It's that time of year again when sightings are happening faster than I can get them on here! Just a quick one as I have had two very full-on days invertebrate surveying at Filsham Reedbed and Old Lodge. On Tuesday I popped out to Church Norton at lunch time to see the Western Bonelli's Warbler which was behaving quite well. Thanks to Paul Snellgrove for sending me through this shot he took when I was there. This is my 2nd new bird so far this year and my 4218th species.
I would literally trade in family members to see this beetle. Sadly, the Sycophant Calosoma sycophanta is only ever a very rare vagrant to the UK so I am not likely to see one any day soon. So why am I featuring this at all...
...last Saturday I attended the carabid workshop at Dinton Pastures ran by
Mark Telfer and
John Walters. It was a great day, it's hugely important NOT to be an entomologist in isolation and having the opportunity to work through a correctly identified reference collection is worth its weight in gold. It's so great to see specimens of beetles that you have only ever seen in photographs. You really can't get the scale and the jizz from just a photograph. Mark and John are great at explaining things and the guides they are working on are really ground breaking. I particularly like Mark's English names for beetles. They are really well thought out but memorable and imaginative too. Naming species like this is a great responsibility, not just for entomologists as a memory aid but I think it's also part of our national heritage. Look at the English names for macro moths. Did they know when they named them that they were leaving behind one of the most fun things in natural history? I don't know if they did but natural history would be a poorer place without them and I feel Mark is doing something similar with carabids. I hope they are well used!
After an inspiring talk by John (including a section on
Philorhizus species, making me realise just how significant a dip it was when I missed the tiny carabid Mab's Lantern
Philorhizus quadrisignatus that Dave Gibbs found whilst torching oak trunks last year at Parham). I then spent the rest of the day keying out several families which I rarely encounter representatives of beyond the extremely common ones:
Dyschirius,
Anisodactylus (I will remember how to identify the Heath Shortspur
Anisodactylus nemorivagus BASED on its name!) and
Amara. I have been to both the carabid and the staphylinid workshops at Dinton Pastures. They are free although they often get fully booked and you don't need to be a member of
BENHS to attend.
I am now getting the beetle bug back and I can't believe I am planning on starting invertebrate surveys in a couple of weeks time, as I am now sat at home writing this on a snow day as Woods Mill is closed and the server is down. Now, I think I will work on my presentation to kick off my 'Introduction to Beetles' course...
I had a great day today visiting a gentleman in West Sussex who showed me this amazing specimen of a Nutcracker. This specimen was shot back in 1906 near Chilgrove, back in the days when birdwatchers were a little more trigger happy and 'bagging' a bird meant literally that. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not celebrating this behaviour in anyway but the retention of the specimen after all these years I do support. I'm just grateful that we have digital cameras these days! I was also intrigued with what else was inside the case, I spotted some Big Shaggy-moss and Common Bent in there, looking just like they had been picked last summer, not 106 years ago.
The taxidermist was a W. Swaysland of 47 Queens Road, Brighton. It seems that this person was responsible for much of the taxidermy at the Booth Museum (also in Brighton for those that don't know). Incidentally, I have always felt a connection with Nutcrackers after seeing one in my home county of Staffordshire 21 years ago in 1991, I would have been 12 or 13.
Living birds today included a singing Firecrest, fly over Hawfinch, singing Crossbills and Marsh Tits and dozens of Redpolls.
I've been doing one of the farmland bird surveys in Hampshire west of Petersfield this morning and I struck gold, black gold. Rare vagrant birds are not the focus of this work, far from it but they do get my blood pumping. I see Red Kites on perhaps every other visit to this farm but they are interesting so I note them down on the maps. So at 10:15 this Red Kite approaches the farm from the south west.
Coming straight out of the sun from the east enters another kite so I mark that one down too.
Wait a flippin' minute! That's no Red Kite, it's got hardly any fork in the tail and it's small and dark, it's a Black Kite! Yes, I now know BK is actually the BTO code for Black Grouse not Black Kite (which is KB) but I didn't know that in the heat of the moment. Anyway, a rumble was on the cards and for the first (and probably the only time) I wrote this down:
They were good but brief views, I got some shots but they're not great. I have only ever seen one Black Kite ever and that was the Black-eared Kite in Lincolnshire several years ago. I have no doubt on the ID though, I spend enough time watching kites these days, I would say I pretty much see reds weekly now. It was a really great opportunity seeing the two species side by side, the first thing that struck me was how much smaller the Black Kite was. It also didn't look so different from above with the sun shining on it but the white bases to the primaries were really only visible when the wings were perpendicular to my line of site, quite different to the Red Kite, like it had flown through a cloud of soot. The differences were much more obvious when comparing their undersides.
Here's the red
Here's the black
And here is the red and the black! (Shame the black is doing some sort of break-dancing at this point but you get the idea).
That's my first self found rarity since Red-rumped Swallow in 2008 and it was amazing how much it got me pumped. I finished the survey in record time, all 18 km and then walked another 5 km at Heyshott Down. That might be the furthest I have ever walked in one day...
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