Promised photos

Like a bus - wait ages for one, then two come in quick succession. The moth-trapping was not too bad. Some 60 individuals of about 30 species, though only one or two micro-moth species which were new to the garden list. The most spectacular was - of course - an Elephant Hawkmoth, pink and green like some over-the-top sweet. Their season is coming to an end now, so it wasn't quite the vibrant beauty of the earlier ones, but fun nonetheless.

Some pictures to make up for the boring previous blog - they're a mish-mash from this weekend and earlier in the year...:

The Buff-tip. A moth that looks like a chip of birch-twig at rest. I'll take a decent photo from the side one day and post it.

Sugar sugar. Our first hawkmoth species: Elephant Hawkmoth. Tropically exotic.

Papa! Eine rosa motte!

A popular hawkmoth: the second species we've recorded - Poplar Hawkmoth. One from earlier in the year

The latest - and largest - of our hawkmoths: Privet Hawkmoth.

The Spectacle; so named because it looks like it's wearing spectacles from the front. I'll dig out a photo...

The Coronet. Not the best of photos, but a very fine moth.

Common Wainscot. Perhaps a quintessentially boring brown moth?

Finally, just because I like it, some ballooning spiderlings on the knapweed in our 'meadow'.

Reappearance

Tonight (July 5th) I intend to run the moth-trap for the sixth time this year (or thereabouts). It’s a miniature Robinson trap, which looks something like the end of a plastic barrel with a conical lid, out of which someone’s chopped the centre so that a second, inverted, cone can sit inside, on top of which is a mercury-vapour lightbulb. Sounds more complex than it actually is: in essence it’s a way of attracting moths to the bulb, baffling them and then funnelling them down into a nice dark place full of old egg-boxes, where they can wait out the rest of the night in safety.

Moth-trapping is something which appeals when you have small children in the house. They can get involved catching the moths in little pots to identify them, finding the right species in the book (OK, not too exciting when it’s a boring brown one, but pretty whizzy when it’s big and spectacular like a Privet Hawkmoth), and then have the fun of releasing the moths into some suitable cover when they’ve been tallied. It’s building an interesting picture of the Lepidoptera inhabiting the small patch of woodland and grassland immediately adjacent to our garden and it’s also keeping me working at learning something new on a regular basis.

We started out with an overnight session in mid-November 2013, with just a single Feathered Thorn in the trap to show for the night. The second session in early December was even less rewarding: not a moth to be seen. The neighbours made some appreciative noises about how the oak looked when floodlit from below, but that wasn’t really the purpose of the exercise. Late autumn and early winter moths are obviously harder come by even if the conditions seem good…

By the time the weather had improved sufficiently to encourage me to try again it was early March. Sixteen moths of six different species seemed like a proper catch after the winter doldrums - and all of them were new species for the garden. A March Moth (how appropriate), a Pale Brindled Beauty, six Oak Beauty, five Common Quaker, two Early Grey and a Satellite. Not too bad for a beginner!

The season progressed from there. Bar the odd blip like one night in mid-May, where only eleven moths bothered to show, the catch has got larger and more diverse: last session was 91 moths of 39 different species, and each time another handful are new for the garden: we’ve recorded about 120 species now and there’s plenty to be found, I’m sure.

I’ve fallen into the habit of running the trap every couple of weeks if there is suitable weather. That prevents me from overloading mentally, becoming a moth bore, making it all too dull for Bina and running up an extortionate electricity bill. So, let's see what tonight may bring... Some pictures may follow.

Oldcrest and carr

Back out to do some ringing - it seems like forever since the last session, though in fact it's only (only!) a month. My glamorous assistant cried off late on Saturday evening, so I had the site to myself - and as wife and child are living it up in Germany for a couple of days, I had the luxury of no guilty conscience at work by the end of the session...

Having only filled feeders the morning before, I had little expectation of being overrun by birds and this proved to be the case. Sure, Blue Tit and Coal Tit made up the bulk of the catch, but there was plenty to appreciate. For instance: a Song Thrush. We only catch one or two each year on site, and have as yet had no recaptures or recoveries. The site is very edge-of-range - on the fringe of the high moors - but there are always a few pairs breeding in the adjacent conifers. What will happen when the conifers are felled and replaced by (presumably) native broadleaves? That will be interesting!

