16:04 - Harry Witts: "I don't think I would ever recognise a grasshopper new to Britain".
16:07 - Harry Witts: "GRAEME! Bring a big net! I think I have a new grasshopper!"
So yeah, here's Sphingonotus caerulans Slender Blue-winged Grasshopper - photographed by Joss Carr. It's very likely the first record of this species to naturally arrive on our shores. So how on Earth did I find myself in such a position not a month after the Verge Cricket madness?
Well, this story isn't about me, it's about the fantastic contingent of Gen Z naturalists who are making big waves in the British natural history world - many of whom are doing so using the pan-species listing approach to natural history. Two such naturalists are Harry Witts and Joss Carr. In the last couple of years, Harry has come out and shadowed me on a few different surveys in Kent and Sussex and this summer Joss has set up some fantastic PSL field meetings in London, many of which I have attended and enjoyed - they are both smashing it! PSLers are (in most parts) a sociable bunch. As I have said for years, it's not really competitive, it's collaborative and we all learn from each other. Pushing each other up not down. PSL is all about breaking down barriers and shoving gatekeeping into the history books. I always had this belief that if I had started PSLing in my teens, it would have fast-tracked me into being a more knowledgeable naturalist at an earlier age. It genuinely does just that, and now there is a growing number of super-capable young naturalists out there, many of which I hope will end up working in the conservation sector and many who already are.
After coming out with me for the day at Blean in April, Harry offered to return the favour by spending a weekend in Essex in August. Harry also invited Joss Carr, as not two weeks earlier they had had a brilliant day out at our destination - Colne Point, even finding Geocoris megacephalus new to Britain there (I had this bug new to Jersey in 2024). This is a coastal SSSI managed by Essex Wildlife Trust.
Colne Point is a sensitive site, with Harry arranging access to survey it through his work. It's pretty dangerous too, you can easily get cut off an a really high tide if you are not careful.
Of course, I wanted some lifers (I was hoping for Ground Lackey in the evening) but was also keen to get some year ticks for the 6000 Species Challenge. Dittander, Golden-samphire, Hog's Fennel and Shrubby Sea-blite were all year-ticked from the car! The first invert of the day was Clouded Yellow. Literally anything could happen...and it did.
First lifer of the day was the tiny picture wing Myopites eximia. This fly galls Golden-samphire.
And in the same first sweep, the first of many of the saltmarsh form of Rhysodromus histrio. This weirdly yellow form is incredibly different to the heathland one, I am amazed it's not a different species. Much less contrasting but clearly the same shape.
The first vac had this metallic purple beauty in it! The sea-lavender feeding Pseudaplimonus limonii. I rarely see this weevil as we have so little saltmarsh in Sussex. So little in fact, that I was getting year tick after year tick.
I got another lifer in the form of the long overdue Dun Sentinel Assiminea grayana! It seems to be really common on saltmarsh on the Thames Gateway and Essex coasts, despite being Nationally Scarce. Pleasingly proportioned.
Joss was on fine form with hoppers as per usual and has found some really significant county firsts there. As we headed to the shingle, I spotted a very large bee fly, which we think has to be Dune Villa Villa modesta. Here's one of Harry's record shots before we missed it with our nets. That's another long overdue lifer for me.
By the time we hit the shingle, Geocoris megacephalus was pretty much the commonest insect! Around this time Harry pulled two immature Heliophanus from his pocket he'd found on a previous visit. The abdomens were covered in golden and copper-coloured hairs but with no white spots. Harry thought they were likely Heliophanus auratus and I was inclined to agree. We knelt down and almost immediately Harry spotted an adult male Heliophanus running around on the shingle. I got hold of it and was happy to confirm this as an adult male Heliophanus auratus! My 565th spider in the British Isles. Here's the adult male, the legs are tri-coloured, while the abdomen is covered in dense shiny hairs that gives it a very distinct appearance. I went on to sieve another from Marram nearby but we didn't get any in the sucker.
Here's those two incredible immatures.
I also recorded Zelotes longipes - my first away from Jersey!
It's now 16:04 and things are about to get interesting.
I leg it over to where Harry is just 10 m away and he soon gets me on to an unusual orthopteran. There is talk of blue wings but the animal I am looking at looks nothing like the Blue-winged Grasshoppers Oedipoda caeruelscens I know well from Jersey. Smaller, slimmer, less contrasty, differently-coloured and with seemingly proportionally longer wings. I have a good side view with my close focus bins and the thing that struck me was the constricted neck and raised head. I think I exclaimed "It looks like a locust!".
Here's Harry's shots taken at a safe distance. This really captures the moment for me.
