The Lyons Share

Yesterday morning, about 8.30 am I was getting to the end of a bird survey at Limpsfield Common in Surrey. No net, no pots. Just my binoculars and Weatherwriter, nothing else. And clothes obviously. When before me a golden orb of light appeared on a sunny ride. It wasn't a religious experience or a UFO, it was far more impressive than that. This hairy nugget of a hoverfly with magic wands for antennae got right up in my grill and I had an idea as to what it was but I needed to catch it to be sure. I stood motionless as the fly descended from eye level and landed in the eye cups of my binoculars! I had one chance and amazingly managed to grab it between my thumb and forefinger before transferring it to a pot. It was indeed the nationally scarce Callicera aurata and an impressive beast indeed. 

I have wanted to see this for some time so it was a great way to end the survey. It actually flew off as I was taking this photo (after cooling down in the fridge) but amazingly I did it again, catching it between my little finger and palm. So when I caught a Syritta pipiens in the kitchen just now, I was feeling rather blase about my fly grabbing skills.

A year or two ago I mentioned to the SxBRC & Adastra that I'd like to do a shieldbug atlas for Sussex. Something like what Shropshire has produced. Having no time or coding abilities, that's as far as I got. Before I knew it, volunteer Mark Robey had created (with Bob's help at the SxBRC) an online atlas. So with a few photos from myself and Derek Binns, a few lines of text from me and some minor tweaking of the look of the thing, SxBRC have launched the online atlas. (I know it was MUCH more work than that but I was impressed at how quickly the test version appeared). The site can be found here https://www.sxbrc.org.uk/shieldbugs/mapping.html.

So many thanks to all of you have been submitting records via iRecord, they're all in there already so you can look around the map and find your records. As well as gaps in recording effort. It includes all the shield bugs, squash bugs, rhopalid bugs and the other usual suspects (such as Fire Bug).

You can start off by displaying all records across all of Sussex and see where the hot spots are and where the gaps are.

Here for example is the 1 km square I live in with eight records of six species.

And if you click on that square the species list for the square pops up.

I was looking around for the most well recorded square. It looks like this one has 145 records of 21 species!

Here they are. Including the incredible Scarlet Shieldbug Eurydema dominulus. I would love to see that. I think this square must have something to do with Patrick Roper.

Now if you click on the species list from the drop down menu at the top left, you can focus in on individual species. Such as the Green Shieldbug here, perhaps the commonest species. Frustratingly I have just noticed that these images have squashed up a bit (that's why they're called squash bugs ha ha) but I haven't got time to change that right now. It gives you an idea anyway.

You can change the scale.

And if you click on the 'i' button some more text about the species, where you can find it in Sussex (or where it's likely to turn up if it's not yet in Sussex) and how you might find it.

Here is a scarcer species. I put this in as there is already a new dot on the map but it was great to be able to instantly know it was the third county record and the most easterly one too, a great benefit of having an atlas. An attendee on a heathland invertebrate training I ran at the RSPB found Dalmann's Leatherbug Spathocera dalmani at it's most easterly site in Sussex at Wiggonholt Common. SxBRC will update the records at regular intervals so the records are as up to date is practical. Given that I haven't even entered this record into my copy of Recorder 6 yet, it's not going to be for a while!

And here is the individual. Only seen this three times now. Once in Hampshire and once in Dorset so this was the first Sussex one for me and only the third Sussex record. Is it slowly spreading east?

And I leave you with the map of a species I am yet to see, the Vernal Shieldbug. Tantalising stuff!
A massive thank you to Mark Robey, Bob Foreman, Clare Blencowe and Derek Binns as well as Pete Boardman from Shropshire and Tristan Bantock for being inspirations.

Now Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.B.U.G.S., get out there and fill those gaps in!!!

