Overdue - Sprawler

Here's another one that is long overdue for a re-appearance in my garden ......

Sprawler - 25th October 2001

Three individuals were taken in different nights in late October 2001, but not a single one since. It's a polyphageous species, so again it's obvious why it is so rare here - not. Need to get the traps out over the next week or so but I seem to be working long/late hours and struggling for time in the mornings. Must still be a chance though.

Chrysalis

I had a couple of hours walking around the square today, mainly looking for fungi and leaf-mines. Found a few bits, nothing too exciting, but this butterfly chrysalis was worth pointing the camera at.

Think this is a Green-veined White - wonder if it will survive hanging there for a few months.

Retrospective Tick

Whilst browsing through images last night looking for that Figure of Eight, I found some shots of a micro that I took in the garden MV trap back on 31/10/2002. Not the best shots, taken with the CoolPix 4500 that I'd only acquired a few weeks previously. The photos were actually taken a few days after the trap date, and it obviously got lost in the noise as on 01/11/2002 our youngest son was born. I'd clearly not worked out what it was back in 2002, and my records on MapMate show nothing that could have been a mis-identification for it either. But now I immediately recognised what it was and knew that it was not on the garden list. I checked with Adrian Russell, without any prompting as to what I thought it was, and he immediately came back with the same answer .....

Psychoides filicivora

Not only is this a retrospective garden tick, it is actually a retrospective first for VC55 preceding the previous first by five years. Even now there are few records. Ironically, it's only a few weeks ago that we had some local e-mail dialogue on this species and I affirmed that I'd not recorded it in the garden and thought it didn't wander far from the foodplant. Had no idea just how wrong I was on that!

Overdue - Figure of Eight

My garden moth list is littered with records of species that have only appeared as a single on one date only, or during one year only. Many of these are really overdue for a re-appearance, and I'll occasionally highlight them through the coming weeks.

First up is this one .....

Figure of Eight

This is the only individual I've ever recorded in the garden, way back on 30/09/2002. In fact I think I've only seen one or two others when out and about in the county. The larvae feed on hawthorn, blackthorn and apple, which make it so obvious why I don't see it all over the place every year!

Well overdue - could have done with one this year for the GMC.

Skev who?

Yet again I've been far too busy / lame / preoccupied / distracted etc to post on my own blog. I've posted on other blogs, tweeted and twatted about and occassionally Facebooked, but this here blog has lain dormant for most of the year. Very poor indeed, and something I will have to correct in 2014.

Here's a nice Vestal from my garden - the 22nd new moth for the garden this year, 4th new macro and 647th species overall. Nice.

Vestal