Ground bugs are great, they are practically beetles. And this smart looking black one with a big orange blob on has been on my 'list of cool looking things I want to see' for some time. Behold, Aphanus rolandri! Now I took the above photo in the Brecks last year, the only time I have seen it. Meanwhile, Mike Edwards was doing a survey for us at West Dean Woods and picked it up there new to West Sussex within a few days of my record! Now what's interesting about this is how different the sites are, given that there are so few records in Sussex. There is a very old record from Seaford in 1949 and two from Brighton between 2006 and 2011 and that is it. It's a big and distinctive bug, I would expect it to come to me to verify via iRecord if it was more widespread but that hasn't happened.
Now the ones I saw in the Brecks were in a huge, hot, dry and old clearing on an abandoned airfield. The immediate vicinity was calcareous-like grassland due to the substrate put down for the runway. As this has been there since WW2, there is a great continuity to this glade. A mass of Wood Small-reed (quite uncommon down in Sussex compared to East Anglia) was growing next to the old runway, mainly unmanaged and it was collapsing in on itself forming a very hot and dry litter layer. There were hundreds of nymphs and adults running around in this having a whale of a time.
You can read about it
here on the British Bugs site.
At West Dean Woods, Mike told me they were plentiful and clearly well established there. Below is the site it was found on. A very recent and quite small clearing in fairly humid woodland. Even the recently cleared coppice coupes nearby are more like the Breckland site than this is but they lack any continuity of bare ground that even a very small glade like this can offer. It's fascinating, as these sites are so different, it makes you think why is it so scarce down here? Or are we actually just seeing the start of a colonisation event from a species that's actually not that fussy and just does well in warm sites? The impression I get is that it is genuinely scarce and whatever these two sites have in common is the answer but there doesn't seem to be much in common!
This fly is special. It's unusual for me to feature it on my blog as it's not a species I have seen. It is however, the first species added to the reserve network by someone else after they received a copy of the spreadsheet. I give you reserve species 9793. Or our 1331st fly. Or should I say Blepharipa schineri. It's a tachinid that Tony Davis picked up at West Dean Woods back in 2013. Added to the British list in 2001, it is thought to parasitise Gypsy Moths on the continent, so it's likely to be on something like Black Arches here (thanks Tony).
But to show you how much he's got the bug when it comes to filling in the gaps in the spreadsheet, this was in the email I got from him last night...
"I'm lovin' this!".
I've only sent it out to about a dozen people, so if this is happening in January, you wait until the summer! Bring it on.
It could be something to do with that I have been watching the Walking Dead all day that I could come up with such a blog title for what was essentially a survey of Wild Daffodils, but as usual, it's the the less obvious things I encounter when I'm out, the underdogs, that interest me. Yes, Wild Daffodils have their own intrinsic beauty but this Toothwort that Nick Sturt got me on to, does it more for me. Looking like dentures that have fallen out of a gawping botanist's mouth or a half-buried dead creature, Toothwort has to be one of the strangest plants out there. I find all the plants that can't be bothered to get their energy from the Sun hugely fascinating. Considering the host is Hazel, why is it so scarce at West Dean Woods?
It was 'bring your girlfriend to work day' last Thursday and Rachael was great at spotting daffs, even when they weren't flowering. She also spotted this Yellow Brain Fungus.
The mapping exercise was a success, I hope to show the results on here next week. For those that like Wild Daffodils, here are bunch of the showy little tarts. Apparently, they look amazing this year! Whatever floats your boat, give me Toothwort any day!
Finally, to dispel any myths that I'm not out there doing natural history or listing anymore, my current list is on 4209 and I've added 30 species (mostly invertebrates) since the start of March! All of this is from the two surveys I am doing at work this year, one at Filsham Reedbed with Alice Parfitt and the other at Old Lodge with Chris Bentley. I anticipate these surveys being the main source of additions to my list this year based upon the success of the March visits but that is another story...
I'm not really that up on mammals so it will not come as a surprise to know that I saw my first ever Dormice at West Dean Woods today! I went out with Mark Monk-Terry and the volunteers (who all have Dormice handling licences I should add) to monitor the population there. There are 50 boxes that are checked and any small mammals are sexed and weighed, the animal above weighed only 12g. We saw I think 13 Dormice in all, and this was the only one that was in a torpor, perhaps because it was alone within a small nest. Here is a better example of a Dormouse nest.
