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.
I received a request to go and have a look at a site just north of Brighton last week, which fitted in really well as I was looking for somewhere new to go this Saturday. Seth Gibson came along too and I managed to clock up ten new species! The highlight actually occurred as we were leaving the site. Seth mentioned that it was worth looking on Greater Stitchwort as there is a couple of Coleophora moths on the plant. I bent down, picked up the nearest bit of Greater Sticthwort and said, "are these them?". It was indeed the Nb Coleophora solitariella. The Sussex Moth Group website states the only 'recent' Sussex record occurred in the Chichester area in 1980! Tony Davis mentioned that he has found it very infrequently despite looking for it many times, so were we just lucky?!
Other highlights included the Nb Scaphisoma boleti, a very cool staph called Bolitobius cingulatus and a money spider with a very strange epigyne (my 212th spider!) being Diplostyla concolor. I recorded over 50 invertebrates myself (I still have Seth's identifications to add to the list) which isn't bad for a day in February. I even managed a bit of sweeping in a rough meadow which proved really productive. It almost felt like summer. I ended the day on 4838 species and look forwarded to making this site my patch over 2014.
So we all have are weak points, right? The one area that I have not been fastidious in keeping up to date and accurate with has been Hemiptera. That is until today. Last week I took on the role of county recorder for Heteroptera. Now for those out there that are not familiar wit the taxonomy of insects, bugs (or true bugs) are collectively known as Hemiptera. This order is split into a number of suborders. The classic bugs, such as shield bugs and ground bugs, fall into the order Heteroptera (this is what I will be covering). The hoppers used to be in the sub order Homoptera but this now has the awfully unpronounceable name of Auchenorrhyncha. Alan Stewart will continue to be the county recorder for these. Then you have psyllids (Sternorrhyncha) which I haven't done anything with yet.
On my list I have previously just treated them to order with a total of 137 species of Hemiptera as of first thing this morning. For this group I have been keeping a paper checklist that I update as a I see new species but today I finally got around to updating this digitally and pulling everything together. I'm glad that I actually came out with 149 Hemiptera, in total being 132 Heteroptera and 17 Auchenorrhyncha, that from now on, on my list I will call true bugs and hoppers respectively. So I end the day on 4798 species, 12 species up. I'm glad to find that I was under-recording rather than over-recording! All the gaps are filled in and the missing species added to Recorder.
Of the 583 species of Heteroptera on the systematic list on
British Bugs, I have seen only 132, just 22.6% of the fauna. Plenty of room to for improvement which is great as far as I am concerned. I searched my photo archive for a species that had slipped through the net and this was all I could find. It's the Nb
Dicranocephalus medius, a bug that feeds on Wood Spurge that I saw at Rewell Wood in 2009 but have not seen since. So the first thing I need to do as county recorder now I have sorted my own bug business, is do the same for East and West Sussex and find out what the county list is, then I'll be in a better position to write an article about it for next year's Adastra and start doing some of the more fun stuff! Like trying to fill in the gaps and promoting bug recording. That leaves me with just one question that is best asked by Hudson from Aliens:
"Is this gonna be stand up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?"
This is the eggcase of the
Small-spotted Catshark (also known as the
Lesser-spotted Dogfish!). After recent storms there were masses of these washed up on Brighton beach at the weekend. I can remember regularly seeing small dogfish washed up dead on the beach at Tal-y-bont in Wales when I was a kid. They were probably the same species. Frustratingly, I am yet to see one of these animals alive, so it's not one of the 69 UK species of fish I have on my list. The records though are valuable and I'll submit them. You can key out catsharks, skate and ray eggcases
on this website, it's a great resource. I was totally gripped though, as on the same day, a colleague found an eggcase of the rare Cuckoo Ray on the same stretch of beach. This was a stunningly beautiful looking thing and I'd love to find my own!
Dogfish to catshark? Quite a drastic name change! Next they'll be called Mousewhales. But seriously, anyone know why the name change?
The 'canny' among you can probably tell from the title of this post, it's about a trip to Norway with a bunch of Geordies. This is what I got up to on a short break in September last year with Rachael and her lovely family. We hadn't been before and I didn't really think I would spend my first trip to Scandinavia in September with my top off but I'm not complaining! When we weren't on a speed boat, a trampoline or a wake board, I was squeezing in some natural history...
