How exactly did I end up in a bog with a chap kneeling at my feet shouting "get your little man out" just as two strangers walked passed and gave us disapproving looks? Well first off, I should say he meant TinyRecorder. That 'he' was Ray Gabriel. Ray, Danni Sherwood and I met up to go spidering at one of my favourite spidering sites, Old Lodge. It was a slow and steady on the spider front but we had seen many of the site specialities by this point. Having introduced Ray to my
little public engagement project earlier when we found a big
Dolomedes, we moved on to another mire when I heard Ray shout "I've got something big! A cricket" or something like that. I thought to myself as I rushed over, it can't be ANOTHER
Large Conehead can it? It only bloody was! It's only 19 days since I saw them at Dungeness on the day they were discovered, here I am on a Sussex Wildlife Trust reserve in the middle of the Ashdown Forest a long way from the coast! In fact the nearest Sussex coast is just under 20 miles away. Clearly, Ray realised that this was a 'TinyRecorder moment' but his choice of words was just hilarious. This isn't the first Sussex record though, as there has been one in a garden in Bexhill since the start of August.
If an en entomologist can encounter these twice in less than three weeks, then there are far more around than you perhaps realise. It's going to be common here very soon I think. They are big and obvious in the day and very noisy at night, so I would think you might have a chance at finding them anywhere in the county now. Absolutely incredible! So nice to see in daylight too though. Enjoy the photos! I thought their eyes were black bu they are really not.
Spiders new for the year were Floronia bucculenta and remarkably, Drapetisca socialis, putting me on 345 spiders for 2020. Here is Drapetisca. Common as muck this one but it's my first of the year. We recorded at least 51 species of spider today but this really did eclipsed for me by that huge cricket. So unexpected!
New for the site was Ozytpila sancturia swept by Danni and Cnephalocotes obscurus by myself. It's not easy to get a new spider for Old Lodge so nice one Danni! The site has now had 172 species of spider recorded on it. Also new for the site, and only the second ever Sussex record was the ground bug Lamproplax picea that I sieved from Sphagnum. The only other Sussex record was Flatropers in 1696! Over 50 years ago. What an awesome day! A big thanks to Danni and Ray for a really enjoyable day.
Last summer I was fortunate to find three of these in a sweep net. This wasn't in Sussex though. Gargara genistae (above) is a local species that feeds on Broom, there is only one Sussex record. It was found in Rewell Wood in 1982 (I don't think it's been recorded in East Sussex) by Wilberforce Jones and E. C. M. Haes. Actually there was a second lifer in the net, the Broom Leaf Beetle Gonioctena olivacea. Anther local species but not a particularly rare one (below). Broom just isn't that common in Sussex. When I say common, it's definitely widespread but if you want good populations of invertebrates that feed on a specific plant, you need lots of that plant in lots of places in the landscape. I rarely get to sweep Broom like this in Sussex. Flatropers has got a bit but it's isolated in woodland and rarely has anything on it.
Anyway back to the charming Gargara. It's one of only two tree hoppers we have. The other being the much commoner Centrotus cornutus. I think Gargara genistae is probably the closest insect in the UK to a cube in its proportions. Plea minutissima might give it a run for its money though. Is there anything else more cube-like out there?
...yet we managed just that on the course I ran there on the 8th November. This is the third year I have ran the 'introduction to fungi' course there and despite a huge site list, we usually find something new there. The aim of the course is to show the limits of what can be done without microscopy. After a brief indoor session talking the attendees through the anatomy of fungi, we headed out onto the site. In 2016 we recorded around 50 species in the field, last year it was 60. This year it was a little less at just over 40 due to the dry autumn. It is perhaps a little unfair that some of the most exciting species were identified after the course but I will start with one of them as it was so striking.
First up we have a fungus with a conservation status. Not new to Ebernoe (last seen there in 2004) but it was new to me. This is the Gilded Bolete, a Near Threatened species that has only a couple records in Sussex and these were both from Ebernoe. Well done to the attendee who spotted this one. It keyed out really well using Kibby due to the small size, pink & slimy cap and exceedingly bright (the photo above does not do it justice) and large pores. Here it is from above, you can see flies and other detritus stuck to the slimy cap. I was pleased that Martin Allison agreed on the ID.
