Freaky Jam

Had a great walk around a local private fishery on Thursday evening with fellow recorders Graham Calow and Craig Mabbett. They'd been a few times previously, and aside from finding some decent and interesting plants they'd also picked up a trio of conifer-specialist Epinotia spp.

I picked up a number of plant ticks walking around, but having left my phone in my car (we travelled together in Craig's) I didn't make any real effort to snap plant life - the phone camera is much better for that stuff. Best of the bunch, although it had gone over a bit, was some spikes of Pale Yellow-eyed-grass - a garden escape that is not a grass at all. Other noteworthy plants for me were Musk Mallow, Caper Spurge, Toad Rush and Upright Hedge-parsley. Also a couple of dipteran leaf mines on Teasel, a Hemipteran and this weird gall hitting the PSL ....

Pineapple Gall Adelgid [Adelges abietis] on Norway Spruce. Adelgids are closely related to aphids.

But my main hope was that around the same Norway Spuce belt I'd pick up at least one of the Epinotia spp. There were plenty of tiny tortrix moths flying around as soon as the sun had gone down before proper dusk, and I certainly got one, possibly two:

Epinotia tedella - past its best, but identifiable and new for me

Confirmed via gen det

Epinotia nanana - confirmed via gen det

Epinotia nanana - confirmed via gen det

Also flying around with these were loads of these ....

Zeiraphera ratzburgiana

Now for the freaky luck. Amongst all these tortrix moths, one way or another, a small beetle ended up in the net which looked quite funky through my eye glass. I thought I recognised it, not from having seen it but from photos on the web or similar, but trawling through the usually excellent Kerbtier website for a clue I was drawing a blank. It looked vaguely similar to Bitoma crenata in structure, but clearly not that on markings. I grabbed a quick snap and pleaded for help on Facebook, with Martin Fowlie and Mark Telfer both coming back almost instantly with the same name - Pycnomerus fuliginosus.

This is an adventive species that is usually found further south. This one fits the Pycnomerus key in Duff as P. fuliginosus (versus P. angulatus), however there is apparently one other recently discovered Pycnomerus sp. in the UK so it's now safely with Graham Finch for carding, as a VC55 first and future reference if pertinent.

This morning I nipped out to Narborough Bog with the Lunar Hornet Moth lure and managed to add another dot.

Whilst trying the lure at Everards Meadows, I noticed a distinctly dark-looking cranefly and netted it. With nothing else to hand, I shovelled it into the same large glass tube that I'd temporarily housed the above Lunar - hence the yellow moth scales all over it in the following shots. It turned out to be not only new to me, but scarce in VC55 - more jammy luck.

Nigrotipula nigra