The Lyons Share

I've been at Iping today with Adrian, Penny and Dave setting up some more monitoring of the scrapes. By far the rarest invertebrate we saw was spotted during our lunch break, away from the scrapes completely is the RDB2 Vulnerable Cryptocephalus biguttatus which I have seen once before in Surrey. A great find as I have been told it's on the site but have never seen it there until now. Two red patches at the back of the elytra give it away but there is a confusion species being a particular form of Cryptocephalus bipunctatus. It tried to get away by falling off the Cross-leaved Heath it was perched upon into the litter beneath but its two bright red patches were pointing right up at me!

The Heath Tiger Beetles were down to only one individual today but we did see it use a path. I have always hoped that if we can get them onto the paths, they'll find their way around the site. Fingers crossed.

We saw a couple of what I believe are Xysticus sabulosus, a species of crab spider that I think I may have seen years ago at Arne but wasn't able to confirm.We also saw a smart female Talavera aequipes, both species spotted by Adrian!

Penny spotted a ground bug that turned out to be the Nb Megalonotus dilatatus which was new for me and the survey! Great to see lots of scarce bare ground specialists using the scrapes. Silver-studded Blues are out in numbers now and we even saw a couple of Anisodactylus nemorivagus. Agonum sexpunctatum are becoming common place, whatever will we see there next?!