spot. It just shows that ongoing casual recording is also a great way to add to our knowledge of sites. The only other record on a Trust reserve is from Malling in 2009.

This is the second Nationally Scarce species we have added to the site list whilst scrub bashing up at Ditchling. A great way to do practical conservation and learn about wildlife at the same time. Have a look here if you want to sign up. It's always the last Sunday of the month and involves some steep and challenging work but is really rewarding. We also found three other species new to the site. Yellow Archangel, Moschatel and Palmate Newt!

Yesterday was the first meeting of the Ditchling Beacon Conservation Super Squad. A conservation task force aimed at tackling this difficult site with it's seemingly inaccessible steep slopes and back-breaking scrub removal; it's not for the fainthearted. We started gently on the slope above though and had a great day. We used the new Tree Poppers for pulling up the invasive Wall Cotoneaster that has invaded large areas of the quarry (along with smaller amounts of native Hawthorn and Wayfaring-tree) and it was really successful. We covered pretty much the whole of the slope above and the plateau beyond that which will make way for all sorts of chalk-grassland plants, bryophytes and invertebrates. I personally loved getting my hands dirty again after all these years and it was a great feeling doing it as a volunteer.

By the end of the day, the slope looked great! I can't wait to see this in the summer. The Tree Poppers are so much better than just cutting and coppicing the scrub as they pull up the whole plant roots and all. They also create some bare ground in the process. The drawback is it takes much longer and they are quite hard work on the slopes. Manageable though.

What was a real surprise (considering we only surveyed it last year) was that Carole Mortimer found an insect new to the site. This is the Nb Agonopterix pallorella which is restricted to the eastern Downs and feeds on Knapweed. As we mention all species with conservation status in the management plans and Ditchling is just about to be submitted, this moth just scrapes it into the plan! It's the 181st moth we have recorded at Ditchling and the 1233rd species over all. I really like being able to tie the management together with some worthwhile species recording as we go, it really completes the circle.

Next month we will try some larger scrub and maybe put some spuds on the fire. If you're interested, please message me on graemelyons@sussexwt.org.uk. It's always on the last Sunday of the month so the next one will be 25th February.

Ever since I got my new handy Black & Decker GWC3600 L20-GB 36V Blower Vac suction sampler that is! Now, we've got a petrol driven machine at work and it's very strong and powerful. It does have its draw backs though. One, if you don't have a shed and a fuel store, it's a pain. It's also not so easy to chuck in the back of a car. It's also quite heavy. So, I was quite pleased to see you can get a fairly strong electric one. I bought this for £140. It runs off a 36V Lithium battery. I've temporarily rigged it up with an old net before my bag arrives from B&S Nets.

I took it up to Ditchling Beacon, a chalk-grassland site with an area of broken sward with bare ground and carpets of mosses. Firstly, it's really easy to carry. Secondly, the battery lasted longer than I did, which was great. As it's light, it's easy to be a little more focused on where you place it and also, the angle you place it at. I was able to get in at right angles under patches of moss. Where it's not so good though is that it's not so strong. It doesn't pick up the quantity of material that a petrol driven one does. On the kind of loose soils I was working on today though, that was actually a good thing. I've struggled in the past with the petrol driven one for the amount of material it picks up which engulfs the specimens. I believe though that having it in the car/with you all the time is likely to result in far more specimens long term than the petrol driven one will provide. In the hour I was up there I managed two new beetles and one new ant (below is Stenamma debile with its tiny eyes). Plus a few nice records too.

And here is the suction sampler favourite, the Devil's-bit Scabious Jewel Beetle Trachy subglaber. 

The commonest snail was Abide secale, a snail I don't see that often. Spiders were surprisingly poorly represented but I did see the tiny Minyriolus pusillus. The commonest bug was Agramma laetum. Weevils included Orthochaetes setiger, Pseudorchestes pratensis and Ceratapion carduorum. So, it's charged up again and in my car, ready for another blast tomorrow lunch time...

Is one way of describing this bizarre looking creature. As for the four men who discovered it today up at Ditchling Beacon, carved from root vegetables might be more appropriate. Looking somewhere between the A-Team and Boyz II Men, we hit the site with all the natural history knowledge we had and we hit it hard. I got the bryophytes out of the way first and everyone else got lots of new species. I've featured these many times before and as I anticipate Steve Gale writing a blog with lots of photos in, I have left space for a link here. It was nice to show people lots of new species though, Ditchling Beacon is great for chalk-grassland bryophytes.

