The Lyons Share

My personal challenge to get to 3000 species by the end of the year seems very likely to succeed...and some! Jo noticed this tiny micro moth on the bedroom wall last night. I potted it up and looked at it this morning and it was surprisingly a little tineid that I had not recorded before. There are two very closely related species and they are best separated by the colour of the hindwing. This one is Monopis obviella (it has a darker hindwing with a purplish tinge - visible under the microscope) and feeds upon animal/vegetable detritus and bird's nests. It got me thinking, I have seen 2973 species now, only 27 away from 3000. Given I have a fungi recording day planned to The Mens on Wednesday with Martin Allison, I may actually even get to 3000 by the end of the month! So, what will the 3000th species be? Anyone care to guess?

There was a good visible migration of birds this morning. During the two minutes it takes me to get to the corner shop, I heard a Goldcrest in the elms outside my house and heard Skylark, Redwing, Meadow Pipit and Siskin flying over. Ha ha, I can actually hear the Siskins flying over as I am writing this!

Finally, I'm back in Sussex! The snail course was awesome. I have added 17 new species of which 14 are molluscs and I am confident I could identify most of the aquatic snails now (but not the bivalves - we didn't cover them). Anyway, first of all, here is a little Flounder we saw in a stream with a brackish element to it. You can tell it's a Flounder by the 40 rays in the anal fin, the other species of flat fish that come this far inland have many more (Dab and Plaice for example). We also found these tiny Jenkin's Spire Snails Potamopyrgus antipodarum.

I also spotted a few of these tiny Leach's Bithynias Bithynia leachii which is a local species and apparently indicates a rich aquatic mollusc fauna. Like yesterday's Common Bithynia but with a more rounded operculum. I think I will practice on the ponds at Woods Mill in my lunch breaks. Now, I am looking forward to two days off. I am a little miffed to find I was a few miles from an Isabelline Wheatear today and didn't realise it...

I am writing this from Flatford Mill Field Centre where I am spending the weekend on an aquatic snails identification course. I have (so far) found, keyed-out and identified about 10 aquatic molluscs. I even got a video of a translucent Keeled Ramshorn's Planorbis carinatus heart beating, although I have not been able to upload it onto my laptop yet. Anyway, here are a few of the species I have looked at so far:

This tiny translucent species is the Lake Limpet Acroloxus lacustris, note how the spur does not project parallel to the long axis of the animal and goes off to one side.

This one was my favourite, a really pretty little snail called the River Nerite Theodoxus fluviatilis that looks like the Slipper Limpets you get on Brighton beach, only much smaller and it's also (probably) native. It even has the little ledge underneath that the Slipper Limpet has.

Finally, this snail has an operculum (a door that locks it in) that sticks to its body when the snail is out of its shell. It's called the Common Bithynia Bithynia tentaculata. Operculums can have spiral patterns or concentric rings. This one has concentric rings.

Also, I've had a fish tick! We have caught at least four Spined Loach Cobitis taenia. I used to catch Stone Loach Barbatula barbatula by hand in the brook by my house when I was a kid and I thought these looked very different straight away. They are quite compressed laterally with a bullish face, square-ended tail and more obvious spotting along the body. They also have spines under the eye which are very hard to see, until you get one stuck in your hand that is. Spined Loach appears to be much more restricted in its distribution than Stone Loach too.

Whilst I'm on the subject of fish, we pulled this little Elver (instantly christened Elvis) out of an old muddy ditch whilst looking for snails. It's been a long time since I saw an Eel, I really miss the electrofishing that Matt Self and I used to do at the RSPB. Freezing cold, covered in Eel slime, exhausted  from carrying boats and generators but we got to see some of the best reserves from places few people ever get to see. Eels are probably one of my favourite species in the UK for that reason alone. I can smell the Eel slime just thinking about them. Mmm!

Whilst we were having lunch, I spotted a squash bug on a barn and thought it looked a little more slender. than the common species. I was sure it was not Dock Bug Coreus marginatus and soon figured out it was Box Bug Gonocerus acuteangulatus. It appears that this once very restricted (RDB1) species has recently undergone a rapid expansion after changing its habits and not being so picky about its food. All the same, it's great to see one and another new species for my list.

During a walk around Ebernoe discussing bat monitoring yesterday, Tony Hutson and I very nearly stepped on this young Grass Snake. Tony soon spotted two more about the same size and we were quite surprised to find them there. They were on a very narrow path with tall and dense Holly on either side and it seemed strange that the animals would be able to get warm enough with such limited sunlight. Perhaps that was why they were so obliging? I also heard yet another singing Firecrest on the edge of the northern pylon ride.

Also, Tony spotted this fungi, which I am pretty sure is the RDB Pseudocraterellus undulatus. I know this from Ebernoe where two years ago it was abundant but the fungi here looks younger and smaller. 

I am currently taking a breather from the aquatic molluscs course that I am on here at Flatford Mill in Suffolk. This time though I have access to a wireless network so I can tell my wildlife adventures in as close to real time as is practically possible...

Saw a couple of Red Kites today including this one at Levin Down and then another one just west of Storrington. There was also a smart looking Firecrest in the scrub at Levin singing away, in exactly the same place I had one almost two and a half years ago. They seem to be quite loyal to their sites.

This is one of the Tegenaria species, or House Spiders, (there are 9 species in the genus on the British list according to the British Archnological Society website) and I'm not able to identify them yet. I would need to take the specimen and look at his palps under the microscope. This one was stuck in another spiders web and looked very dead. So much so, that Nick made a girly yelp when it suddenly came to life when he went to retrieve the specimen! Ha ha. We were there to try and relocate the Purse-web Spider that Nick found there yesterday (and to exercise my back) but we couldn't find it. Bugger.