Old Coal Tit. Given the text in the Helm family guide (Tits, Nuthatches and Treecreepers), this ought to be a male, with such an extensive bib. We just don't catch them in the breeding season to be able to confirm!

For the first time, a Sparrowhawk managed to stay in the net. We've had a couple of near-misses with this species in the past: a male low in the net last autumn managed to extricate himself before we could reach the net, and the year before that one left its dinner in the bottom of a net, in the shape of a freshly-plucked and trimmed Woodpigeon pullus. Yesterday, however, I turned the corner to a net and there was a male Sparrowhawk, neatly cushioned in the bottom shelf and glaring balefully up at me. I carefully disentangled him and took him back to the car to be ringed, measured and weighed - I wonder if he's the same bird as previously escaped?

Sparrowhawk. Talons safely the other side of my mitt.

The Willow Tits at the southern end of the site appear to have paired up. Both were in the net together and flew off together when weighed and released. It would be nice if they managed to breed successfully this year - last year's nest failed. The male was originally caught in October 2010, so is now a very experienced bird within his territory.

Yesterday produced a handful of experienced individuals: two Coal Tits which were originally caught in January 2011 and a Goldcrest first caught in September 2011. The latter is always somewhat impressive: that a bird which weighs in the same as a sheet of A4 paper, or a 2p piece should survive year-round on Dartmoor is somewhat admirable. The longevity record for Goldcrest in the UK is a whole 4 years, 2 months 24 days, so this one's got a while to go before he reaches the record, but he's doing well nonetheless!

With it being a quiet day, there was also opportunity to admire the lichens and mosses on the trees around the car, to seek out the tiny red stars of Hazel flowers and to relish the willow carr - such an under-appreciated habitat. There are patches of carr woodland on site which are breathtakingly rainforest-like. Walk into them and the air is redolent with the fresh damp greenness of the carr. Old fallen willow stems snake across the ground, starring out from the original tree's base with linear thickets of young poles growing vertically from them. The old stems are felted with a luxuriance of mosses and lichens, whilst the young stems remain grey and smooth. The boggy ground between the wood is a verdant carpet of plants bewildering in its complexity of form and colour so that the eye just sees green at first, but has to then pull back, refocus and concentrate to appreciate the subtle beauty. Drips and drops fall all around and everything seems to pulse with moistness: whatever you touch, wherever you step, wherever your hand lands...

Hazel flower.

Masses of elf-cups, Cladonia pyxidata (I think) reach up from old willow stems in the carr

Another Cladonia lichen, this time coniocraea amidst a mat of Hypnum mosses

Drips and drops - decomposition is rife within the carr. This seemed a better picture than the remains of the frog.

Peltigera lichens and the moss Kindbergia praelonga grow over one another on the ground.

Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain...

You could be forgiven for thinking the Atlantic had tired of sweeping the shores and decided to reclaim the land by air-drop. It's been pretty soggy here for the past month or so. Not, I'll grant you, as bad as Somerset, Dorset or further east still, but still relentlessly soggy. The skies have been grey and weepy, the ground growing increasingly squelchy, and the river Bovey has been up and down like a back-bencher in a lively parliamentary debate. We're fortunate to live a couple of house-heights above the river, so flooding is the least of our worries, but there are a few buildings in town which tread a delicate line along the river's edge and are a salutary lesson not to buy property in a flood-plain (as if the lesson were needed)!

We're quite high up the catchment and the rivers here are short and inclined to spate conditions, so flooding never lasts that long on any one occasion, but it can repeat over and over again if the weather gets it just so. Just before Christmas (doesn't that seem a long time ago?!) I had an hour of free time just before it got dark, and the Bovey was overtopping the banks - so I managed to shoot out and take some pictures. The river is bottle-necked where the west-bound road crosses just below the town centre. Once there was a ford there beside the old mill, now there's a neat little hump-backed bridge, and a flood-bank to protect the houses on the west side of the river. As it's quite an old bridge, there's a two-arch span, and this constrains the water perfectly, so it ponds back and spills over the adjacent playing field. By the time I got there the water was about welly-top depth across the end of the park - the brand new, newly-gravelled cyclepath only indicated by a forlorn sign asking cyclists to respect the pedestrians on the track. The gravel had been neatly swept off the path and deposited in a sweeping system of deposit bars to gladden the heart of a fluvial morphologist. To cap it all, there was a Cormorant fishing on the field.

