I had a great day today handing over the Butcherlands bird survey to Glenn where we saw three Hawfinches, Peregrine and Red Kite. Then we went on to Burton where we had a look at the work being done there to open up Black Hole. It's looking really good but I didn't want to miss an opportunity to work some of the tussocks in the bog. I apologise in advance for rubbish photos in the white tray but it's a very wet site and wet day, so nice photos were not really achievable.
We recorded 27 species of spider, 16 of which were new to the site. Including Nesticus cellulanus, a spider that I was worried I might not pick up this year. Also new for the year were a couple of other 'bogey spiders' I had not seen until now but really should have. Macrargus rufus and FINALLY Robertus lividus. That puts me on 343 species for the year, just passing over the 50% mark. Now I know I am a few months behind Matt Prince on this but I am very pleased to get to this point.
New to the site today was the creepy Taranuncus setosus. A Nationally Scarce spider I have only ever found in Greater Tussock-sedge or Purple Moor-grass tussocks. It is really rather sinister looking, a big dark leggy liny with 'something of the night' about it. Here is a female on the left. To the right is the disappointing Walckenaeria nudipalpis which lacks a fancy head in the male.
And these tiny spiders must surely be young
Rugathodes instabilis given the habitat.
Then Glenn swept the first Hieroglyphic Ladybird I have ever seen in Sussex and the first on a Trust reserve since 1993 (which was actually Graffham Common). This was from an area of rush growing over Sphagnum, a long way from any heathers. Why are these so hard to find? I have now seen them three times, all this year in Surrey, Hampshire and Sussex.
Found a few nice fungi recently while walking around Graffham Common. I noticed what looked like a dirty oyster on a birch stump (not the usual place for an oyster) and when I turned it over noticed it had quite striking lilac gills. I was pretty sure it was Lilac Oysterling after a flick through the books and thanks to Martin Allison and Andy Overall for confirming, A new record for the site. Here it is from above.
Also new to the site and only the second time I have encountered it was Plums & Custard, it's not rare and very distinctive so I don't know why I have encountered it so infrequently. These grow on dead pines so it's not surprising that it's found at Graffham Common. The photos didn't come out so well, these are really attractive fungi.
Last Saturday I took the Sussex Fungi Group around the good bits of Ditchling Beacon (which probably tripled the site's fungi list) and was pleased that we came across Toasted Waxcaps in several areas. This is my 21st waxcap and a subtly beautiful one. It really does seem to be limited to chalk-grassland in the county so is a really good indicator.
Last year you may remember that we pan-listed all the Sussex Wildlife Trust reserves. You can read about this in more detail
here. With the first draft we were tantalisingly close to reaching 10,000 species. More recently though I have been quiet about it, that's because I wanted to wait until Adastra (the Sussex Biological Recorders' Seminar) to reveal who the finder of that 10,000th species.
But firstly, Adastra! Wow, how lucky are we in Sussex to have this? Well, actually it's not luck; you make your own luck. It's the coming together of a huge collective passion and hard graft coupled with some of the most biodiverse counties in the UK. There were some fantastic talks on Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers, Knepp, flies and much much more. It was also the launch of this fantastic publication. So much awesomeness in one day was difficult to take in!
I gave a talk on the species list on the reserves and announced the finder of the 10,000th species BAFTA style. The winner was James McCulloch and the species was the leaf-mining fly Phytomyza ranunculivora recorded at Graffham Common last year. This species is identifiable from its mines and can be seen above in James' photo of a buttercup leaf. The distribution of the larva's droppings in the mine are enough to clinch the ID. A huge well done to James for finding the 10,000th species. Here he is receiving the prize.
James is also a pan-species lister and I had a look at
his profile to write this blog. James is currently ranked as 51st place and has seen 2787 species. What's remarkable about this is he is 14! I put my total together before pan-species listing had a name at age 32 back in 2010. My list then was 2748! So James has beat my by 18 years. This is an incredible achievement. The prize was some NHBS book tokens and I am informed James will be acquiring some books on rove beetles. Well done James!
The species list on the reserves has already shot well beyond 10,000 after the review. In fact we are on 10,094 with the addition of the spider Steatoda grossa that Chris recorded at Rye Harbour in the last few days (thanks for the photo Chris). So what's next? Well, we'll keep adding to the list. I'm about to review all the species recorded at Seaford Head that have conservation status for the management plan. I'd love it if someone who was in a position to, were to approach me to help pan-list another wildlife trust out there, if we could do them all it would be a hugely powerful tool.
Every year just seems to beat the last one. This has been my most prolific recording year to date with well over 15000 records entered so far this year but what were the highlights? In reverse order we have:
10. Tiered Tooth at Ebernoe Common. My all time favourite fungus which also couldn't be more Christmas if it tried.
9. The first time I'd ever seen an
Osprey fishing let alone catch a fish (and then drop it). This was in the Cuckmere.
8. Rock-pooling at the Pound near Eastbourne produced my first live Lobster (which promptly nipped me) and not only my first species of sea slug but three species of them, I've still not seen them anywhere else! It's the best place I know for rock-pooling in Sussex. Thanks to Oli Froom for the photo.
7. Wildlife in Portugal was AMAZING. I had ten new birds which were all unforgettable but the highlight has to be Mediterranean Chameleon just for how much effort we put into tracking one down and its sudden appearance at the final hour.
6. Controversial as it might be, mopping up loads of rare bugs on Jersey and adding them to my PSL list was a blast. This Graphosoma lineatum says it all really.
5. After walking the beach in Hove for weeks looking for a Portuguese Man o' War, I finally struck gold after a tip off from work that they'd arrived.