This is a difficult post to write but a couple of weeks ago I handed my notice in at Sussex Wildlife Trust. Being an awkward git who never does anything conventionally though, I plan to work a ten month’s period of notice (nearly nine now). I am going to work up until the 31^st March 2019 at which point I will work solely as a self-employed ecologist and entomologist. This feels like the right time in my life to do this, so I’m going to go for it.

 

The last ten years have been an incredible time for me. I have given over a quarter of my life to the role and the 32 reserves and all the thousands of species that live there. It has been the best job a naturalist could ever hope for, given the freedom to write a monitoring strategy for such fantastic reserves from scratch and then implement it has been a dream come true. Yet nothing lasts forever and I feel a new challenge calling me.

 

With such a complex job, I couldn’t leave mid field season, then all that work takes time to write up so even six month’s was looking like a short period of time to give. So in order to do it justice, I needed the longest run up possible to leave the work I’ve done on the monitoring strategy over the last ten years (well 11 by the time I’ve finished) in the best state possible.

  

When I do finally leave, I will be strongly linked to the Trust still, remaining in my role of VRM for Ditchling Beacon on the last Sunday of every month and working closely with the SxBRC as county recorder for bugs & spiders and submitting thousands of records every year etc etc.

So as of the 1st April 2019 I will be a naturalist for hire based out of Brighton but I'll be posting more about that in the future.

I'll keep the blog going throughout though and in the future when I can too. Saying goodbye to those reserves is going to be tough, as hard as saying goodbye to my colleagues even. Today was incredible with a singing Nightjar in broad day light, a Purple Emperor landing in the gazebo and clouds of Silver-studded Blues. Iping is a real gem of a site.

So I reckon I have about #300dayswild left as I plan my exit or 'Grexit'.

And here is that Purple Emperor,  a fitting way to end such a post!

Last Friday I ran a course for the first time. An Introduction to Spiders at Iping Common. This fantastic reserve is Sussex's best site for spiders, with 204 species recorded there and a quarter of these having conservation status, it's one of the best places to see spiders in Sussex (along with Rye Harbour).

The aim was to show how much can be done in the field and also how much needs to be done at the microscope. The very first spider we recorded on the first Gorse we beat was the nationally scarce Araneus angulatus! All in all we recorded 21 species. Only one of these was identified at the microscope. Tibellus oblongus. Despite taking several very spotty Tibellus, we didn't manage to add Tibellus maritimus to the site list, a useful lesson in how some ID features are only a guide with spdiers. In fact, it's getting really hard to add a new spider to this site! Here are the spiders we saw with the year they were last recorded and their conservation status.

That's a whopping 38% of spiders with conservation status! Stars of the show included the jumping spiders and of course Thomisus onustus shown above. We found one adult male and two immature females. It's the male featured in the image above and below. I think it looks like cooling lava against the black heath.

This is the female (although this image was taken some years ago of an adult - wow it was over eight years ago now).

Well done everyone who attended and help find the spiders, if any course attendees have any photos they would like to share on this post from the day I will gladly do so. It was a great day. But it didn't end with the spiders. We had two species new to Iping Common. Both bugs, being Leptopterna ferrugata and Aradus cinnamomeus. The rare beetle Cryptocephalus biggutatus also showed up in the sweep net.

A couple of days ago, Alice and I headed to Marline Valley to assess the meadows and also look for a rare micro moth that feeds on Dyer's Greenweed. We didn't find the Greenweed Flat-body Agonopterix atomella. We did however, find a whole bunch of other quite interesting stuff. First up, we saw this aberrant Grizzled Skipper (I'm thinking taras but as I have seen very few aberrant butterflies I'm not sure).

It wasn't long before we saw another one. Clearly a different animal. These were the only two Grizzled Skippers we saw all day and it's not a common butterfly at Marline. They have almost certainly come in from a change in sward structure that favours the butterfly.