Living here would make me nervous. But I wouldn't live here anyway!

The old mill - now home to the Devon Guild of Craftsmen - lives on the edge. You wonder how often it flooded in times past...

The road-bridge through town

No conflicts today...

Looking across the cycle path

Looking south, towards the bridge

Further upstream the field rises slightly, and then there is another narrow point where the A382 crosses the river - this time in a single-span bridge, but with a carefully-constructed underpass for cyclists and walkers to avoid the road-crossing. Not today, though.

Low and narrow, yes. I think I'd prefer to take my chances crossing the road.

By the time I reached my intended goal, the light was appalling, so most of the photos were on delayed timer and at half a second or more exposure time. The weir was a spectacular sight: the difference in water height between top and bottom of weir is usually a good 1.5m; today, more like half a metre. The water surged over the top of the path, submerging the entire woodland floor across the bend where the weir sits - normally a well-trodden sandy patch where dogs frolic and children play chase. In the gathering gloom it was a distinctly suspect proposition to venture in and take photographs, so I contented myself with some atmospheric pictures of 'the end of the path as we know it'. Given the exposure times, the tripod would no doubt have been so shaken around by the water that the photos would be even worse in any case!

The weir: normally a well-trodden relaxing spot

The weir itself is hiding under that bank of water just above and right of centre

The end of the line...

Redpoll redux

Way back in the mists of 2011, we ringed a shed-load of Lesser Redpolls up on the edge of the moors. Somewhere around 250 of them over the course of the autumn. OK, it's hardly the stuff to make an observatory staff quake in their boots, but for our first full season at the site, it was something pretty special. Within that mix were a couple of local retraps - all from round about the moor's edge and none of them from more than 10km away - and that seemed to be about that... Then, the following spring, we received news that one of our birds had been caught in someone's house in northern France - always an exciting moment when one of 'your' birds is traced to another country, and this autumn we've discovered that another of 'our' class of 2011 has been recaptured twice by a local ringer on the south-west side of the moor, this time a bird on a breeding territory. So we know that some of the birds we ringed that autumn most likely came from the local area, whilst some presumably originated elsewhere in Europe...

Since that autumn, we've caught rather fewer Lesser Redpolls: in fact fewer than 10 each season. None of those we caught in 2011 have been recaptured on site either, though there are generally a few Lesser Redpoll around throughout the year.

Then, a couple of weekends back, we caught half a dozen Lesser Redpolls on one day... and this:

It's big...

...it's got a socking great pale rump...

...(just like the linked blog above, you can see some wear on the tail and primary tips which help age it as a bird of the year)...

...no brown on the flanks...

....it's grey (this photo © Judith Read)...

...it's still got no brown on the flanks (this photo © Judith Read)...

...and it's got white wing-bars (this photo also © Judith Read). Note also the two visible retained juvenile greater coverts. Award yourself an extra mark if you didn't have to look the feather tract up.

'It' is, of course (roll eyes and sigh, go on) a Common Redpoll, Carduelis flammea - one of those northern birds so controversially (?) split out during some taxonomic reorganisation back in the late 90s-early 2000s. You can see most everything you ought to want to to identify this one as a Common: white wing-bars, pale rump, cold brown and grey tones overall. You can't hear it, because I haven't got the kit to record it, but rest assured it even sounded a little deeper-voiced when it called.

The description's in the post to the county recorder...

Mind that forkful...

Summer holidays mean family visits. My mother-in-law's a teacher, so long summer breaks mean she and her husband are able to come over and visit in what should be the nicest part of the year. The last couple of summers an old friend of Na's has also been visiting England to help her children learn English - and they've just been over. Typically, after a lovely hot summer the weather's been playing up a little whilst they visited and a couple of weekends back it was particularly foul: heavy overcast and steady rain: more like October than August... Naturally enough, having five small children in a small house together on a rainy day means that adults are constantly looking for something to occupy them and when Bina wandered into the kitchen ans started pulling pasta out of the cupboard and rattling it around, music came to mind (sort of)!

