Salticus scenicus

Last week I partook in my first twitch of the year, hoping to show a friend the overwintering Short-eared Owls at Kempsey just a couple of miles south of Worcester. Despite being reported on a daily basis since the start of February, with up to five openly hunting across fields in broad daylight, we failed to connect with the birds in the two hours spent searching, and our attention inevitably turned to the local insect life.

On the south-facing wall of Kempsey church - extremely well camouflaged against the stone - Jumping Spiders (Salticus scenicus) were hunting too...

Signs of spring

Took a walk along the footpath that run by the side of our student house this morning, in the hope that fresh air would shrug off the last of a cold that has been nagging at me for the past week.

I don't want to speak too soon but it seems to have done the trick. Lying in bed with the curtains drawn swallowing paracetamol every few hours does nothing for me, but just a few minutes standing outside with the sun on my face worked wonders on clear the feeling of grogginess from my head - there were even some signs along the path that spring is just around the corner.

Phytomyza ranunculi leaf mine

Pseudotaxiphyllum elegans

Carpets of Lesser Celandine decorate field margins and road sides throughout Worcester at the moment

New blog header

Regular (and irregular) visitors will notice that I've added a new header to the blog - a photo of a Short-eared Owl quartering Staines Moor on a crisp, misty December afternoon back in 2012.

Compared to previous headers of late, this one is slightly different in that the subject is a bird and not a moth - the first such bird photo I've uploaded to the blog since January 2015. What started out back in 2008 as a medium through which to 'showcase' my awful bird photography in Bushy Park has - over the years - turned into an almost solely insectivorous blog.

It's quite interesting, for me anyway, to look back and find the point at which blog content switched from birds to other stuff. Such a transition seems to take place in spring 2013, when I attempted to take on pan-species listing for the first time as part of the '1000for1ksq' challenge - mosses, plants and other taxonomic groups I wouldn't have previously batted an eyelid at started to appear, and birds have taken a bit of a back foot.

I do hope to get more content posted up here as the weather begins to warm and things begin to emerge from the cold, but the likelihood of this including anything much bird-related is doubtful. I still take my binoculars wherever I go and get great enjoyment out of birding, but that is as far it goes. I no longer worry about photographic opportunities I could miss out on if I go out birding without my DSLR, and as a result my motivation to carry it is dwindling.

In other news, Black Sabbath's self-titled debut album is 46 years old today. Enjoy. 

Malta

With a reading week at uni and some holiday hours to take off work, myself and a couple of friends decided to book a four-day holiday to Malta.

Malta has never been top of my list of places to visit - mainly because, like many birders, I've been off-putted by the bird hunting atrocities that appear in the news every spring, but I was pretty easily swayed by the promise of sun, sea and good beer, and we set off on Thursday last week.

The first two days were spent visiting various historical towns and cities around the island, admiring the beautiful architecture and eclectic culture. The island has clearly been influenced by the colonies that have landed on its shores (evident by the fact that almost all locals are fluent in English and every other bar is an Irish Pub), but it maintains a really unique sense of individuality and tradition that no amount of British tourism could break.

We spent the last two days exploring the more remote west coast of the island, characterised by high cliffs, scree slopes, megalithic temples and 360 degree views. Blue Rock Thrush flitted between the boulders, whilst Sardinian and Cetti's Warblers sung from the dry scrub. One of my friends is current undertaking a horticulture internship back at home, so we spent a fair amount of time getting our heads around the local cliff top flora. Maltese Spurge - a species endemic to the archipeligo - decorated much of the upper slopes, interspersed with clumps of the tiny Mediterranean Heather and delicate Bunch-flowered Daffodil.

Mediterranean Heather (Erica multiflora)

Maltese Spurge (Euphorbia melitensis)

Bunch-flowered Daffodil (Narcissus tazetta)

Further north we stopped off at Ghajn Tuffieha, a collection of steep-sided turquoise bays composed entirely of sandstone. Sublime...

Cape Sorrel (Oxalis pes-caprae)

And all that done using only the island's well established network of buses - leagues ahead of public transport in London.