No matter where I go in the world, natural history plays its part. It's like a curse and a blessing all in one. I was quite restrained though, and didn't do too much this time. As I was jumping up and down on a trampoline, I could hear what sounded like someone clicking their fingers in the distance. I realised it was coming from a rough grassy bank nearby and was probably some sort of cricket. I spotted a huge grasshopper, shuffling up and down the stems and recognised it as the
Large Marsh Grasshopper (above)
, a species I am yet to see in the UK. Nearby I spotted a
Yellow-winged Darter, another species not on my British list. I even got Rachael's Mum taking photos of invertebrates, with this
Goat Moth larvae she spotted on the way to the shops! I've only ever seen this moth as an adult or from the feeding damage it creates on the trees.
I picked up on a few
Wart-biters by their distinctive song as I walked passed an unremarkable road verge. A species that's so rare in the UK it's only at a handful of chalk-grassland sites in the south.
Swimming with
Lion's-man Jellyfish is less than fun. "Whatever you do, don't look over your shoulder!". There are thousands of them in the fjords.
I went on one long walk (actually a 16 miler) through the woods. I wanted to see one new species of bird and was hoping for a woodpecker. About two miles in I heard an awful racket which turned out to be a
Nutcracker and I watched it land on the top of pine in front of me. Now, I have Nutcracker on my UK list (the Staffordshire bird) but was chuffed to see one again after some 20 years. At this point, an even louder noise came from behind the tree line and I assumed it would be another Nutcracker. It was actually a
Black Woodpecker and landed on the adjacent pine top, so I had both birds in the same field of view. It then flew off straight over my head!!! My first ever Black Woodpecker and it was THE bird I really wanted to see. I then walked for another 14 miles and hardly saw anything else! I didn't care though, the landscape was amazing...
This little house is the furthest north I have ever been.
Northern Willow Tits were frequent here.
Wild
Blueberries.
And Moose poo. No Mooses though.
A currently unidentified carpet of
club-moss from the spruce forest.
And the days we spent in the Skyberg's family holiday home were amazing. Waking up to
Northern Nuthatches (how cool are they ?!) and
Crested Tits was very cool.
A huge thank you to Espen and Jenny for sharing their home with us! We had a great time and I can't wait to go back.
A quick walk around Withdean Woods yesterday morning and the highlight was four plants of
Stinking Hellebore just starting to flower. Or was it?! Interesting enough in its own right but I noticed the leaves were heavily mined. A quick look on
ukflymines and it was clear there is only one species on hellebores, being a fly called
Phytomyza hellebori. A new one for me and only the third record for Sussex!
Last week I payed a visit to Amberley Wildbrooks and was amazed at the strand line of flood debris that extended off to the horizon. I didn't have much time to look so I had to go back a little more prepared and despite even then having only an hour to record, I managed to identify 36 species of insect, 33 of which were beetles including nine species I hadn't seen before. Not bad for an hour in January?
I found that rather than sieve through so much litter, it was easier to find beetles under logs. The logs in the litter had very few beetles under them but the logs adjacent to the litter in the grass were covered in beetles underneath. I would say that every log had at least a hundred beetles underneath of many different species. In the above photos, most of what you can see is Paederus riparius but in among them I found a few of the Nb Paederus fuscipes. You can also make out a few Stenus and a 16-spot Ladybird.
Here are the Nb species I recorded, species in bold were new to me:
Pterostichus anthracinus
Paederus fuscipes
Demetrias monistigma (I have only seen this once before at Burton Pond)
Oodes heliopioides (this is present in the fen at Filsham)
Acupalpus exiguus
Other species new to me but without a conservation status were:
Notaris acridulus
Stenus clavicornis
Stenus pallipes
Tachyporus pusillus
Bembidion assimile
Anacaena globulus
Chartoscirta cocksii (a shore bug)
It's amazing how many species can be found this way and this particular flood really felt like an opportunity that couldn't be missed. As I was there, the river had breached the banks again and was pouring into the site in a mile long waterfall that produced quite a roar! I think this boat that has appeared on the reserve, says it all.
I helped
Sussex Bat Group to count the hibernating bats in the abandoned tunnels and mines in West Sussex yesterday, my main motivation being to get access to our Marehill Quarry site as I haven't been in there for several years. Bat numbers were low due to wet and mild conditions but we did see
Natterer's and
Daubenton's Bats and I'm feeling much more confident at identifying those two now. There were no rare bats this time.