Various jars, packets and boxes were brought out which made a variety of sounds when shaken and all was going nicely when my nephew pointed out that there was 'a moth in that jar'. Sure enough, in a jar of red Camargue rice, a small moth was wriggling energetically across the grains. I'd not long put the rice into the jar (the plastic packets that the rice comes in aren't particularly baby-proof, but good jars are) and the previous occupant of the jar had been some very nice banana chutney made by our friends on the Isle of Man - so I knew the moth had to have come in the rice.

The moth itself, before its trip through the post

I gently encouraged it out of the jar and into a small box, where Basti and I took a good look at it. Seemed innocuous enough and also depressingly anonymous: fairly plain brown above and below, though with rather pointed wings. So, I enlisted the aid of the experts - why have 'em if you can't?! First of all, I took some photos and sent them on to the county moth recorder, who's been kind enough to identify some of my photos in the past. He wrote back saying that he'd in turn enlisted the aid of a national micro-moth expert who happens to live locally, who thought that the moth might possibly be Sitotroga cerealella, a.k.a. the Angoumois Grain Moth: but that this would be a first record for Devon and he couldn't tell for sure from the photos - could I perhaps post the moth on to be scrutinised in more detail?

I duly did and the species was duly confirmed, though the unfortunate moth had to be dissected to clinch the identification. Going back to the jar a couple of days later, I was interested to see that a few more had hatched out: in fact, no fewer than 63 dead moths were lurking in the jar, along with five apparently healthy larvae (carefully transferred to a small container of rice and posted on to the micro-moth expert, who particularly wanted to see them) and nine very lively weevils: their identity yet to be confirmed, though they might just be Rice Weevils Sitophilus oryzae! All in all a productive packet of rice, though not perhaps what I'd anticipated when I bought the stuff. All goes to show though - if I'd been quicker about cooking it, we'd never have known what was stowing away amongst it. All makes you think - and perhaps a good job we're not squeamish too!

Though the species is a grain pest (link takes you to a pdf), it's confined to warmer regions and so perhaps unlikely to become established here in the UK - perhaps fortunately: we have more than enough non-native problem species as it is!

Male genitalia of Sitotroga cerealella (© R. Heckford, 2013)

With many grateful thanks to Barry Henwood and Bob Heckford for taking on the identification of this specimen.

Sounds of summer

It's been seven years since we had a nice spell of weather like this. It feels almost like living that idyllic early scene in Puckoon, in "...an unexpected burst of hot weather. Saffron coloured in the bleach early sky, the sun blistered down, cracking walls and curling the brims of the old men's winter-damp hats...", though I (hopefully) bear little resemblance to Dan Milligan. And there's no nobbly brown dog in the vicinity. What there are, though, are grasshoppers. Stacks of 'em.

A good patch of long grass, paper-dry rustling already with the breeze, suddenly comes alive when the sun begins to crank up the heat in mid-morning. The plants suddenly seem to sizzle and whisper with the songs of various species, all clinging cryptically to stems and leaves or huddled against fragments of plants on the ground. Every footstep is accompanied by an explosion of tiny forms, bursting into action and springing wildly in every which direction.

A short, 'Schritt. ... Schritt. ... Schritt' heralds Field Grasshoppers, Chorthippus brunneus, a dust-brown and faded yellow-green with a blushing abdomen tip and two neat little angles on top of its thorax (the pronotum, if you prefer), rather like the mathematical operators greater than and less than: > <

Female Field Grasshopper. Note that the pale angles on the pronotum don't meet the hind edge of the pronotum either, and that the antennae are not clubbed, unlike some otherwise similar species.

A slightly drier, softer 'zee-zee-zee-zee-zee' gives away Meadow Grasshoppers, Chorthippus parallelus, which tend to be brighter green, striped dandy-ish beasts with - slightly belying the scientific name - gently incurved marks on the pronotum: )(

Meadow Grasshopper. Posing.

Meadow Grasshopper. The pale lines on the pronotum are not only gently curved, but stretch from end to end of the pronotum.

