I’ve decided to try and keep up with my nature blog. I’ve had a major health scare this year and it’s taken me a long time to fall back in love with nature. Barely walked my local patch, not gone further afield, barely read around the subject, barely worked on my dissertation project (all about dealing with bad biological recording data).
I’m starting to slowly get back into it, and writing has helped me out in the past so I shall give it another go.
Yesterday I had a wander round Jackson’s Brickworks, a local nature reserve, in my home village/town. I have written about the place before, a little gem filled with all sorts of wildlife. Expecting to find not a lot, owing to windy conditions I was just expecting a pleasant stroll. And I was right, no real highlights. Was half hoping for an early Chiffchaff Phylloscopus collybita but alas I heard nothing. This is a partial migrant bird, in some parts of the UK you can find them all year round, but here they are still a migrant and turn up about nowish (my earliest record for the site is 13th March).
I did see a Buff-tailed Bumblebee Bombus terrestris which was a bonus given the
strong winds and low temperature. I actually saw several more of these 3 weeks ago when the UK had unseasonably mild February weather.
Marsh Marigolds Caltha palustris were in full bloom, pretty normal for this time of year, granted, but they are a great sign that things are changing and it can only be getting better from now on.
FULL LIST OF BIRDS SEEN/HEARD (GEEKY, I KNOW, BUT HEY)
Canada Goose (2, maybe checking out a nesting site)
First blog for a bit. Been pretty busy in a pretty inhospitable part of the country (more on that hopefully soon..).
As it is New Year’s Eve as I write this I thought I’d share some wildlife highlights and statistics. Pretty dry I suppose but I kinda like it!
OK, so you remember at the start of the year I decided to get more into moths than I had in previous years? Well I did, I had my garden moth trap out pretty much once or twice (or more) a week from January all the way through to September when work took me travelling. I also bought the MapMate software (which is an impressive database which can be linked to other databases thus creating a huge one!) This has allowed me to share my moth records with the county moth recorder and I can see all the other millions of moth records for Cheshire. Anyway, using this software I’ve been able to see what the most common moths in my garden are this year. So here’s my top 10 (Which I’ve ranked by record not by individuals – some moths are more gregarious than others in the trap).
1. Large Yellow Underwing (pictured above)
2.Heart and Dart (No photo)
3. Riband Wave
4. Dark Arches (No photo)
5. Willow Beauty
6. Light Brown Apple Moth (pictured above)
7. Bee Moth (No photo)
8. Lesser Yellow Underwing (no photo)
9. Double Square-spot
10. Common Marbled Carpet (pictured above)
All photos by me the author.
On to my favourite moths for the year – just a few a ‘top’ 5 but not in any order (and with no photos – WordPress is making it really difficult for me to lay out photos neatly and/or vaguely professionally + I don’t have any)
Chimney Sweeper.This is a black moth (hence the name) which looks a lot like a butterfly and also flies during the day like a butterfly. One turned up in my trap; which is remarkable as they shouldn’t turn up in moth traps due to their daytime habits (and therefore not attracted to light).
Wood Tiger Moth. A brightly coloured yellow black and white moth which also flies during the day. I found one in Crowden, where I was coming back from Ring Ouzel surveying. I found out via MapMate that this moth hasn’t been recorded there before now.
Black Rustic. One of those creatures when you flick through field guides that really stands out and that you wish you can see in the real world. It’s velvety jet black in colour and is just gorgeous and one turned up on the trap this September.
Oak Eggar. Another day flying moth. This one reminds me of working in the uplands on my Ring Ouzel surveys. These moths were everywhere this summer but my stand out memory was of one in a Ring Ouzel’s beak as it was about to turn into fledgling food.
Streamer. By far and away the best looking moth that I found in the garden this year, this was newly emerged and was white pink and lilac in colour.
Streamer (photo: Author)
I’ll leave my bird highlights until tomorrow, don’t want to give an information overload here.