Quite hard to spot, isn't it? Until it flies!
I heavily cropped Harry's shot here to show the view I had through my bins, showing that oddly-positioned head.
I attempted to get it in the net but it crawled out from under it and flew. Long-winged but with very pale blue (almost white) hindwings. Again, quite unlike Blue-winged Grasshopper. It also flew quite some distance for a grasshopper, but we sprinted after it relocating it almost instantly among the shingle. I wish someone could have filmed it, it felt like comedy gold as we 'moved as one' as Harry described it. I soon had my hands on it and transferred it to the dirtiest pot in the entomological world - at least we were not going to lose it now and could get some record shots of that hind wing indoors.
I was utterly convinced this was some other species of grasshopper with blue wings. Joss had found a candidate on his phone, read out the differences and tracked down a 2024 record on the Eurostar tracks at Folkstone on iNaturalist before I had even unlocked my phone (how do Gen Z work their phones so quickly?). Anyways, I was pretty sure we had nailed the ID with Sphingonotus careulans. I called Peter Sutton up straight away. As if all the Verge Cricket/Praying Mantis/Blue-winged Grasshopper madness wasn't enough!
The next day, Joss got a shot of the hind wing and the lovely shot at the top of this post. Soon after Peter Sutton confirmed our ID was correct.
And here's me, Joss and Harry enjoying the sunset as we wait to do a bit of dusking.
I spotted this Ray's Knotgrass on the beach.
Harry found Armadillidium album under some logs. He was on fire!
Dusking wasn't the greatest but we did see lots of Sandhill Rustics, which I have not seen since before Joss was born.
And then we called in on the way back to look for Agonopterix putridella - which Harry spotted! A super-rare micro that only feeds on Hog's Fennel! What a day. Utterly unforgettable.
Time for Bob Dylan to provide the sound track for my pensive conclusion...
Our invertebrate fauna becomes more continental by the day, mostly down to man-made climate change, with species colonising our shores almost as fast we can write them down. Furthermore, that rate of change is increasing, it's as if we are heading towards an 'entomological singularity' if you will. This leads me to a state of cognitive dissonance, where I feel both joy and terror simultaneously at seeing these novel species. I want both more of them AND less of them. It's vital that we record them though. So lots of keen eyes on the ground is essential in all of this.
However, the great news is, I think that the young PSLers are doing a great job at carrying the torch of natural history, biological recording and wildlife conservation into the uncertain future that awaits us all. They're not just brilliant naturalists for their age - they're brilliant naturalists period! I don't just go out with them to show them stuff, I go out with them as I know they'll get me a load of lifers too! I absolutely love being shown things by people decades younger than me. It's great fun seeing PSL thriving in this way.
If you want to get into PSL, it's totally free and you can sign up here www.panspecieslisting.com
On Thursday morning (6th August), I hit 10,000 species seen in the British Isles. I first pulled my list together on the 1st August 2010, so you could say it's took me 16 years to get to this point. Yet I started recording when I was 10, so you could also say it actually took 38 years. Or 48 years. Whatever the time scale, I feel privileged to be one of only three people to every get to the 10,000 mark. Looking at the rankings though, this is really going to change over the coming years. I predict some of the younger more active listers could hit 10,000 before they reach 30.
My 10,000th species was very nearly a bug new to Britain but it needs more work to confirm it, or it might not be possible to get to species. I didn't want to go and find something, I just wanted it to happen organically - I really love the randomness of PSL. That side of it really appeals to my ADHD brain. I was working at Blean Wednesday to Friday last week and again stayed at Sandwich Bird Observatory. I didn't get anything new at Blean that day and I ran a trap at the Obs. So my 10,000th species was...
Ancylosis oblitella. A rather dull pyralid. It must be common there as there were 10 in the trap! In fact, I actually quite like that it wasn't that scarce and wasn't that exciting. Because that is what most species are like. Something amazing would have been too easy, and to be fair PSL is all about trying to master all the species within each group over your life, and most species are not rare or scarce.
Which is how minutes later I hit my 10,001 species with one of my longest standing bogies! Dark Spinach. How has it took me 35 years to see this moth?
The next day at Blean, I picked up my 10,002nd species. This gorgeous cranefly. What a beauty! I believe this is Metalimnobia bifasciata. Yet another fairly widespread species.
In the evening, I went out with Jonny Bull the Assistant Warden at the Obs to set some moth traps up. I couldn't believe it when I saw my 10,003rd species - Sharp Rush! I had no idea how different this thing is compared to Sea Rush (on the right). What a rush dude! It's 6 foot high and could easily have your eye out, the spines are brutal and the inflorescences are massive.
