The Lyons Share

This is actually a hoverfly Eristalis pertinax, not a Honey Bee. It's a pretty convincing mimic and I saw loads of them today nectaring (with Honey Bees) on some Ivy blossom that was catching the afternoon sunlight. I am always surprised how great a nectar source Ivy is this time of year, it's even worth checking it at night for moths. Eristalis pertinax looks quite like the Drone Fly Eristalis tenax but that has all dark legs, the front and mid tarsi are yellow on pertinax. This is one of the commonest hoverflies and I see it from earliest spring well into autumn (but not so often in mid summer). I also saw several Melanostoma mellinum, which was a new one for me. I am now only three away from 3000!

Neil Fletcher and I went into Hoe Wood today to photograph Common Tamarisk-moss Thuidium tamariscinum for a bryophytes course planned for next year. Neil got the shots but on the way out, I spotted this crazy caterpillar walking up some Isothecium moss on the base of an oak tree. It's the larva of the Pale Tussock moth and I am really pleased how this shot came out. I love the nearest row of 'exploding' yellow hairs, like a fire works display. The narrow jet of long red hairs above the vent is also impressive, as are the velvety-black pits between the segments, they seem to reflect no light what-so-ever.

The Woods Mill stream restoration is well underway. It's perhaps a week away from completion, the channel has nearly been cut and the ox-bow lakes are being added. Later this week the riffles and course woody-debris will be some of the final touches before the new channel is connected up and water is allowed to flow  along it naturally (the water in the above photo has simply gathered at the base of the channel - it's not connected up yet).

This has been a joint project between SWT and Environment Agency and has been many years in the making. It's great to see it finally taking shape. It does (and will for a short time) look very bare but this was always going to happen, a necessary part of the process. Vegetation will establish very quickly and by next spring and summer the site will be unrecognisable. I am monitoring these changes, with amongst many things, fixed-point photography. I hope to put together a 'time-lapse' sequence of stills. Watch this space, it's going to be amazing!

As we were observing the project today we saw a Little Egret fly over and I heard my first Redpolls of the season. This latest post will have put birds as my most frequently used label, bad luck beetles!

This is Helophilus pendulus (which roughly translates as dangling swamp-lover - it's not an official name, don't know if it has one and I don't know if it is particularly relevant), and is one of the commonest hoverflies in the UK.  As far as I know there are four species in the genus. They are all black and yellow, medium sized hovers with vertical stripes on the thorax. One is restricted to Scotland (groenlandicus) and is very dark in appearance so we can eliminate that one. Of the remaining two, one has an all yellow face trivittatus, you can see from the above photo that this specimen has a black line down the centre of the face. That leaves two species, pendulus and the more local hybridus. The hind tibia (middle section of the leg) of hybridus has only about one third yellow while in pendulus at least half is yellow (in this case nearly least two thirds are yellow). Therefore this is Helophilus pendulus. See British Hoverflies by Alan Stubbs and Steven Falk for more details.

I have been lecturing for Birkbeck all weekend, hence the blog has been quiet. It's been a really exhausting weekend as it always is with all the travelling but this was exacerbated by being stuck in three huge traffic jams and having by far the largest class of students. That meant I had no time to do any natural history what-so-ever except to photo this hoverfly and spot another Brambling. Seems like this year is going to be a good Brambling year having recorded four so far this end of the year.

Ha ha, I was just looking at a friends profile on the Internet Movie Database (who is working on the new X-Men movie) and discovered that I am on there too for my appearance on Springwatch's Wild Night In! How mad is that! Here is the link. Being a massive film nerd this was quite a  big surprise! Somehow, Wild Night In has gone down as a TV movie?! If you then click on the link to the show itself, I am on there on top of Graham Norton (oo-er) and more importantly, two spaces above Bill Oddie! (I appreciate this is just down to the alphabetical order of things but little victories and all that). Anyway, that's another story. To be on the same cast list as David Attenborough and Prince William does make me feel rather proud.

Whilst I was walking along the mill leat at Woods Mill yesterday (14th October) to photograph the river restoration, I noticed a medium brown butterfly struggling along in the open. The sun was quite warm  (it was  2.00 pm) but there was very little latent heat in the air, it was really cold in the shade. I thought it was too late for Gatekeeper and was probably a stray Speckled Wood. It landed in some rank grass and I was amazed to see it was a tatty female Brown Hairstreak. I posted about a male I spotted outside my office window but that was on  the 16th August, almost two months ago. I see that on the Sussex Butterfly Conservation sightings page Wendy Wilson spotted one on the 11th October this year at Pulborough. She stated that this was far later than her previous late record of the 7th. So, could this be the last record of a living adult Brown Hairstreak of the year? Has anyone else seen one this late, I'd love to hear about it.

I saw a female about 100 m from this point two years ago but there is very little Blackthorn scrub where yesterday's individual was found. Although there are some fairly impressive English Oaks present, there are very few Ash trees.

