The Lyons Share

Caput

Latin dictionary: head

Urban dictionary: done with, over, dead broken, the end of, no more

Last week, Alice and I did a 'mini-bioblitz' at Gillham Wood. One of our smaller sites with no designations (in over seven years of blogging, this is my first post about the site!), it's much lower down the priority list for monitoring. This means we don't do much structured monitoring there, it's simply not going to greatly inform management. It's at sites like this that casual recording is welcome though, so we attempted to see if we could beat the 108 species noted on the spreadsheet. We did, with 145 species in just over two hours. The highlight was this micro moth which I beat from a Hawthorn on the southern edge of the wood. It's Spuleria flavicaput (what an awesome scientific name?) or the Yellow-headed Cosmet. The are only six records in the county so it's quite a goody abd it's new to the whole reserve network.  It's my 1045th moth and 6545th species. It's the 1233rd moth on our reserves and the 9846th species we've recorded on our reserves so far. We also recorded a few nice ancient woodland indicators such as Pignut, Wood Speedwell and Butcher's Broom.

Now for the bad news. My back has gone again and this time it's pretty bad. I had thought that last week's flare up had resolved itself as yesterday I mostly felt fine but this morning the disc has got much worse and my left lats have gone into spasm. It's pretty bad when both happen at once. I have only three weeks left before the 1000 species challenge! Dave has suggested he'll be carrying me around on a stretcher. Maybe we could get some Segways?

This post has been brought to you by the medium of opiate based pain killers and Libby's birthday cake which has more sugar in a slice than I've eaten all year. Now to catch up with entering some records, my 40,000th record is coming up!