4. Invertebrate survey at Butcherlands, Ebernoe Common. I still haven't identified all the specimens yet but the spiders alone were amazing. The large population of Pardosa paludicola was a real surprise to everyone. Thanks to Evan Jones for the photo.
3. The invertebrate survey at Graffham Common was even more surprising, the spiders were also out of this world there but it was perhaps this Sundew Plume, that hadn't been seen in Sussex for 20 years that was most surprising.
2. 1000 species in a day. Probably the most fun you can have in 24 hours of non-stop biological recording. Read more about this
here. Photo by Alice Parfitt.
1. Pan-species Listing ALL of Sussex Wildlife Trust's 32 reserves. When I first did this last year we were on around 9770. I have six reserves left to analyse and I will have updated the list for the year. Will we have reached 10,000? I will be talking about this at Adastra soon in more detail but I can't express enough how useful an exercise this has been and will continue to be if regularly updated. I use the spreadsheet every day now and can't imagine doing my job without it.
Let's hope that 2018 is another amazing year for wildlife recording! Thanks for reading.
This is Ero tuberculata, a nationally scarce species that is mostly a heathland specialist. The individuals at Graffham are quite bright orange compared to ones I have seen before, they are very well camouflaged against the old flowers of Bell Heather and this is indeed what I swept it from. Yesterday we hosted a BAS field meeting but the weather wasn't great. I added eight spiders to the site list but these were mostly common ones. I've just had Andy's determinations in too and it just takes the site to 139 species, which makes Graffham our third best site for spiders! This is remarkable given that it was mostly under conifers five years ago. Here are some more shots of my Ero.
Andy added three species new to the entire reserve network, this included the ichneumon wasp that parisitises the larvae of Pine weevil being
Dolichomitus tuberculatus. Amazingly
Tegenaria silvestris had never been recorded on an trust reserve (which is crazy as we cover the spiders in intimate detail and have recorded 382 species so far). The best one though (that I didn't see) was
Rugathodes instabilis. And that pretty much wraps up my invertebrate survey at Graffham for the year.
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.
Last year I beat two immature
Philodromus of the low branches of a pine tree at Graffham Common. I was convinced then that it was the
Lichen Running-spider Philodromus margaritatus. However, I couldn't be sure. I started an invertebrate survey there today and found this immature female on the same branch! And nowhere else on the site. Now this is a BAP species (Nb) but with very few records. Check out the BAS page on the species
here. It has only two records in Sussex both from Lavington (very close to Graffham) in 1979 and 1984. It's not been seen since in the county and this means it's a new species for any Sussex Wildlife Trust reserve.
Although it's not adult and I can't be 100% sure it's that species, I really can't see what else it is. I'll go and look for it again next month but who really cares when it has such a cute face on its abdomen?
It's been a while, I've been taking a break off natural history of late, partly due to the season and partly due to circumstances. CrossFit has taken up the slack though, I got my first muscle-ups last week! Anyways, this is still a wildlife blog...
During our department Christmas walk I spotted what looked like little earthballs partially buried in the soil. They didn't look quite right for them though, they appeared 'lightly dusted in cocoa powder', like handmade chocolate truffles. I refrained from putting one in my mouth but was struck by how they lacked any suggestion of a stype (stem). In the hand it felt and looked like a really light pebble. I cracked one open and it was full of gooey black stuff.
We are carrying out a great deal of felling, scraping and disturbance at Graffham and it struck me we may have brought these things up from the top soil. Were they a kind of truffle?! Well almost, I believe these are False Truffles Elaphomyces granulatus. Seldom recorded as they grow beneath the surface in pine woods, they are usually spotted by the presence of the Cordyceps fungus that parisitises them. Of course, these ones were brought up by the earth works and probably washed clean by recent showers, giving them the appearance of growing on the surface. The texts say simply edibility unknown...
Although it wasn't my most prolific blogging year, 2013 was an amazing year for natural history. Here are the top ten in reverse order.
10). Pearl-bordered Fritillary dead on a sundew at Graffham Common. When Rachael said 'I've never seen anyone get so excited over a dead butterfly' was the moment she realised her new boyfriend was an obsessed maniac.
9). Six new birds in 2013 which were: Western Bonnelli's Warbler, American Golden Plover, Hermit Thrush, Radde's Warbler, Semipalmated Sandpiper and (see below). The twitching trip to Cornwall in search of the Hermit Thrush with Mark, Neil and Seth was a blast. Despite seeing the Hermit Thrush, I thought the smartest thing that day was this Blue-rayed Limpet. It just goes to show that twitching with a bunch of pan-species listers can go in all sorts of directions.
8). An autumn at Rye Harbour NVCing the whole nature reserve. I found a
Pectoral Sandpiper but this female
Red-veined Darter was a highlight for me.
7). Teesdale. Lots of scarce new plants including this
Alpine Bartsia.
6). It was a fantastic autumn for fungi, this
Starfish or
Anemone Fungus is still giving me nightmares. And boy do I LOVE nightmares!
5). A summer of fish surveys with Sussex IFCA. I saw so many new species, I couldn't decide between
Little Cuttlefish or
Thornback Ray as my favourite.
4). Micrommata virescens and Carabus arvensis, just two of the 584 species Chris Bentley and I recorded at the Old Lodge invertebrate survey.
3). 67
Heath Tiger Beetles at Iping Common using purpose made scrapes put in with a turf stripper. Great to see this reintroduced species not only present on site but thriving. The 1st August was a great day and so glad I was able to share it with Shaun Pryor.
2). Lumpsucker and
Montagu's Sea-snail at St Mary's Island. Sublime.
1). The 'elusive'
Corncrake at Beachy Head. Say no more.
So is that it for 2013? I was hoping for an Ivory Gull on the way back south tomorrow but they all seem to have gone now. I think I might have a day at the microscope on the 31st...
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