Things started getting exciting for me when we went sieving moss though. We hooked up with another of the bizarre harvestman Anelasmocephalus cambridgei shown above. This one was much paler, exactly the same colour of the chalky soil. I recorded four new species, all from sieving. Two ground bugs being Cymus claviculus and Drymus ryei. We also found this Drymus brunneus which seems to have fungus bursting out of every orifice. Ouch.

Just when I thought I had ran out of interesting specimens I recorded a male Walckaenaeria antica (my fourth in the genus and 213th spider). Finally, what I thought was a Bembidion tuned out to be a carabid tick. Syntomus truncatellus! A cracking day out, more of this please! Sadly though I was hugely gripped by the size of Steve's club sandwich and that is not a euphemism for anything, there is just nothing worse than ordering the wrong meal.

Last year it was tussocking. Last week it was sieving flood debris. This week I have mostly been grabbing handfuls of the moss Rhytidiadelphus triquetrus and shaking them into a white tray in an old quarry at Ditchling Beacon. It's basically the chalk-grassland equivalent of tussocking and it's really productive. You have to have a keen eye though as there are some pretty small things to look out for. The above snail is the tiny Prickly Snail Acanthinula aculeata. It's one of those snails that I've wanted to see ever since I bought the snail atlas back in 2009 and I remember reading that the spines often rub off by the time you are likely to find them, not this one though. At  a maximum size of 2.2 mm, it's twice the size of this species....

This is the aptly named Dwarf Snail Punctum pygmaeum. I'm still amazed I managed to spot it at 1.2 mm! I've included my lucky piece of laminated graph paper for scale. You can tell it's not an immature snail of a larger species because the number of whorls (>3.5) show it's an adult. I could just discern these whorls with the naked eye which made me have a closer look.

I added nine species to my list including a couple of great looking harvestmen, Anelasmocephalus cambridgei and Mitostoma chrysomelas (as well as lots of the odd looking Homalenotus quadridentatus I found there two years ago) . I found a smart looking staph called Quedius picipes and this earwig which I thought looked different to the common one. Indeed, it is Lesne's Earwig Forficula lesnei. Finally, I've seen one other than the common one! It was the fact that the hind wings were not sticking out that led me to think it was different (although I didn't know this until I keyed it out).

I also saw the nationally scarce ground bug Drymus pumilio which is about half the size of the much commoner Drymus sylvaticus with which it was found. This is quite a scarce bug and is only the second time I have seen it.

Not scarce, but it's always nice to put a name to a face. This large caterpillar was bright and patterned enough for me to have a go at identifying it and I'm quite confident it's the larvae of the Brown Rustic moth.

Here is the kind of clump of moss that was coming up with so many species. It has the English name Big Shaggy-moss Rhytidiadelphus triquetrus.

So I added nine new species putting me on 4753. That's 35 new species so far this year. Slightly under my required target to get 10,000 by the time I'm 40 but it is January and the day is but young!

This is Pissodes pini, a beetle that I collected during a survey at Old Lodge last year in April, it wasn't until this week that I was informed it was actually a first for Sussex! I very nearly over looked it in among the larger Pine Weevils Hylopbius abietis. Like the Pine Weevil, it's found on dead and decaying pines but is usually more of a northern species. That's not the only county first I have had confirmed this week though.

This is Acidota crenata. A staph that I found on one of the turf-stripped areas at Iping Common in September. 

Again this is thought of as a more northern and possibly even alpine species. So why was it found on bare ground on one of the hottest heathlands in the south?!

I have had a third species new to Sussex confirmed this week in the form of a small snail called Balea heydeni I found under Elder bark at Seaford Head back in October, if you look at this post too you will realise just how fortunate it was for me to be in the wrong place at the right time. I didn't get a photo of that one though. So with Stenus palustris new to Sussex from Filsham Reedbed, where it is abundant and the naturalised ground bug Nysius hutoni we found at the Crumbles in vast numbers in July means I had five species new to Sussex in 2013. Four of these on sites managed by the Trust!

