What a year. I started with the first month in the southern hemisphere, then had possibly the busiest and often most stressful year of my life but I found some great stuff on the way, Including what I think is the highlight of my career so far. As ever, natural history and conservation has been my rock. So, in reverse order...
10. I don't do slugs but back in February I went all the way to Wales to see a whole slimy bunch of them. Here is the Alsatian Semi-slug.
9. I've wanted to see these freaky Tompot Blennies for years and was pleased to find loads off Saltdean in September.
8. It wasn't my first record of this as I had one last year but it was the first for West Sussex and the first for one of our reserves (Levin Down). Here is the awesome Platyrhinus resinosus.
7. Resurveying the ditches at Amberley was great as there was such positive changes. Like this Marsh Cinquefoil appearing in of our ditches after it was cleared.
6. Surveying the Murray Downland Trust's sites with Mike Edwards produced lots of surprises, such as this Villa cingulata at Heyshott Down.
5. I don't often see new longhorn beetles but the beetle season started with a bang with this Mesosa nebulosa found at Sheffield Park on a BMIG meeting by Nathan Clements in April.
4. The repeat of the big farm surveys in 2016 showed one of the farms in East Sussex become internationally significant for arable plants. I stumbled across three species I had never even seen before, like this Stinking Chamomile.
3. New Zealand was an incredible place. Perhaps the best memories are of the amazing seabirds. I'll never forget the first time an albatross flew right over our heads!
2. Sometimes a hunch pays off. An early morning start and we bagged the first records for Columbus Crabs in Sussex off Brighton Beach, all the way from the Sargasso!
1. Do I need to say anything other than CALOSOMA SYCOPHANTA!!!
A few weeks ago I'd never heard of Columbus Crabs Planes minutus but then Steve Trewhella started posting pictures of them he had found in goose barnacles and other flotsam on beaches in Dorset. After a walk along Brighton Beach on Sunday, I did indeed find several Common Goose Barnacles Lepas anatifera but not the kind of large fresh clumps I had seen in Steve's images. So, yesterday while looking at the wind direction and ferocity of Storm Imogen, I thought it would be worth a look this morning on Brighton Beach. So Olle Akesson, Michael Blencowe and I met in a miserable car park by the Marina. It was pouring down and very cold and I was wondering what I was doing there. As I said though, "fortune favours the bold."
Ten minutes later we found a big patch of Common Goose Barnacles right by the Marina and there, sticking up for all to see, was a tiny claw! There it was, the first known record of this incredible species for Sussex!
We walked along and found several more patches of goose barnacle and then we stumbled upon a partially buried patch on a buoy that yielded another four individuals, this time showing how varied they can be. Here is Little Red, Little Blue, Christopher Columbus's Ghost and Weetabix-head. Who is your favourite?
My favourite response on facebook to this image was: "It's an itteh bitteh crustacean commiteh."
And here is their habitat!
So what is a Columbus Crab? It, like the goose barnacles, is an entirely pelagic animal (yes, they are both crustaceans). The barnacle attaches itself to flotsam (trees, boats, floating plastic bottles!) and the crab lives among the barnacles. It can also live on turtles and in bits of floating rubbish (a number turned up recently in an old rope). So these little guys may well have come all the way across the Atlantic! What a life! I thought the name would come from this very behaviour but it seems that it is actually named after Christopher Columbus who could well of been the first to see this animal! This is likely to be the first record for Sussex but is not the furthest east in the UK as they have been recorded in Kent a couple of months ago (thanks to Steve Trewhella for this fact).
This is Babington's Leek, a form of the nationally scarce Wild Leek that grows on the sea front at Brighton by the Volks Railway. Amazingly, having lived here on and off for 18 years, half my life, I only saw it yesterday. This is for a number of reasons:
1) It flowers in the July and August when I always feel burned out and lose interest in wildlife.
2) There are way too many tourists in this part of the city so it's not usually a place I feel I want to visit.
3) Most perilously, there are literally hundreds of pubs to walk past and they are very inviting in this heat.
We almost failed on out mission when a small storm forced us to drink beer.
But we managed to soldier on. Other wildlife was thin on the ground but we did see some Common Broomrape and the nationally scarce bug Megalonotus sabulicola. I couldn't contain my excitement when I saw my first specimen of Babington's Leek missing a flower head. I believe "I walked five miles for a stick!" was said.
Fortunately there were more in flower a little further towards the Marina.
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?
Shiver me timbers, it was cold on Saltdean sea front this afternoon. I had the afternoon off and went and joined Erin Pettifer and Gerald Legg on a
Shore Search survey. Most impressive were a couple of
Snakelocks Anemones Anemonia viridis, a species I have not seen for ten years since I lived on Anglesey. Cool looking things. We saw another anemone which was a new one for me,
Sagartia troglodytes. This one is also cool and quite common on this part of the coast, the
Strawberry Anemone Actinia fragacea.