This species has been turning up all over recently, it wasn't too much of a surprise that one attendee spotted Plicatura crispa (I was surprised to see it now has an English name in Recorder being Crimped Gill). I recorded this new to all reserves two years ago at Flatropers, it's now been recorded on four of our reserves at least.
We bumped into Pete Flood who I met a couple of years ago on a lichen day in the New Forest and he tagged along and was a great help. I was pleased that by weight of numbers, we were able to find Holly Parachute without too much effort in the poor light. Thanks to Pete for letting me use this photo. I had never noticed how much this looks like human skin with hair coming out of it. Like someone crossed a fungus with a person. What a weird little thing, love that it only grows from dead Holly leaves.
Nearby (and another one of Pete's photos) we found some Pipe Club.
The Spectacular Rustgill we found was a candidate for one of the biggest mushrooms I have ever seen. It was utterly spectacular but without anything in the image to scale, I was left with an underwhelming brown mass in the photo below that looks like a Vic Reeves drawing of a face. Seriously, it was amazing. You had to be there.
Visual highlight of the day would have to go to Parrot Waxcap in the churchyard. We went on our annual pilgrimage to Ebernoe Cricket Pitch and for the first time ever, there was not a single waxcap anywhere to be seen. Sadly no Pink Waxcaps in the churchyard this year.
And Scarlet Caterpillar Clubs were also good value.
Who doesn't love a Magpie Inkcap?
But it was this earthstar that turned out to be the real highlight. First up I need to apologise to everyone for incorrectly identifying this in the field. Last year there were earthstars in the same area that were spotted by Mark Colvin and I was pretty sure we had identified them as Sessile Earthstars and that's what I incorrectly called this as on the course. When I got home and looked at the photo I came to think it might actually be Rosy Earthstar. A quick text to Mark and he was able to go and locate the exact specimen the next day and get it to Martin. It was in fact Arched Earthstar, which I have knowingly seen only once before in Easebourne Churchyard. This is a great record being not only new to Ebernoe Common but also new to all SWT reserves! Thanks Mark and Martin.
And this moth was also new, not an easy thing to get for Ebernoe being heavily 'mothed' over the years. Grey Shoulder-knot, the 659th moth recorded there.
We have recorded 1389 species of fungi on our 32 reserves so far and 967 of them have been recorded at Ebernoe Common, that's 70.0% from one site! No wonder it is one of only around 10 sites in the UK to be designated for its fungi. I love that we are still learning about that too. How long will it take to find another 33 species and get to a 1000?! A big thank you to everyone who attended and also to Pete, Mark and Martin for their input too.
Here is the full species list for the day (those marked with an asterisk were confirmed before or after by Martin Allison):
| Vernacular |
Species |
| Arched Earthstar |
Geastrum fornicatum * |
| Bay Bolete |
Boletus badius |
| Beech Jellydisc |
Neobulgaria pura |
| Beech Milkcap |
Lactarius blennius |
| Beech Woodwart |
Hypoxylon fragiforme |
| Birch Polypore |
Piptoporus betulinus |
| Blackfoot Polypore |
Polyporus leptocephalus |
| Blusher |
Amanita rubescens |
| Blushing Bracket |
Daedaleopsis confragosa |
| Butter Cap |
Rhodocollybia butyracea |
| Candlesnuff Fungus |
Xylaria hypoxylon |
| Clouded Funnel |
Clitocybe nebularis |
| Clustered Bracket |
Inonotus cuticularis * |
| Crimped Gill |
Plicatura crispa |
| Dead Moll's Fingers |
Xylaria longipes |
| False Death Cap |
Amanita citrina |
| Fluted Bird's Nest |
Cyathus striatus |
Fly Agaric
Garlic Parachute |
Amanita muscaria
Marasmius alliaceus |
| Gilded Bolete |
Aureoboletus gentilis * |
| Glistening Inkcap |
Coprinellus micaceus |
| Glue Crust |
Hymenochaetopsis corrugata |
| Golden Waxcap |
Hygrocybe chlorophana |
| Hen Of The Woods |
Grifola frondosa |
| Holly Parachute |
Marasmius hudsonii |
| Lemon Disco |
Bisporella citrina |
| Lilac Bonnet |
Mycena pura |
| Magpie Inkcap |
Coprinopsis picacea |
| Oak Bracket |
Pseudoinonotus dryadeus |
| Parrot Waxcap |
Gliophorus psittacinus |
| Pestle Puffball |
Lycoperdon excipuliforme |
| Pipe Club |
Macrotyphula fistulosa |
| Porcelain Fungus |
Oudemansiella mucida |
| Saffrondrop Bonnet |
Mycena crocata |
| Scarlet Caterpillar Fungus |
Cordyceps militaris |
| Scurfy Deceiver |
Laccaria proxima |
| Sheathed Woodtuft |