As ever though, it was the invertebrates that got me excited! In the West Dean tunnel (above), we recorded the usual Herald moths, mostly around the cave entrance along with a couple of Peacock butterflies. The only other moth we saw deep in the cave was a single Tissue (quite a scarce moth in Sussex). Spiders were poor here restricted to Metellina merianae, we didn't see any of the larger Meta species. Further into the tunnel we saw a single Eristalis tenax, a rove beetle that turned out to be new to me, Quedius mesomelinus. At about 200 m in which is approximately the half way mark and about as far as you can get from the light, we recorded Cellar Snail Oxychilus cellarius (new to me!) and Rosy Woodlouse. The only other species we saw was Oniscus asellus.
At Marehill Quarry, you are never that far from the light so there tend to be more invertebrates (last time I was there I recorded a Bloxworth Snout). By far the most frequent species being a heleomyzid fly, that at first I thought was
Scoliocentra villosa but now I'm not so sure.
Heralds were again present in numbers also accompanied by a single
Tissue. A cluster of
Eristalis tenax was present at the entrance as was a single
Armadallidium vulgare. The spiders though were much more interesting. There were lots more
Metellina merianae as well as a male
Micrargus rufus (new to me), a stonking male
Amaurobius ferox with white palps and best of all a
Comb-footed Cellar Spider Nesticus cellulanus (photo above) which I have never seen before. This is quite a local species and it doesn't look like there are that many records of it in Sussex. So I got four new species and end the day on 4765. I'm already 47 up in 2014 including 20 beetles!
Graffham Common is not just your typical 'trees off heaths' project. We were not starting with a featureless conifer plantation, there were already some nice sunny glades, areas of wet heath and big old granny pines in among the plantations. We surveyed theses areas extensively before starting management there, so that we enhanced what was already there, rather than replace it with what we thought should be there. One of the real surprises, even from pitfall traps, was the number of saproxylic species there. I've almost got enough to put together an SQI for the site and it's scoring surprisingly high.
In 2012,
in a five minute period on a single fallen birch log with
Razorstrop I recorded
Diaperis boleti (RDB2),
Colydium elongatum (RDB3) and (just confirmed by Peter Hodge)
Ampedus cinnabarinus (RDB3). That is a really good five minutes of recording for a conifer plantation! Given the habitat, you would expect
Diaperis, but the other two?
Colydium is a predator so it goes where the food is and I have now seen it on birch and (I think) pine. I rolled this log yesterday and found this odd looking larvae with two upward pointing black hooks which I believe is probably
Colydium elongatum. Anyone else seen the larvae of this beast?
21/03/2014 UPDATE: I came to the conclusion that this is actually the larvae of the much commoner
Nalassus laevioctostriatus after finding another one at Flatropers
and Mark Telfer said the same thing too
.
But Ampedus cinnabarinus on birch? I have only seen this once before under Beech bark at Cowdray, the expected habitat according to Peter Hodge. Maybe though we are missing the real resource needs?
Other saproxylic beetle highlights from Graffham include: Leptura aurulenta (Na), Prionus coriarius (Na), Pogonocherus fasciculatus (Nb and new to Sussex) and Melandrya caraboides (Nb).
If we can replicate at least some of those needs on a site like Graffham, we can enhance a site for such species rather than create a uniform heathland that replaces it. What we have done there is leave more trees than would usually be left (about 30% canopy cover). Connecting the existing glades, leaving some areas wooded, opening some areas right up and providing a range of different microclimates. What we hope to achieve is something more like parkland but with pines and birches instead of oaks and heath instead of grass. The best of both worlds. I believe that shelter is a really important resource for invertebrates but is often overlooked.
When the felling happened, we left a few trees as deadwood too and even had a few 'hung up'. These blew down in the storms but on a visit there yesterday I was pleasantly surprised by how many had blown down. We are going to leave as many as we can without negatively affecting the management of the future heathland. The great thing is these winds were predominantly from the south, so the root plates are all facing south. Fantastic habitat for all sorts of things but they should be really good for aculeates.
Some like the eight foot tall root plate above, have produced their own peaty pools too! Or this one that has pulled up a great plug of mineral soil.
And this one with its exposed roots.
There are few snags too where the tops just blew right off! I'm betting there will be a Woodlark on there by the end of the year.
I can't wait to see how this site develops. Heather, Bell Heather and Cross-leaved Heath is growing well on site and the major management issue currently is staying on top of Bracken control. I'll be repeating some pitfall traps and quadrats this year that we set up in 2009 and again in five years or so. Watch this space! Finally a big congratulations to Jane Willmott for making such a success of this project!
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!
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