Binocular psychology

It's been a slow start to the year in terms of wildlife opportunities. A combination of coursework deadlines, job commitments and the grogginess of the weather here in Worcester have kept me inside for a large proportion of the past two weeks.

Last week I did go and treat myself to a new pair of binoculars from The Birder's Store in Worcester town centre. Brian was as helpful as ever and I ended up leaving with a brand spanking new pair of Opticron's Discovery 10x42. My technical know-how when it comes to optics is non-existent (I couldn't for the life of me tell you what the '42' in '10x42' means) so I won't even attempt to review them, but these look and feel fantastic for the modest price tag, and the compact design is perfect for the 'sling-over-your-shoulder' way I want to use them.

I never really got on much with binoculars, this being only the second pair I've owned. Wearing them around your neck gives you away as a bit of an anorak - or so 16-year old me thought - and that wasn't the type of self-image I wanted to promote. In the same vein as other people growing up with a passion for natural history, it felt as though no one in my school shared my interests, and I was afraid I might be seen as uncool if people caught wind of it. As a result, for most of secondary school, very few of my friends knew that I liked birds, and even fewer of them knew that I went birding around the local area on a daily basis - it was something I tried to keep secret; hiding away my binoculars whilst walking to my local park until I was sure there was no chance of bumping into someone I knew.

It hasn't been hard to notice a heartening change in young people's attitudes towards the hobby, as various platforms of social media (Twitter in particular) have helped link up like-minded people across the country. When I was school aged, only six or seven years ago, I'd come home and share my sightings to a tiny handful of other 'young' birders through the now dormant Young Birders blog. Fast forward to 2016 and the Next Generation Birders crowd now has almost 650 Facebook members and 4,000 Twitter followers; regularly organising field trips and socials for members. Every other post on my Twitter news feed seems to celebrate the actions of teenagers promoting wildlife within their school or wider community, and it's welcoming to see that they don't identify a passion for wildlife as something to be reserved about in the way that I did. It's fair to say that birding has never been so popular amongst youngsters.

On an unrelated note, I've noticed several other bloggers subtly drop-in links to songs at the end of their posts, and it works well - so much so that I might start adding more music to this blog in 2016. This week's artist was inevitable.

Happy New Year

Wishing you all a fantastic new year from both myself and this Tortricodes alternella that turned up at a lit kitchen window last night.

Be sure to make 2016 the year you express yourself.

                               

A trivial quest

It's late June. The height of summer. Flowers are appearing everywhere and the weather has been kind to us on the west coast of Mull for the past week. There are 20 hours of daylight in a 24 hour period, and it seemed like the ideal time to find my way seventy odd miles to the other side of the island in search of one of the rarest moths in Britain; the Slender Scotch Burnet.

Chimney Sweeper

Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary

Starting at the croft late in the morning, I walked for a feet-busting 16 miles along the A849 - the main road connecting each corner of the island - spurred on every few metres by the appearance of Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary, Chimney Sweeper and Marsh Fritillary feeding amongst the abundant roadside vegetation.

Clouds over Ben More

I reached Tobermory late in the evening, having hitch-hiked half way across Mull with a young couple driving their camper van back to Yorkshire - they'd spent the last few days at a music festival on Iona. I checked into the youth hostel, stumbled towards the harbour for fish & chips (and a drop of the town's esteemed whisky), and devoured it all on a golf course while watching dusk fall over the island.

Looking south from Tobermory golf course - mainland Scotland is on the left and Ben More (Mull's highest mountain) can be seen peeking over the headland on the right.

The next morning I was up and out by first light; the destination a sheltered patch of coastal grassland tucked away behind a small private castle called Glengorm, where Slender Scotch Burnet has one of its only strongholds in the UK.

The castle itself stands alone in a remote & windswept landscape, well away from the nearest crofts. Getting to it requires a six mile drive along a thin, curvy road - up and down steep hills, through lush grassland pastures and alongside thick pine forests. Without a car it was a tiring four hour stroll, but one of the most tranquil I've ever experienced. I was 70 odd miles from the croft I was working on and hundreds more away from home, relying only on my limited ability to hitchhike to get back for the night. I was in the middle of nowhere and no one was expecting me anywhere. There were no deadlines to fulfil. It's hard to explain but I felt completely disconnected from any obligations other than my trivial quest to see a rare moth, and it felt really nice.