Kuehneromyces mutabilis * |
| Snowy Waxcap |
Hygrocybe virginea |
| Spectacular Rustgill |
Gymnopilus junonius |
| Stump Puffball |
Lycoperdon pyriforme |
| Sulphur Tuft |
Hypholoma fasciculare |
| Tawny Grisette |
Amanita fulva |
| Tiered Tooth |
Hericium cirrhatum |
| Trooping Funnel |
Clitocybe geotropa |
| Turkeytail |
Trametes versicolor |
| Tyromyces chioneus |
Tyromyces chioneus * |
Alice and I had a recording day yesterday for the volunteers of the new Flatropers Wood volunteer group to excite them about wildlife and biological recording. For a site with no designations that's so far away, Flatropers is really well recorded so to record at least four species new to the site was pretty good. Including one that is nationally scarce that I have only seen once before.
Why is that? The answer: recording in March. It's a great time of year to find stuff that many naturalists and even entomologists don't usually pick up. It's also a time of year I am at my most DESPERATE to do some recording. It's also the time of year I (usually) have the most free time before the field season starts.
I love finding moths at rest. It's such a rare event, I'm certain that is the first time I have ever found a Yellow-horned moth at rest (and might even be the last). Although it's a well known location for moths since the Victorian era, this early spring species (along with Tortricodes alternella) were also new to the site. We swept a tiny (almost) mature male spider which I am pretty sure is Dipoena tristis (which IS known from the site). Turning logs in the wood provided only my second ever record of the Nb weevil Caenopsis fissirostris. The only other time I saw this was on the 17th March last year under a damp log looking rather soggy and dead, just like this one. I wonder if it is typically found like this?
We had a new bird for the site too. Hawfinch! At least five of them that took a bit of stalking but eventually perched high at the top of a tree. At the start of this winter we had records for 6/32 sites, it's now at 11/32 sites and that's just the ones we know about! It's now been recorded on as many reserves as Greylag and Teal and Marsh Tits were also good value.
So why not get out there and do some early spring recording? You never know what you might find!
So a bit of a break from the 1000species business until I have pulled everything together. Off the success of the Graffham Common visit on Saturday though (adding four new spiders to the reserve list - bringing it to 115 species, including
Dipoena tristis (Na) and
Araneus angulatus (Na)), I decided to do the invertebrate survey. I was not dissapointed and added not one but two species new to the reserve network! Quite a surprise right at the end of the day, about 5.15 pm was noticing this tiny little plume moth in the sundew area. I knew instantly it was going to be the
Sundew Plume. This is the first record in Sussex for 20 years and then it was only known from Ambersham Common. This is a Na species. It's fascinating to think the larvae can eat the leaves of Round-leaved Sundew without getting stuck in it. Unlike this
Chrysopa perla.
In fact Round-leaved and Oblong-leaved Sundew are now present on the east side, with masses of Hare's-tail Cotton-grass too. Also, Marsh Club-moss has been refound on the west, I predict it's only a matter of time before this spreads to the east too.
I kicked a Scallop Shell up, the first time I have seen one of these for years.
And I found this Striped Ladybird larva, which reminded me of Wordy from Look and Read.
But before all this began, ten minutes after getting on site I netted a big green/purple beetle in flight. I struggled to ID this in the field then realised it's the dark colour form of Dune Chafer. Another species new to the reserve network and new for me too. It's quite the looker.
That brings the species seen on the reserves to 9856. However, that's just gone up to 9857 since i started writing this as Alice has found something VERY exciting at Flatropers today. So why is Graffham churning out rarity after rarity? Well it's connected to Ambersham by a bit of pretty good habitat, so there is a reservoir there. It's also been smashed about and opened up, but with about 30% of trees left to form glades and and provide shelter. So it's at just the right stage in succession but is also a great example of landscape scale conservation. Invertebrates that were only ever known in Sussex from Ambersham or few other places are now getting an opportunity to colonise/recolonise Graffham Common. It's a fantastic conservation success story. I can't wait to go back next month.