Here we have two top shells. On the left is the Flat Top Shell Gibbula umbilicalis and on the right the Grey Top Shell Gibbula cineraria. Fairly straight forward these two.
This orange blob, I am reliably informed, is a Breadcrumb Sponge Halichondria panicea. I now have a sponge on my list.
A seaweed tick. The strange looking Sugar Kelp Saccharina latissima. Thanks for holding it up, unidentified human male. The other seaweed in the background is mostly Toothed Wrack Fucus serratus, the dominant plant there.
The rather racistly named Japweed Sargassum muticum, an introduction, is now going by the more acceptable name of Wireweed.
Someone found a dead Garfish Belone belone. I have ticked this as I used to see the fisherman occasionally catch them off the Marina when I was sea watching. A blenny was spotted but butter-fingers here tried to catch it with his hands and it got away. Then someone told me they bite and I lost interest.
And finally, a
Great Shipworm Teredo navalis, that Gerald said he had not recorded in this area before. I was amazed to find out that these are actually molluscs. It sure was an odd thing and I'm glad Gerald was able to identify it to species, I wish I had had a closer look at it now though. I had a wicked time, I added five species, ending the day on 3920 species. If you want to get involved, have a look at the
Shore Search pages on the Sussex Wildlife Trust's website. As you can tell, I got quite into it and could have stayed there all afternoon, even though I could barely operate my camera, my hands were so cold. I will definitely be doing more of this though!
A quick walk along the see front today produced a few surprises. I was hoping to see Hoary Stock which is common along the coast east of Brighton, whether the plants shown here are native or naturalised though is another matter, either way it's an addition to my list. I also added Wallflower which for some reason I had not ticked off too. I'm sure the Hoary Stock is more abundant east of the marina but we were pushed for time today, I will go back and get some better shots.
Walking along the promenade on Madeira Drive on a bank holiday weekend is not exactly peaceful but the strangest thing was a Reed Warbler, singing from a bush just metres away from hundreds of people. I have heard migrant Reed and Sedge Warblers in some funny places in Brighton before at this time of year.but this was ridiculous. It was singing so quietly that I nearly walked straight passed it. It does make you think, why bother singing on migration like that? I guess the territorial urges are great, they do cross continents to get here!
This Common Broomrape got me excited, I thought perhaps I had stumbled upon Oxtongue Broomrape but I keyed it out using the very useful British Wildlife article from 2008, knew that would come in handy one day. Just the common one though but not something you see every day.
A plastic heron and a Small Dusty Wave in a car park stair well was about as interesting as it got. Yawn. So, I escaped the car boot at the marina and went sea watching. I immediately saw a mixed flock of migrating terns. There were eight Comics and a single Little Tern. After that the bird life was pretty dull with a Med. Gull, a Wheatear, 9 Sandwich Terns and 5 Sand Martins being of the most interesting.
Just by the western arm of the marina, there is a tiny patch of vegetated shingle. Dominated by the rather local Sea Kale here, this community is best described by SD1a - the typical Curled Dock - Yellow-horned Poppy shingle community. There is also Sea Fern-grass here as well as Sea Sandwort, Sticky Groundsel and a few specimens of the alien grass Cockspur (below). Further up the slope this community grades into SM24 - Sea Couch salt-marsh community.
I searched for some invertebrate interest but all I could find was this green carabid under a stone. I struggled even to get this shot, it was very camera shy and just kept trying to bury itself. It keyed out rather neatly to be the common Harpalus affinis, one of the ones I have already seen. It appears I have failed to see a single new species all weekend! Bugger.
Yesterday evening Jo and I and a whole load of Natural England types went fishing for Mackerel for a couple of hours. We hired a boat but the skipper tried to convince us not to go, saying that there were no fish today and that the sea was a bit choppy. We went anyway, three miles out to sea in fact and we did indeed catch 11 fish. I caught one and Jo caught two! In the photo, mine is the biggest one. They really are beautiful looking fish. We killed the fish straight away and one chap on board gutted the fish expertly and on the way back we cast the chum overboard and soon attracted lots of gulls and a couple of Kittiwakes including this first summer bird. We then cooked the fish on a portable BBQ. This is a really sustainable way to catch fish and it tasted fantastic. Birds were quiet, we had a Gannet go straight over the boat, a few Fulmars and a distant Auk sp. There were lots of wind born seed out at sea as well as a cranefly about a mile out heading south. On the beach, we also saw a Ringed Plover sitting on eggs, an as yet unidentified blue beetle and a whole mess of Sea Kale. I would definitely do this again, perhaps even a trip just looking for sea birds at the end of April/start of May? Hmmm...
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