In fact, we recorded at least 20 species new to the reserve. Perhaps the most exciting was a male Long-horned Bee Eucera longicornis on Bramble flowers. This isn't the exact Long-horn Bee but you get the idea. A brilliant thing to find on the site and hot on the heels of Alice's record of them at Pevensey Marshes last week!

The highlight for me though was this trio of big brown weevils. Tanymecus palliatus looks like a large Sitona and we picked two of these up in the suction sampler. It's a Nb species that's already known from the site and is not common in Sussex.

This is Attactagenus plumbeus. Another Nb species with a 'dot-dash' Morse code pattern on its back. It's a new record for our reserve network!

And this one is a bit of an oddity. It's also a new record for the reserve network but is not nationally scarce. It's on the Sussex Rare Species Inventory though. I was only thinking about this as I found one of these years ago soon after I started beetling in 2010 but for one reason or another it didn't get recorded. In the last eight years I have not seen another one. It's Graptus triguttatus. Strange how this happens.

Despite much searching, we didn't find any other Dyer's Greenweed specialist other than the mirid Heterocordylus genistae. This was present on every patch, even the single isolated patch in Lower Meadow. A great day in all. The meadows were looking great. Well managed as ever and with little Bramble and scrub due to the 'little and often' approach of cutting carried out by the volunteers.

I've recently stumbled across quite a lot of good species whilst doing other things. Firstly, I noted this Field Mouse-ear while mapping Chalk Milkwort (below) at Southerham this week. It turned up on the site in 2016, a record came in via Dave Bangs when I did the review of the species list but I have never found it on the site, so I was pleased to find it there!

There is masses of Chalk Milkwort in this really rich area and more Adonis Blues than I have ever seen there before, all down to finally being able to fence out this compartment from the arable reversion and gain better control of the grazing. It's looking great!

When I was showing Steve the mouse-ear, he spotted something shiny in the short turf! We managed to get it, a Scarab Shieldbug! A new record for the site of this now Nationally Scarce species, despite a thorough survey with a suction sampler here a few year ago.

Then yesterday I was at Amberley Wildbrooks helping the RSPB with a CBC there. Right at the end I stumbled on a field with about 100 Narrow-leaved Water-dropwort or Sulphurwort (Near Threatened and Nationally Scarce) plants in! It's been a few years since this was recorded here. Being an early flowerer and growing in the field centres (not the ditches), it's not one we pick up on the ditch survey.

Best of all though was last week. Jane and I were finishing a bird survey when I noticed a plant on an area that we couldn't access some distance away. I thought it was Large Bittercress. A really uncommon plant and it would be a new record for the site. So I rested my elbow on Jane's shoulder and took this terrible photo through my binoculars. Never had to do this before!

Frances went and had a look and found another plant nearby and confirmed it and while she was there, found the first Subterranean Clover there in 40 years. These surprises at Waltham are a direct response to the better graze it has been having the last few years. Jane took this photo of the Large Bittercress. The moral of the story. Always have a GPS and a notebook with you, whatever you are doing. And recording to eight figures IS really useful despite what some people say. Eight figures can always be turned into six but you can't do that the other way around. Additionally, I'm very fond of mapping plants using the basic unit of a 10 x 10 m square (or to eight figures) on the British National Grid in GIS.

Last week I started a survey of the rare Potter Flower-bee Anthophora retusa at Seaford Head. Coincidentally, there is also a PhD study being carried out by Gigi Hennessy so we joined forces to get a more thorough idea of where the bee is on the site. As Gigi has some transects concentrated on the key areas, I was keen to have a look at areas away from these transects.

My approach was to GPS every individual found and map them. I also wanted to sex them and record what they were feeding on. That last was easy, all 12 we saw were feeding on Ground-ivy. The problem with recording retusa is the abundance of plumipes still present. The first we recorded last Thursday was a female at the top of the west ride. This is great news as this was just solid scrub only five years ago. This fantastic ride created by SWT and the volunteers has produced plentiful forage for this rare bee. We also saw another male there. Now the female is a little smaller (although this isn't enough to clinch ID in the field - some plumipes are smaller) so you have to catch them and look for the red spines present on the hind leg. This is a bit of a faff. You can see them clearly in the image below but that's after catching the bee and getting it into this cage or small glass tube. The females are faster than the males too.