It's how many bugs do we have of course! And by that I mean Heteroptera, the true bugs that I am county recorder for. It's not so easy to do that for other taxa from the Recorder 6 output as the hoppers, plant-lice and aphids are all mixed in too but I have removed the offending species for this analysis. So, I thought it was also about time I put together a definitive county list (both for East and West Sussex) as well as the reserve list. And my list. So many lists.
So the Sussex list is up 5 species to 429 including the tiny introduced Buchananiella continua I recorded at Ebernoe in the summer. Estimates were right in saying East Sussex is the richer county, almost certainly due to more open habitats like Rye that do well for bugs. East Sussex has 387 species with West over 40 species behind on 346. It's important to remember we have two counties and that a first for West Sussex is just as significant as say a first for Surrey. East is also more recently recorded, the mean year of the last record per species is 2007 compared to 2002. With 2008 overall which is not bad really. Sussex Wildlife Trust reserves have 486 bugs (but that's ALL bugs). Just the Heteroptera comes out at 308 species. My Heteroptera list is 255, almost all of which is in Sussex.
Guess what the best reserve is for Hets? Surprise, surprise it's the greedy Goliath Rye Harbour with a whopping 146 species. It has some bugs found nowhere else in the county like Arenocoris falleni. Followed by Malling at 112, Ebernoe at 90, Woods Mill 86 and the unexpected jewel Flatropers at 74.
The most frequent species at 16 of the reserves is the tiny but super abundant Plagiognathus arbustorum. Again I'm surprised it's not a shield bug, this is a bug you are unlikely to identify if you haven't made any effort with mirids and I certainly don't have a photo of it. After this it's Hawthorn Shieldbug, Capsus ater and Sloe Shieldbug at 16. The unique species account for 97 of the 308 species.
Across the county, the Dock Bug is the most frequently recorded bug with 639 records. The number of Heteroptera records ha risen to 16977 from 12011. A 41% increase in two years. This is in part to several new and prolific recorders but a big part of this is iRecord. Which leads me to the shieldbug atlas that we have been working on at the SxBRC which I'll be talking about at Adastra in a few weeks. Watch this space for an update on this project really soon! Really interesting to see how poorly recorded our most recorded and easy to identify bugs are. Not for long at this rate though. We are definitely in a new age of bug recording in Sussex!
I was very pleased to see that my post on
pan-listing Sussex Wildlife Trust's reserves is already almost my third most viewed post of all time which is pretty good considering I only wrote it on the 29th December and I've been blogging for nearly seven years now. Anyway, I'm going to be running a series of posts on this list. There are so many different ways to look at and cross-reference this list, I was going to start with the reserves but what I really wanted to do was have a look at a specific taxanomic group. Here then the spiders (not arachnids pan-listers, just the spiders) of Sussex Wildlife Trust's reserves.
We have 373 species, a fairly impressive list that is well over half of the British fauna. The top site is Rye Harbour with 201 species closely followed by Iping & Stedham Common with 199 species. It drops off really quickly after that with Old Lodge on 133 then Flatropers on 92. More surprisingly is the fact that 13 sites have less then ten species recorded and three sites don't have a single spider record! These are Gillham Wood, Brickfield Meadow and the Deneway. Jane Willmott wins the prize for the reserve manager with the most spiders overall with 245 species on her sites. Interestingly it was at Graffham where I found the as yet unidentified Philodromus last year, the specimen I kept didn't make it through the winter to reach maturity so I will be going back in the summer to look for that.
The mean last year of all spider records is 2008, showing that they have on average been recorded relatively recently. A total of 112 species have only been recorded on one of the 32 sites. Rye Harbour has the most unique species with 47 found only there out of our reserves, then Iping & Stedham which has 32 uniques. After this it plummets rapidly with Graffham, Old Lodge and Woods Mill all with only five unique species a piece. The most frequently recorded species is the Nursery-web Spider Pisaura mirabilis which has been recorded on 17 sites. Closely followed by Garden Spider Araneus diadematus and Misumena vatia on 15 of the sites.
Here is one of Rye Harbour's unique species, Pellenes tripunctatus. It will almost certainly always remain only there out of our sites being shingle specialist.
