The Lyons Share

We did it! Wow, that was intense!What an incredible 24 hours that was. Actually, it was much tougher than I was expecting due to my knee playing up. Actually both Dave and I had difficulty with both out knees and hay fever, Dave particularly so but other than that it was an amazing day. the weather was mostly OK , except for a bit of rain just before dawn that meant entomologising at Ebernoe was a bit tricky. My morning, the wind really picked up so day flying invertebrates were not well represented.

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Anyway, after a good night's sleep we are feeling a little more refreshed. Our preliminary total is 1044 but we expect this to change. I'm going to publish the whole list here in the next week but this is taking a bit of time so I have just done the moths as an example today. But first, here are lots of Dave's photos and a few of mine showing some of the highlights.

Here is Dave and i at 11 pm on Friday night after about three hours sleep. Look how awake we are!

We started at Ebernoe and managed quite a list there. Botanising by head torch was really exciting, like when Dave found this Bird's-nest Orchid, hard enough to find in daylight!

Moth trapping at Ebernoe was pretty good but could of been better. In all we caught 113 species of moth including day flying species, larvae and trapping again at Burton Pond the following evening. So 11% of what we saw were moths. They just were not coming out to play too much. Below is an Orange Moth (yeah I know, it's yellow!) that we don't see all that often, last recorded at Ebernoe in 2009.

And bumping into this huge Snakeskin Grisette, which was a lifer for me, was a real surprise.

Dave found this dead Welsh Longhorn Beetle, a recent arrival in Sussex which was not only new to Ebernoe but new to the whole reserve network.

Trunking was good too, with larvae like this Black Arches.

Here are some other photos from the day!

The 1000th species was Drilus flavescens found at Levin Down.

This huge larva is that of Red Sword-grass, new to Graffham Common. In fact of the 113 moths seen, 25 of them were recorded new to an SWT reserve. This shows that even something light-hearted like this was can produce valuable records. I even had two new moths myself including this Dentated Pug that I caught by hand after being awake for about 22 hours!

Anyway, I'm going to do a series of blogs over the next few days with this, I need some more rest. I leave you with our moth list, the rest to follow soon. The reserve name in brackets how the reserves where the species was a first record. What an experience!