Here it is the next morning. It's like someone magically froze a firework! I actually hear firework noises in my head when I look at these tussocks.I got a couple more new moths in the traps the next morning but failed to take any photos. So I am now on 10,005 species! The moth traps were epically good but I will do a separate post about that as part of the 6000 Species Challenge.
The rate at which I see new species is easy to forecast over long time scales, in fact as far back as last year I expected it to happen this August! Now, is 20,000 species possible in a lifetime? I will give it a go...
A massive thanks Jonny Bull and the team at the Obs but also a huge thanks to Will Langdon, Alex Press and Joss Carr for getting me loads of lifers on an epic trip to Epping Forest last weekend. It was all the more exciting as I wasn't expecting to go!
If you fancy giving pan-species listing a go, you can sign up free to the website here www.panspecieslisting.com, It might just change your life!
I haven't posted a longer update here in a while of my '6000 species in 2026' pan-species year-listing challenge, as I have been doing more daily updates on Instagram/Facebook. I thought an end of June update would be a good thing, the 'half way' stage in the challenge (actually not quite, as there are 184 days between 1st July and 31st December). Anyways, I ended 30th June on 3,840 species for the year (64.0% of the challenge complete). I am about 850 species ahead of where I would be if I were to add 16.4 species a day, every day (exactly the number I would need to reach 6,000 on the nose). Of course, that's already out of date (I am on 3,862 species - 64.4%). On the 30th June I was working at Heyshott Down, doing a plant survey, where I added Marsh Fragrant-orchid and Musk Orchid to the year list (along with Goshawk).
This is a really fun challenge but I certainly won't be doing it every year. Almost everything I am adding at the moment is from work and moth trapping. I am not looking at any specimens until after September. I had planned to go to Scotland in the last week of June but various things conspired against me, but I did have a few days out instead. A day trip to the Cambridgeshire fens with Peter Sutton was great fun. I finally got to see Reed Leopard!
And this aptly named Lister's River Snail! What an absolutely beautiful aquatic snail this is.
Wait, the top of that snail looks familiar? Oh yeah, it's the poop emoji!
And of course, the star of the show - the rather rare Agabus undulatus!
I have seen lots of new stuff already this year, 235 species to be precise! That's 1.30 species per day. I am only 53 species away from the mythical 10,000 species for my PSL life list, something that will likely now happen in late August. Everything in the following collage I have seen new in the first half of 2026.
One of the interesting things about this challenge is how how it has changed my behaviour. Now, we had an epic trip to Cornwall rock-pooling at the end of March/start of April. This was so good, that it has sort of ruined rock-pooling for me in Sussex. You have to work really hard here to find new things, as such I have only been out once since. Meanwhile, two or my largest target taxa are vascular plants (with a 1,050 species target) and moths (with a 850 target). Now beetles are my highest target (I have set myself a ludicrous 1,200 species) and although a lot of these are field identifiable, a huge number are also sitting in alcohol waiting to be identified over the winter. Not so with moths and vascular plants. They're both great groups to add yo your list as the year progresses. As such, I have really got back into these groups, especially moth trapping, dusking and going out at night. I have even really been enjoying gen detting moths. It's also a really great way to do recording when you are already busy! As well as a great way to cool off during a heatwave - go nocturnal! Nothing has been more exciting though than netting an Eastern Bordered Straw at Hurston Warren at the start of that invasion (before my feed was saturated with other people's pictures of them), what a moth!
After 137 days I matched my first incarnation of my pan-species list. That was 2,748 species that once took me 32 years to accumulate. In other words, it took me 137 days to match what once took me 11,795 days! I can't think of any better way to show the power of the pan-species listing approach than this! I should add I have never once used AI to identify anything and never will, you can read more about that in my book!
Anyways, here's where I am at with each taxa. I have reached my targets for protists, other animals, annelids, sea-spiders, crustaceans, springtails, 3-taled bristletails, fish, amphibians, cnidarians and bryophytes. I am getting very close on mammals, molluscs and butterflies.
This chart is interesting, you can see the rapid growth of the list in January that then flattens out in Feb and Mar where I became increasingly desk bound. Then the field season started at the start of April, from this point on I am adding species at a very consistent rate, around 24 species a day!