But the relevance to the blog title (I’m trying to keep a vague theme here!) is that all these moth records have been submitted to my local county recorder and can be potentially used (along with all the others) as a resource in the future. So if anyone is reading this and has a load of moth records (or any other records) please submit them to your local recorder!
I’ve decided in 2015 to try and learn a different taxon group. I may even put birds on the back burner (in a non-professional sense) to concentrate on something else. A bit drastic I know but I don’t really want to be a one trick pony (who lets face it can’t always get the trick right!) and would love to broaden my naturalist horizon. Fungi appealed to me towards the end of last year and is a group I’ll take more interest in for sure. How about molluscs? More specifically slugs and snails, it’s niche and I’ve got two excellent books on them but they don’t really get me going if I’m honest. Now I’ve had a moth trap for coming up to five years which I’ve used most weeks in the summer months. Bingo! Moths it is, I’ve got the gear, I’ve some field guides, the local county recorder lives in my town, and the moths can come to you, not the other way around!
My local county recorder is Steve Hind (more specifically, the micro-moth recorder) and I paid him a visit before Christmas. He is a font of knowledge and provided great help, put me in contact with a local forum, and recommended me a load of books and journals. One of which was the ‘Common Micro-moths of Berkshire.’ This is slightly odd as I live in Cheshire, but I was assured only 6 of the moths in the book don’t occur in Cheshire at the moment. I had a quick flick through it and thought it looked great, so a month and £10 later I bought it.
Now micro-moths haven’t had a dedicated field-guide to them for one very good reason, there are literally thousands of them! And most of them don’t have an English name, instead most have scientific two part names. So they haven’t been all that accessible to the budding moth enthusiast (should they be called mothers perhaps? Maybe not.). This was rectified a couple of years ago with the publication of a dedicated field guide by Stirling and Parsons. But still the sheer number of them can be overwhelming; which is where ‘Common Micro-moths of Berkshire’ comes in.
I have to say the book is excellent, it covers 103 species of moth which are the most commonly recorded in Berkshire. There is an easy access thumbnail selection to quickly narrow down a potential moth at the start of the book and then a full page description of each moth, along with hinting at other moths your selection may be similar to. For example one of my favourite micro-moths is Emmelina monodactyla or ‘Common Plume,’ which I think looks like one of these:
Common PlumeFiesler Storch
There is a brief description of the habitat of the Common Plume which is stated as a ‘variety of different habitats’ and whose status is ‘Common’ and then gives a detailed description of what it looks like highlighting important features to look out for, hopefully leading to an easy ID. If not than my potential Common Plume could, according to the similar species given, be a Stenopyilia bipunctidactyla or a S. pterodactyla. There is also a handy graph giving the flight seasons (when are you likely to see an adult flying moth?) although this is less helpful in more northern Cheshire than it would be if I lived in Berkshire. The guide does this pretty well for every moth, most of which are far less distinctive than the Common Plume. Because it is limited to common micro-moths which are you are more likely to catch in a light trap or whilst on a walk it doesn’t overwhelm you with hundreds of options to choose from. I definitely think you can use it in conjunction with the comprehensive Stirling and Parsons guide though, especially as not every description gives clues as to whether the moths are attracted to light or sugar, or are day-flying for instance.
The other thing to remark upon is that the production values of the book are superb. The book looks like it could have come from a major publishing house. It hasn’t. It comes from a local enthusiast group, the Berkshire Moth Group. It is incredibly professional looking, well laid out, glossy pages, a good index, and an appendix which goes into more detail with more alternative species similar to ones found in the main body of the book. There are a few errors which are highlighted in an Errata print-out loosely included at the beginning of the book, including a few mislabelled photographs which would unfortunately confuse IDs. But on the whole these shouldn’t distract from this fantastic book which I would recommend to any naturalist.
So I think I’ve got it. Moths it is for the year (OK maybe I can begin to look at slugs and snails too, and perhaps fungi, and maybe lichen. Perhaps also bryophytes, or perhaps beetles, or hoverflies, spiders even? Possibly.)
Grass-roots Wildlife 