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!