The Lyons Share

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.

So I'd planned a rare day of doing very little and somehow find myself writing a blog on spiders and rewilding for two hours. I thought I'd check my work email quickly and there was a message from Charlotte at work saying a member of the public had spotted a Portuguese Man o' War on Shoreham beach. I emailed them asking for more detail but then realised I had better chance it and  just started walking west along the strand-line until I found one! And then less than hour later I'm looking at one. Now, I've been up and down the beach several times over the last few week searching for one of these so really pleased to find my own one.

It was incredible to find this only slightly more than a mile from my house. It took a bit of searching for though. I was very twitchy about everything blue I could see up ahead.

Portuguese Man o' Poorly Secured Livestock. Tentacles: Check. Air sack: Nope. Onwards.

Portuguese Man o' Obsessive Cleaning. Air Sack: Check. Tentacles: Nope. That doesn't look right either.

Portuguese Man o' Weight Loss. No, that's not it. Although it has an air sack of sorts and some kind tentacles. Not transparent enough though.

Portuguese Man o' Colonic Inspections. Tentacles: Check. Air sack: Check (although deflated). Translucence: Check! But it doesn't smell right. Eww.

Portuguese Man o' WAR!!! All that jazz at the bottom is far stranger than I was expecting. Quite a bizarre alien like thing indeed. This one seemed to be lacking the big sail, more of a transparent pastie sitting on top of a bubble gum flavoured Slush Puppie. Awesome. Only one guy walked by and asked me why I was taking photos of a condom. I told him what it was and he actually took a photo and got really into it.