A bright green Meadow Grasshopper. Note also the short wings: generally this species has rather stumpy wings, but when populations grow too dense, a whole load of longer-winged individuals emerge and head off for pastures new.

The crickets are less conspicuous and also quieter, with a rather ventriloqual quality. A sibilant 'srrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr' from rank grass suggests that a Conehead (Conocephalus) of one or other species is lurking, but without seeing it I'm not sure of the identification. The likelihood is that it's Short-winged (C. dorsalis), but you never know...! Finally, a surreptitious movement gives away a Dark Bush-cricket Pholidoptera griseoaptera, looking a little like a dark spider scuttling across the ground. Their staccato 'Tschr. ... Tschr. ...Tschr.' will soon be ringing from the depths of almost any patch of slightly scrubby vegetation .

Soon it'll be the season for the outrageously loud Great Green Bush-crickets Tettigonius viridis, which can be clearly heard from a passing car, even at a fairly high speed, their penetrating 'TCHR-TCHR-TCHR-TCHR-TCHR-TCHR-TCHR-TCHR-' assaulting your ears as you pass a patch of brambles.

Hot in the shade, hotter on the moors

I joined a couple of friends on Dartmoor yesterday to help them mop up the last few of their nest records for the summer. As they've found some 200 nests over the course of the season on about five square kilometres of moorland you'd be forgiven for thinking there was little left to find there, but that's never quite the case.

We started out by watching a Tree Pipit which was behaving as if there might be a nest nearby, but eventually decided that it was just guarding fledged young from a nest that had already been recorded, so we moved on up the slope to the area my friends wanted to concentrate on.

We weren't hugely successful in the grand scheme of things: finding only a new Whinchat nest with a full clutch of five eggs and a second brood of Stonechats with seven pulli (this pair had lost their first clutch), but we also checked on a number of nests that had been found previously: a brood of Skylarks had apparently fledged successfully, a female Linnet sitting on a now-complete clutch and another pair of Whichats which had - for the third time this season - had  their eggs predated (probably by a fox, as the nest had been pulled out and left on the ground nearby).

Despite it being a rather quiet day in terms of nests, the site was alive with wildlife, a sign of how useful this recent spell of decent weather has been. The air resounded with a constant 'tchirrp' of Meadow Pipits warning their young to stay out of sight, mingled with the melodious bubbling song of Skylarks above us. A male Reed Bunting rattled out his song from a patch of low Western Gorse whilst Linnets chirruped to and fro over him. Everywhere were Blackbirds shuttling between the open moorland and the adjacent scrub where their second broods sat waiting for more and more food.

It wasn't just birds, though they were perhaps the most obvious part of the day. Butterflies were out early with the rapidly warming air: Small Heaths and Meadow Browns bouncing erratically up and down over tufts of grass, whirring up into spiralling chases when another of their species approached too close, though whether fighting or attempting to impress a potential mate is impossible for me to tell. Field Grasshoppers sizzled staccato bursts from the tussocks and a Goldenring or two drifted casually through the cloud of flies and midges, snacking at will. As we walked through the grass, moths shot away from us (I could only pick out Emerald and Brown Silver-lines as we went, but there were many others too), Common Lizards rustled off, a tell-tale sliver of brown wriggling between the stems, and a brief glint of rich orange drifting through the air resolved into a fine fresh Dark Green Fritillary... Let's see how long this weather lasts!

Dark Green Fritillary (Argynnis aglaja) - a flake of orange gliding across the open moors, or down on the coastal heaths and dunes, often proves to be this species.

Goldenring (Cordulegaster boltonii) - this one resting up and digesting between flies.

Meadow Brown (Maniola jurtina) taking a drink to refuel between those energetic spiralling aeriel encounters.

Common Lizard (Zootoca vivipara), sunning itself

Small is beautiful

Having a small person in the house now means that some things have changed radically. Our time outdoors is constrained by sleep patterns (to some degree) and time spent with the camera is now precious. That said, the recent spell of (whisper it) fine weather here has given me an opportunity to get out into the garden and appreciate what's lurking in the vegetation there.