We found a male and female in one box that were huge, much bigger than the others, and the female, one of the biggest they had ever seen, was thought possibly to be pregnant. At 35g she was nearly three times the size of the one above. It's nearly as big as Mark's hand. We left a flyer for Weight Watchers.
I don't really get cute things but I have to say they are quite cute. Compared to the hectic nature of the Yellow-necked Mouse below, that run around inside the bag like a whirlwind and don't really give the impression that they would be easy to handle, the Dormice do seem quite appealing. They are very docile, they don't bite often and even fall asleep in the bags when you are weighing them. They also look considerably less like rats and much more like tiny monkeys with their rather silly feet (look at the second photo above). So, I can see why people go all gooey eyed at them.
You can see the complete yellow band across the neck on the Yellow-necked Mouse above. Compare to the Wood Mouse below. It was a great day and it has made me realise I would like to do more with small mamals. For part two of todays adventures you will have to wait until tomorrow as Mark showed me two species of fungi new to me at Ebenoe right near the car park!
I'm not punching the air at the joy of not having back ache, this is the call of my favourite bird, Mediterranean Gull and today I saw more of them in a single group than I have ever seen before. Driving south from West Dean Woods we disturbed a flock of gulls from a field very close to the road, there were at least 40, probably many more Meds. A few Black-headed Gulls in with them but flock was very much dominated with Meds. I took a few shots but they don't do it justice. What were they doing at this time of year in such numbers in the middle of a field?
Here is the rare four-winged sub species and a Black-headed Gull for comparison. I can't get enough of these birds, everything about them is just perfect and I still get this amazing rush every time I see one, even though I must have seen thousands by now. I don't know why. Ye-eah!
At West Dean I heard my first
Turtle Dove of the year as well as a singing
Firecrest. Five species of longhorn beetle, with four firsts for the year. A single
Drab Looper and this stunning blue beetle, which as far as I can tell is the
Birch Leaf-roller Byctiscus betulae which was a tick for me. If you wanna hear what Med Gulls sound like, click here
YE-EAH!
Here's a nice and easy-to-identify spider, Diaea dorsata. A crab spider that I see quite often in West Sussex, this one was at West Dean Woods. I have only ever come across it by sweeping or beating though. Also there today were two singing Firecrests that I could hear at the same time and some Crossbills flew overhead.
I did the breeding bird survey at Woods Mill this morning and there were two singing Nightingales right out in the open, I managed to film both of them but I'll have to wait to find the time to upload the videos. At least four Whitethroats there and a Cuckoo. In the moth trap was a Powdered Quaker (photo), Oak-tree Pug and a few craneflies that I'm going to take a pop at as well as a second hand Dark Sword-grass caught by Dave and Penny. Pan-species list currently at 3239.
Today's farm in deepest West Sussex had a surprise in the form of a Hawfinch, followed by a flock of three several hours later, then another five, beating the Skylarks today, of which there was only a single flock of six. I bet some of these birds are from the West Dean estate. I also saw another Merlin and the biggest flock of Greenfinches so far (40+). After walking 38 km this weekend, it's time to crash now.
OK, so some might argue the Drab Looper has 'character' but I think the name says it all. It's small, it's brown, has no markings and is a nightmare to photograph (hence the rubbish shot) as I can never get them to stay bloody still! It is however, nationally scarce (Nb) and a BAP priority species. West Dean Woods is a great site for Drab Looper, the sole foodplant is Wood Spurge and this plant is abundant during the early stages of the coppice cycle. The moth is also a day flyer (a surprisingly strong flyer for such a little moth) and I recorded 14 today but only in areas that were coppiced in the winter of 2008/09. I also saw dozens of Silver-Ys and a few Speckled Yellows. I completed my first quadrats of the year today at West Dean, good to get back into some vegetative botany. I also saw this longhorn beetle feeding on Wood Spurge, it's a female Black-striped Longhorn Beetle Stenurella melanura. Birds heard but not seen included Turtle Dove, Crossbill and Siskin. Earlier this morning during a breeding bird survey at Butcherlands I saw a Hobby and yet another Turtle Dove.
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