We saw quite a few spiders in the half hour we were there including these species. The top one is  Amaurobius similis and was found on a flint wall. It has distinctive palps. The middle photo is one of the missing-sector spiders Zygiella x-notata and was hanging around on a grave. The bottom photo is Drassodes cupreus and was happily sheltering on the edge of a crypt. You need to see this under the microscope to separate from another closely related species.

On the way out I saw what I thought was Bermuda Grass growing on some bare ground between gravestones. I took a specimen and it turned out to be the naturalised Hairy Finger-grass.

Many years ago, the Woods Mill stream was split in two for a short section to create the mill leat to feed the mill wheel. The stream itself, in an unnatural position, has dug deep into the clay and is very steep sided and uniform in appearance, the area does not function very well as a flood plain for this reason. There is no ecotone between the river and grassland plants. A joint project is underway to realign a section of the stream and this started last week. In the above image, the new stream route is being plotted by removing the top soil.(the current stream follows the line of trees in the distance and to the right of the digger). Riffles, oxbow lakes and woody debris will be added to the design and the project should be finished in two or three weeks. I can't wait to see how it recovers and what new species it will attract. Exciting times! I will be taking photographs throughout the project.

Birds today included the first Redwings this end of the year, Yellowhammer, Skylark and Cormorant. There were still quite a few inverts around today, including Roesel's Bush-crickets and Long-winged Coneheads. I spotted this Nursery-web Spider Pisaura mirabilis. I like this spider, mainly 'cause it is the only one in the genus and there is nothing else that looks like it! It is very, very common and reminds of the big 'facehugger' like huntsmen spiders you get in Australia!

Don't worry, this is not a proposal to make another TV follow up of another Shane  Meadows movie. I have recently become fascinated by Purse-web Spiders Atypus affinis. I have still never seen one but yesterday I did find the web of one. I was told recently that the spiders are present in Woodvale Crematorium in central Brighton. The spiders need south facing slopes with dry bare ground and this habitat is provided at Woodvale, there is some nice chalk-grassland surviving there, it makes me wonder what my house was built on? What species once flew and crawled through the space that is now my home?

Anyway, I was told about this spider and it's fascinating life story and I would like to pass this on. It lives in a closed long silken tube (more like a sock than a purse) which is buried vertically in the ground with just the top (maybe 10 cm) sticking out.  There can be as much as 50 cm underground, they are real grave diggers! It lives at the bottom but when a none suspecting invertebrates crawls over the exposed section, it runs up and attacks it with its HUGE jaws. It then drags it through the web, devours it and then goes back up and fixes the hole it made. It is the only species in the sub-order in the UK and is quite unlike anything else. I would love to see one but I don't know how, other than digging one up, which  I wouldn't do as this would be destructive to the spider and might get you in trouble in a cemetery! They rarely leave the web so I'll just have to wait for a chance encounter. Anyway, second best is the photo of the web and knowing I was less than a metre from one! There are lots of pictures of them on Google and a video on YouTube. It's amazing to think they take four years to mature.

One of my favourite aspects of birding is learning songs and calls. I shout them out where ever I am, whatever I am doing, no matter how inappropriate. Meetings, weddings, funerals. You get the idea. I can't help it, I'm sorry (I'm soo not sorry). I also do it during films. After natural history, watching movies is probably my second favourite past time. Now I have found a way to combine the two! I have been keeping a mental list for a long time so I am going to kick start my list on a new page with a few things that I remember and an awful film that I have just watched, Centurion. The highlight for me was the Green Woodpecker that called half way through the movie, it was that bad. Neil Marshall, Dog Soldiers and The Descent were ace, what's this rubbish? I should say this is not a cry for sending in birds you have heard in films, this is my own perverse pleasure I am sharing with you. For me it is all about the surprise when I am totally absorbed in a film when suddenly I'm shouting out the name of a bird I've just heard in the background. A perfect synergy between two hobbies. I don't want the surprise ruined. Now I did hear a Common Sandpiper the other day but I can't remember the film....

You might think this is a little sad, and you would be completely right.

I just spent an hour trying to key out an ichneumon wasp I found in a moth trap at Woods Mill last week. I was sent a key by Dr Gavin Broad of the NHM to nocturnal ichneumons (in other words, the ones that turn up in moth traps!). I think this is Netelia virgata but I cannot be sure, I can't even find any pictures of it on the Internet. I'll send it off and we shall have to wait and see. I don't think though I will be getting huge numbers of ticks this way...

I am going to start a new feature, a monthly update on the 1st of each month showing what I have added to my all-taxa list in the preceding month. It became too time consuming to update it each time I saw something new. Once a month it is then. And what a month! Firstly, I should say that some of the ticks this month are actually things I saw years ago and had forgotten about, hence the huge jump since the last update.  I was on 2834 on the 10th September, by the 1st October I reached 2951! So, where have most of the ticks come from? Fungi, I have been really lazy with fungi until recently and I am really starting to get the bug.

Vascular plants	1044
Moths	761 (+23)
Birds	331 (+2)
Beetles	195 (+12)
Fungi	127 (+58)
Mosses	83 (+6)
Butterflies	50
True flies	49
Mammals	38
Molluscs	37 (+3)
Fish	36
Spiders	32
Dragonflies	29
True bugs	28 (+7)
Crickets & grasshoppers	18
Aculeates	18 (+1)
Liverworts	18 (+6)
Crustaceans	17 (+3)
Lichen	10 (+6)
Amphibians	6
Reptiles	6 (+1)
Seaweeds & algae	5
Anemones	4
Cockroaches	3
Caddisflies	2
Earwigs	1
Ant-lion	1
Lacewings	1
Leeches	1