By 10am the wind had subsided and the sun - already high in the sky - was parching the coastal grassland behind the castle. Conditions were perfect and the shoreline resembled classic Zygaena habitat; short grassy turf intertwined with numerous Bird's-foot Trefoil and the strong, aromatic smell of flowering Thyme. It didn't take long to find a Slender Scotch Burnet resting on a grass stem, followed by another, and another. They were easier to identify than I'd initially imagined; noticeably smaller than the Six-spot Burnets also present and almost always with the two spots closest to the end of the wing fused together. I stuck around for a couple of hours - watching a White-tailed Eagle soar on thermals overhead and a small pod of Bottlenose Dolphins out at sea - before starting on the long journey back to the croft.

Slender Scotch Burnet

Pyrausta cingulata

This post is part of a wholly inconsistent, seldom updated series on my time spent working on organic farms in the Hebrides this summer. You can find the previous posts here:

http://billsbirding.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/postcards-from-erraid.html

http://billsbirding.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/eerie-and-atmospheric.html

http://billsbirding.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/a-bike-ride-to-bunessan.html

http://billsbirding.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/back-from-hebrides.html

Migrant of the Year

One of the highlights of this year has been the influx of migrant moths into much of the UK. The likes of Dark Sword-grass, Small Mottled Willow and, just recently, Syncopacma polychromella have all reached the garden from their continental breeding grounds for the first time. However, the prestigious Bill's Birding Migrant of the Year award has to go to the Bordered Straw which went from no garden records to six in the space of a few months.

The above two moths represent the 1st and 3rd records for the garden (the 2nd didn't stick around for a photo), and turned up towards the end of May at the same time as a wave of Striped Hawk-moths and Bordered Straws hit the south coast. All three had sustained varying degrees of wear and tear on their travels from southern Europe, and were easy to distinguish as individuals because they each had separate little chunks missing from their forewings.

August came, and with it a second wave of Bordered Straws. Whilst the May individuals had been pale and sparsely marked - characteristics associated with moths of desert origin - these new moths were noticeably darker in colouration and turned up without any signs of travel-induced damage to their forewing, indicating that they'd emerged locally - the home bred second generation from eggs laid by the pale individuals back in May.

The question of whether an individual is a 'true' migrant or the home-grown offspring of an egg laying migrant is a hard one to answer. As recorders we all like to hope that our moths have made the impressive crossing from across the channel, and luckily Bordered Straws are one of those species that give us some clues as to their origin through their forewing patterns! 

Christmas presents

Syncopacma polychromella - a minuscule long-distance traveller 

If you put a moth trap out in our garden in any month outside the period April-September, you're asking to be let down. The bright glow of overlooking street lights draws away the few moths likely to be flying, and even trapping in mild weather is unlikely to catch the most abundant of the late-flying species; Winter Moth itself has appeared in the garden on only two occasions in the past seven years!

This winter looks set to be different. Winds pushed straight up from sub-saharan Africa have blown with them warm temperatures and plenty of migrant moths, so I put the trap out in the garden on Christmas night on the off chance that Father Mothmas had a present or two in-store.

Morning came and presents there were. One each of Syncopacma polychromella & Crocidosema plebejana were tucked away amongst the egg boxes at the bottom of the trap. The Crocidosema is a late-flying species of tortrix only added to the Surrey moth list as recently as 1996 when one was caught in Chessington by ex-county recorder Jim Porter. The Syncopacma is just one of many to have been blown over from the continent recently, with over 40 individuals having turned up along the south coast in the past couple of weeks. This is quite an impressive turn-up considering that the 6th record of the species for Britain was only just caught in July by Steve Nash.

Both of these were unsurprisingly new to the garden, and another moth session in the garden last night produced this Oak Beauty - a whole two months earlier than my previous earliest record! Looks like it could be a very interesting winter...

Oak Beauty - normally a spring flying species, but enticed into early emergence by the warm weather.