Now a thing I realised the other day about firsts for Sussex is that they are more significant than most county firsts because we have TWO counties!

After an hour and a half of sieving clumps of moss at Ditchling Beacon today I managed to find eight new species, including a few really unusual species but that will have to wait for another day...

More mosses I'm afraid. Another day out on reserves with Tom Ottley. This time at Ditchling Beacon and again we get a thumbs up for our management in terms of bryophytes. I added six new mosses to my list and a lichen. This first one wasn't a new one for me but is a chalk-grassland specialist. Fissidens dubius.

We have lots of the attractive moss Hylocomium splendens.

And Scapania aspera is all over the place in small patches. This liverwort is a key species for the site and the only species that makes up the 'southern hepatic mat' that occurs at Ditchling Beacon.

I was finally able to put a name to this golden pleurocarp, it's Campylium protensum.

Rushed over to Waltham Brooks to see the Night Heron but dipped. Went out looking for Adder's-tongue Fern at Ditchling Beacon but dipped (two species I have seen before I should add). However, the first thing I saw when I woke up this morning was this crab spider. I thought it looked like a Philodromus and considering I have only ever identified two before (histrio and dispar - both distinctive looking spiders) I thought it might be a tick. It was, being Philodromus aureolus. The literature states it's one of the commoner species and does sometimes enter houses. I was amazed at how metallic the abdomen was when I shone a light on it. That was my 3931st species.

Whilst poking around in the bottom of a quarry this afternoon I found a Badger's skull. I see a lot of these now, perhaps even more than those of Fox. I am always impressed by the sagittal crest on a Badger's skull. This 'crest' is where the jaw muscles attach to and is only present on animals with incredibly strong jaw muscles. It's also meant to get larger on older animals according to one website. What is strange about this particular skull is that the crest is hardly developed at all. What's more, the skull is bigger than any other Badger skull I have seen.

Here is a more typical Badger's skull (with jaw attached).

And here are the two together.

So what is going on here? If the sagittal crest does grow with age, that suggests there may be an environmental response involved, i.e., maybe Badgers which chew a lot, get more of a work out and therefore get bigger crests? Maybe this Badger lived on nothing but earth worms and marsh mallows and didn't develop a crest? Well it sure got big on whatever it was eating. I'd be interested to hear what people think. I am going to eat nothing but toffee pennies from Quality Street now and see if I can develop my own sagittal crest. Watch this space.

And to rule out dog, which have very different hind molars, here are the only teeth present.

I took some good friends up Ditchling Beacon for some chalk-grassland moss identification this afternoon and it was dead good fun. A big thank you to Victoria Benstead-Hume, Carole Mortimer, Penny Green and Dave Green for making it a really fun day and providing marzipan biscuits and posh sandwiches and fresh coffee and ginger wine etc etc om nom nom lol. I think I've just made myself sick. Who would of thought four people would get so excited by mosses?! I also got five ticks out of it but only one of them was a moss...

Thanks ever so much to Victoria Hume for taking these photos, have a look at more of her impressive photography here on Flickr.

I had one moss species new for me, Campylium protensum.

And here are some of Carole's shots, thanks Carole. I think. Just remember that me and hairbrushes don't mix. I'm still picking 'things' out of my dreads now.

Here we have Neckera complanata.

And this one is Thamnobryum alopecurum.

And a large patch of Pseudoscleropdium purum. It's amazing what you can find hiding under big lumps of moss.

So, in between placing chunks of mosses about one's person, everyone did see a good selection of about 15 species which is about as much as most people can handle when they are new to bryology. It's a good place to start on the chalk as it's heavy in big attractive pleurocarps.

However, while this was going on I was taking advantage of a little 'tussocking' and it proved very worthwhile as I added four species to my list. Two beetles including this Chrysolina staphylaea and Philonthus marginatus.

This staphylinid is always a welcome sight. The rather smart Ontholestes murinus and this time the little bugger was completely motionless. The others I have seen were more like the cartoon character Taz in their demeanour.

I also added the ground bug Peretrichus lundii to my list. This harvestman looked different under the hand lens but really stood out under the microscope. My fifth new species of the day, the bizarre looking and southerly restricted Homalenotus quadridentatus. I end the day on 3771 species. Now, tomorrow we record the outdoor session of our next podcast too!