I went on to catch a male. Much more gingery and lacking the long hairs on the legs of the male plumipes. 

Here is the habitat showing the wealth of Ground-ivy.

We caught a male plumipes and put it next to the retusa. That's when it hit us, retusa has green eyes just like Anthophora bimaculata while plumipes are black. Actually this is so much easier than trying to see the red spines in the female!

We then went a walk along the coastal grassland where the Anthophora petered out as the Ground-ivy stopped. We saw clouds of very worn male Andrena haemorrhoa flying around the edge of the cliffs. A single Ophonus ardosiacus ran across the cliff top grassland, a new carabid for the site. Dingy and Grizzled Skippers were everywhere. There were however, no Anthophora at all on the golf course side. All but Alex and I headed off and despite a cool westerly breeze, we decided to head to the one other suitable area that Gigi is not covering; the cattle grazed area to the east of Hope Bottom...

The first retusa we had was a female which made for the photo at the top of this post and this video.

We caught a further six males but also three Bombus humilis! I was quite pleased with this, especially as Alex spotted the first one and we didn't see any humilis up there during a thorough survey two years ago. We may have also seen a Bombus ruderaius but we bungled it and the wind took it.

So a big thumbs up from me and a male Anthophora plumipes to the work being done there! There is not much we can do about nesting habitat but we can create lots of forage, so thanks to the ride creation, its aftercare and the cattle-grazing and scrub management, we are creating more forage for this incredibly rare bee.

Too much natural history getting in the way of blogging at the moment! A crazy few weeks. Just a quick one of a new spider for me from a site in Surrey. The Nationally Rare Xysticus acerbus. The male is at the top and I also found a female (the bottom two photos). This is perhaps my favourite genus of spiders. In fact, there are now only two I haven't seen - robustus and luctator. 

Other favourites of mine include Andrena, Chrysolina, Cryptocephalus and Ampedus. I am sure there are many more. What makes for a good genus? A decent number of species with a mix of bright and varied charismatic species identifiable in the field and some only at the microscope. A mix of common species and rare ones so that they are not too elusive. That sort of thing for me. So what's your favourite genus? Meanwhile enjoy some more Xysticus acerbus.

Excuse the poor quality photo but I had to share this one. Last Sunday was our third Ditchling Beacon Conservation Super Squad and as my back is anything other than super, I was on light duties. Which involved finding wildlife to show the team on a freezing cold day. I had a go with the suction sampler in the quarry at Ditchling and picked up a tiny (1.5 mm) spider. It wasn't until I got home and looked down the microscope that I saw this...

I am still terrified of ET as a 40 year old 'man'. I've gone all jittery looking through photos just to write this post. Anyway, money spiders with freaky heads are pretty cool but this one is really weird. What looks like nostrils are actually one of the four pairs of eyes. The palps (External Testicles) were pretty weird too. This is Panamomops sulcifrons (my 373rd arachnid). It's a bit of a chalk-grassland specialist but what's strange is that I didn't pick it up at all last year during a survey there, in fact there were only three species of spider with conservation status that went into the management plan. Even though I was using a suction sampler in that exact same spot. It just shows that ongoing casual recording is also a great way to add to our knowledge of sites. The only other record on a Trust reserve is from Malling in 2009.

This is the second Nationally Scarce species we have added to the site list whilst scrub bashing up at Ditchling. A great way to do practical conservation and learn about wildlife at the same time. Have a look here if you want to sign up. It's always the last Sunday of the month and involves some steep and challenging work but is really rewarding. We also found three other species new to the site. Yellow Archangel, Moschatel and Palmate Newt!