So I thought I would pull out the ten most speciose taxa and chart them in the same way (the other 28 taxa are displayed as 'others' here in dark blue - the fourth line down). Vascular plants (mid blue) are in the lead for now, but could well be over taken by beetles and/or moths. Beetles (orange) show a vert similar pattern to the vascular plants. Moths have REALLY ramped up in the last six weeks, storming past bugs, spiders and more. Moth trapping can add dozens of species a day (of course, the by-catch is significant too) but my garden actinic is typically one or two new species a night (so I have taken to trapping with my MV at my old place of work, Southerham). The two steep pulses below (the grey line) represent the madness of the two heat waves. Spiders (yellow) started hard but plateaued. This is because most spiders I couldn't field ID are waiting for me to look at over the winter. Bugs (in light blue) are likely to overtake spiders at some point. Flies, birds, hymenopterans, molluscs and bryophytes all cluster together, but with flies just nudging into 6th place (in green).
Will I make it? Sure, I think so. Burn out is something I just don't get, I love it all too much! I would love to get to 6,000 by the end of the year, with specimens further adding to the total as I process them from Jan to Mar next year. Fungi season in the autumn will surely add a few hundred species too. I still haven't seen a Dunlin, Grey Plover, Goldeneye, Goosander or Pink-footed Goose! An autumn trip to Norfolk is on the cards for sure.
If you want to get into pan-species listing, you can sign up to our website for free here www.panspecieslisting.com. And it's well worth getting my book, which has already gone to reprint! https://pelagicpublishing.com/products/pan-species-listing.And please do consider sponsoring me for this challenge, I am raising funds to help Sussex Wildlife Trust manage their land. My Just Giving page is here.
I'll be at Global Birdfair the weekend after next, so come and find me. Will do another post on that in the next few days.
I am trying to finish my annual monitoring of the arable margins of the Norfolk Estate this weekend but the weather has been challenging. I shot up to Lee Farm for an hour yesterday afternoon at 3.30 pm after the storms dried out (to make this afternoon a more realistic possibility). This is year six of me monitoring the Peppering side (and year three of the Lee Farm side). This year has so far been exceptional and it is amazing just how any new species are still turning up.
So, here is what happened in just one hour of monitoring two arable margins of two fields yesterday. I recorded 103 field dets in that hour, not in itself exceptional. At about 26 minutes into the survey I looked in the net and saw this!!! Carpocoris purpureiepennis. A recent colonist and a lifer, with very few UK records so far. It was the first to be noted on the new pan-species listing website. I was pretty stoked with this, as there are very few shieldbugs in the UK I have not seen now. I carried on looking through the same sweep net sample, and saw this! The same species but showing how variable they are.
Here they are side by side.
They are pretty big bugs, and strikingly different to anything else. They also look pretty odd underneath.
I walked back and swept a third one, which was very soft and clearly teneral, showing confirmed breeding. Apart from a nymph of this genus recorded in Kent earlier this month, this seems to be the first confirmed breeding of this species in the UK according to Tristan Bantock. Now there are lots of other species in the genus on the Continent, so you really do need to check any Carpocoris carefully.
On the same margin, I turned one big flint and found Eratigena picta, a Nationally Rare house spider with very few records nationally. I had in this field last year and last month.
Other species seen in that hour included a nymph of a Vernal Shieldbug, Dark Green Fritillary, Sitochroa palealis and Cerceris quinquefasciata. It was an eventful hour. I particularly enjoyed this five-spotted ladybird, which is clear an aberrant Seven-spot Ladybird, but shows the importance of correctly writing common names.
But the other day at Peppering was also really exciting. The first margin had a Hornet Robberfly! The first one I have recorded up there in six years.Small Blues have colonised the margins this year with the new seed mix providing plenty of Kidney-vetch.
I found this scarce migrant moth, Loxostege sticicalis. A lifer and with less than 30 Sussex records. Sitochroa palealis and Evergestis extimalis were also new to the site. There were plenty of Clouded Yellows too.Then I nearly tripped over this huge Large Conehead, another recent colonist! This is my first for the site and my first West Sussex record. This is an impressive cricket.
I also heard a Whimbrel flying over and found Knapweed Broomrape.
Last month was exciting too! I stumbled on my first ever Small Marbled there.
As well as a couple of Bordered Straws! Who needs a moth trap when you can just stumble upon moths in fields like this?! It also shows just how much insect migration is happening this year (although I have recorded many more migrant insects here than anywhere else on the Downs this year).
These arable margins are all in place to help the Grey Partridge project up there, which is a fantastic initiative and is really working to help biodiversity across the board. The farmers and keepers are working together with ecologists to produce something really exceptional. I have recorded over 1,000 species on just 16 fields over the years (and have hardly mentioned here the host of native rare species, with over a 100 noted so far). This year, the margins have been incredibly exciting and diverse though. Now hopefully I can get up there this avo and finish the survey for the year...
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