Some background... when we moved in, the back garden was effectively a wasteland only recently reclaimed from a seething mass of bramble, with a small patch of dog-fouled perennial rye grass at the bottom. We began by digging out bramble roots and pulling up ash seedlings which sprout like weeds in this area, but aren't really suited to a tiny garden, and mulled over the possibilities inherent in the grass patch. I hesitate to call it a lawn... Both being of a somewhat wildlife-friendly bent, we decided that chucking a bit of species-rich hay around might be quite fun, so we asked a friend of ours for a couple of bags of hay next time he cut his patch - and duly got about 15 sacks of clippings (thanks David!!). We raked over the rye-grass until there were some sizable bare patches amongst it, strewed the clippings, and jumped up and down on them for a while, just to make sure.

The next spring, we began to see the fruits of our labours - well, the flowers. Germander Speedwell, Ribwort Plantain, Meadow Buttercup, Sweet Vernal-grass all came up with some vigour, and a handful of Yellow-rattle plants emerged too, to our pleasure. In the autumn we repeated the grass-strewing over the bare patches, and were rewarded with Centaury, Common Knapweed and Bird's-foot Trefoil joining the party.

This year I've noticed that we seem to have an abundance of invertebrates, when compared with my memories of previous years. OK, last year was nothing to shout about for most wildlife (except bryophytes and molluscs, perhaps) but this spring hasn't exactly been brilliant weather either. However, looking over the back garden now during a sunny spell and the air is full of a myriad shining wings - mainly small hoverflies and other flies. This intrigued me, so I thought I'd take the camera out and have a look... and what's pictured below might not yet be identified - and indeed may not be identifiable - but it gives a flavour of what's going on in the garden.

One of a number of slender hoverflies which cruises the garden - this one a rather black/bottle-green animal.

A small, yet perfectly-formed longhorn beetle of some description, working its way over the raspberries (the raspberry canes have proved to be a fertile hunting ground for photos this year - nearly as good as the hazel-honeysuckle tangle nearby). Edit: thanks to Tim Worfolk, below, a name: Pogonocherus hispidus

One of the flesh-flies, as far as I can tell. Edit: TW suggests perhaps Graphomyia sp (Muscid)

Leaf-mining flies (Liriomyza sp.) doing their stuff on the comfrey. Perhaps not identifiable to species, but they bear a passing resemblance to L. pusilla - and as the name suggests, they're small! About 2mm long, snout to tail-tip.

A more conventional hoverfly, brilliant in black and yellow. Edit: Eupiodes c.f. luniger is suggested

A tiny teardrop-shaped spider which feasts on aphids. Go to it...

Yet another fly - there is a startling diversity in the garden... Edit: this one appears to be perhaps Beris c.f. chalybata, a Stratiomyid fly.

A solitary bee, one of the Andrena species. This one seems to have a particular liking for our dandelions.

Apropos of which, dandelion clocks too are worth a closer look. Their geometry is pleasing when the clocks are whole...

...and there is also beauty to be found in the detail of the seeds when they are exposed.

Even plain old Ribwort Plantain takes on a new dimension at this scale: I hadn't realised that the anthers seem to be swollen bags of pollen. These release their pollen on the wind, but if you see them on a still day when the rain is falling gently, you can see little puffs of pollen clouding up, for all the world like miniature cannon-smoke drifting across the grass...

Another small fly which enjoys hanging out around the honeysuckle growing through the hazel. Notable particularly for its antennae... Edit: Dolichopodid fly: Syntormon sp.

A scorpion-fly, I think. Edit: an Empid of some species - anyone feel like raising the bar?!

Micropterix calthella - a tiny micro-moth, about 4-5mm long, which has decided our raspberry canes make a great place to lure in some of the opposite sex. They spend a lot of time wandering up and down their few cms of stalk, waving their antennae around, looking left and right and occasionally scrapping over the right to use a particularly choice spot.

Another hoverfly, this one with powder-blue markings on the dorsal side of the abdomen, and a rich ochre stripe along the sides. Edit: Platycheirus sp. (female); thanks to 'Ophrys' on i-spot for that one.

Final edit: Many thanks indeed to Tim Worfolk (two bird theory blog - visit: it's great!) and 'Ophrys' on I-Spot for their help with identifications so far...