Before scrolling down, see how many moths you can see in the above photo. I didn't find the moths like this (they were caught in the moth trap) but it does make a good background. I think some of the lichen mimic moths are some of our most stunning species and I wanted to show how cryptic they are against the right background.

Thanks to Alice I didn't have to do much other than turn up and photograph the moths again today at Woods Mill. It's always a good day when you catch Merveille du Jour (it translates as 'marvel of the day' apparently), this is surely the nicest British moth, well it's my favorite anyway. It reminds me of mint chock-chip ice-cream. Om nom nom.

But how many people spotted the third and final moth, the Figure of Eight? There were three in the trap today. I don't know if I have ever seen this moth as an adult before, I see the larvae all the time when beating rich hedgerows in the West Weald in the early summer. I imagine this is a good indicator of a rich hedgerow.

I have had an excellent day today at The Mens. I met up with Martin Allison and some of his friends, Martin is an old colleague of mine from the RSPB days and is an exceptional mycologist. I saw many more species than I could record, I concentrated on the ones I could identify myself without a high-powered microscope (my x 50 zoom might be good for counting the hairs on beetles palps but not for looking at fungal spores, I'd need a x 1000 for that!). Anyway, I'll start off with my all time favourite fungus, Magpie Inkcap. The pictures says it all really. Amazing! What else to include? I saw my first Sulphur Knights in the car park before they arrived. This yellow fungus stinks strongly of gas and petrol.

Before leaving the car park I spotted these White Saddles, another new species for me. The specimens are splashed with mud from passing traffic but you can see the odd shaped cap that the Helvella species have.

Next up we have Green Elfcup but this time it is actually fruiting. Normally you just see deadwood turned green by the mycelium, this is the first time I have seen it in fruit.

Here are the Jellybabies. What an awesome name, I just wish they came in different colours. They look good enough to eat but feel very rubbery to touch and Roger Phillips states they are inedible.

It seems to be another good year for Horn of Plenty. I like this one as it is really easy to identify!

Perhaps the commonest fungi we saw today were Blackening Brittlegills and Buttercaps. On the decaying Blackening Brittlegills we recorded a few Powdery Piggybacks!

Two years ago, Mark Monk-Terry and I bumped into some Terracotta Hedgehogs at The Mens but I didn't have my camera and we saw them again today, they don't have gills as such, more like stalagmites.

I can't believe I have never seen this one before, there were hundreds there today. The simple, solid but elegant Clouded Agaric.

Finally, this oddity is the Pestle Puffball and was quite a specimen. It has been a really good day, I saw far more species than this but I struggled to take in all the Mycenas, Lacatarius, Clitocybes and Russulas. Still, I have seen 16 species that I am confident with and could recognise again. I am SEVEN species away from 3000!

I went up to Hollingbury Fort and the back of Wild Park to experience the visible migration, it's almost as addictive as sea watching! I observed from 07:45 to 09:35 and here are the totals. It was quite windy and it was difficult to hear birds unless they were right overhead.

It was nice to hear Bramblings again, definitely one of my favourite calls. Collins Bird Guide has perhaps the best written word interpretations of bird vocalisations. So, it puts Brambling's call as 'a loud, croaking, harsh, nasal te-ehp'. I am sure I heard one last week go over the car park at Woods Mill. Firecrests seem to be turning up everywhere at the moment.

I shot round to the cliffs in front of Newhaven Heights not really knowing where I was going in search of a Rose-coloured Starling. I looked along the bottom of the cliffs and saw only three Wheatear. I scurried up the cliffs and saw a number of forlorn looking birdwatchers clustered together. My rule is always to break away from these groups as people stop looking, start talking and cover very little ground. I saw that the Starlings seemed to be coming in to roost a little further east. I headed along the cliff tops and found this old gun emplacement (I'm assuming that's what it is) that is part of Newhaven Fort. 

There must be a large hollow going into the cliff. Starlings were pouring in, both through the opening and  through a hidden hole further up the cliff. I figured if I wait on the cliff top long enough, I'll see the bird come in to roost. Two people at the bottom of the cliff had the same idea. I was there for less than 10 minutes when I suddenly saw the bird with five Starlings. It circled round a few times, broke away and headed east out of site! I had been expecting a beige juvenile but it was a really nice adult! The people at the bottom of the cliff whistled, but I had already got onto it. Later, whilst talking to the two birders at the bottom, they said that they hadn't whistled and thought that I had! So who was this mystery whistler? Who cares, I just got another lifer! UPDATE: I since found out that it was Andrew Whitcomb who found the bird, here are some photos and a video from when it was on the deck.

Newhaven Fort is a strange sight, built in the 1860s it serviced both World Wars. I find these military sites fascinating, there are so few buildings that are built without any consideration for aesthetics, all geometric shapes and brutal functionality, crumbling concrete and rusting iron, more like the setting of an Iain Banks novel than a twitch.