And of Iping's uniques. The awesome Aelurillus v-insignitis. It could be discovered on other heathlands in the county but as it stands it is very restricted. It benefits greatly from the management for Heath Tiger Beetles as do many other bare ground loving species.
And the most frequently recorded spider, Pisaura mirabilis. Big and easy to identify. So what do people want to hear about next?
Ten months ago during an invertebrate survey at Flatropers Wood, we (Alice Parfitt, Chris Bentley and I) collected a specimen of a female
Andrena (mining bees) that remained unidentified, until now. Bear in mind that last year was the year I first attempted keying out solitary bees, so it was with some trepidation that I keyed this particular bee out to
Andrena ferox, an RDB1 BAP species with one record in Sussex
70 years ago!!! Basically the rarest
Andrena in the country. I keyed it out again after sleeping on it and it came out to the same species (thanks to Dave Gibbs for his help). Then I keyed it out with James Power at work and we got it to the same species. Finally today, county recorder and bee wizard Mike Edwards took a look at it and confirmed it as this species. This is by far my best find of 2014. It's the jewel in the crown of the invertebrate fauna of Flatropers Wood, a site that I should add is not even an SNCI. If you want to read more about
Andrena ferox, have a look at the
BWARS page and Steven Falk's excellent f
lickr stream. It looks like many other bees but it has bright orange hind femora, which are themselves covered in orange hairs. Other bees do share this feature though, so again it comes down to microscopic features.
We have so far recorded 610 species of invertebrate from Flatropers during the survey, 297 of which were recorded from the Pylon Ride where
Andrena ferox was recorded on the 24th April 2014. We've recorded 32 species of aculeate (bees, ants and wasps) and 27 of these are from this ride. The ride really is where much of the interest of the site is but it was particularly good in the spring and the autumn, showing how important early and late visits are to these kind of surveys. It's produced some really great finds, have a look through some of the
highlights here.
So what next for this bee? Well we will go and have another look if we can find more individuals and perhaps find the nesting aggregations in April but I hear this bee is incredibly hard to find (apparently, or am I just really lucky?!) and we may never record another one. We can however take a good look at the site and knowing the bee's requirements, see if there is any management we can put in place, if any, to improve its chances there. It's a very welcome return to our invertebrate fauna and just goes to show how you can make significant finds with relatively limited experience if you adopt the right approach!
2014 was a great year of natural history for me. My database now stands at nearly 26,000 records, over 5000 added in 2014 so far. So here is my annual top ten highlights of the year in reverse order.
10) Spending some time in sand dunes
There isn't much good sand dune habitat in Sussex, so I had to go further afield.
Here is a selection being from top to bottom: Dalman's Leatherbug, Dune Waxcap, Marpissa nivoyi, Fallen's Leatherbug and Marram Grass Chelifer.
9) Flatropers Wood invertebrate survey
Flatropers isn't even an SNCI and it has shed loads of rare invertebrates. Here we have Xysticus bifasciatus and the two myrmecophiles: the Scarce Seven-spot Ladybird and Clytra quadripunctatus.
8) New Forest antics
I love finding lots of new species in a very small area. Micro-botanising overload.
7) If Darth Maul were a beetle...
Pilemostoma fastuosa. A very cool tortoise beetle from Knepp.
6) Gower power
Rock pooling on the Worm's Head produced this Green Sea Urchin among many other things.
5) Lappet
Always wanted to see one and one finally turned up in the moth trap.
4) Jurassic Carp
A trip with Seth and Tony to Kimmeridge Bay produced my first Cornish Sucker!
3) Burton Pond invertebrate survey
Here we have Xysticus audax, Alder Leaf Beetle (new to Sussex and found by Adrian Holloway) and the beetle Agapanthia villosoviridescens.
2) Creating the PSL website and article in British Wildlife
It has been a great year for pan-species listing and I'm pleased to have been able to contribute so much to the movement.
1) My first freelance invertebrate surveys struck gold!
Finding only the 7th known site for the rare Pondweed Leafhopper and also plenty of 13-spot Ladybirds was my highlight of the year. This cracking little private nature reserve just is a great example of what can be done to benefit wildlife.
So hopefully I will get back in the saddle in the new year but for the time being I'm still rather estranged from it. It's reminded me how much I love wildlife though writing this post so who knows.
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