Into the dark

I've been doing a lot of bat surveys recently, which usually involves sitting around looking for bats.  Tonight's bat survey was a bit different.  The building is a known brown long-eared roost and our survey team was privileged enough to have a look around the building with our licensed colleagues.

Sixteen bats were seen getting ready for a night on the wing, but perhaps more interesting was the array of insects hiding in the building in the complete dark.  There were several peacock and small tortoiseshell butterflies roosting up, along with many herald moths.

Stars of the show were a large number of spiders, not everyones cup of tea.  At work I'm fortunate enough to have the county spider recorder on hand to help with ID.  To my surprise and delight the spider was the cave spider, a species which lives its entire life in complete darkness.  Tick!

Doxey Marshes

This evening I took at Doxey Marshes to complete one of my regular water level monitoring visits.  Its always a great excuse to have a look around the nature reserve, and this evening didn't disappoint.

One of the first birds seen was a little egret, feeding along a ditch near the motorway.  It was shortly followed by a whinchat flitting between perches in the neighbouring field.  The air above the flashes were filled with swallows busily feeding up before migrating south.  They were joined by a few house martin and sand martin, but it seems like a long time since I've seen a swift!

Now whinchat is a great bird to find, but I have to give 'star species' to a plant, a plant I've wanted to see since I first heard of it.  Sadly its not rare, I just need to pay more attention.  The species is gypsywort, a member of the dead nettle family with a cluster of small pink flowers around the stem.  Several plants were growing a stretch of ditch at the end of Warrens Lane.  On checking the county database, it turns out this is actually the first record for the nature reserve.

Also present along the ditch was water mint, probably my favourite wetland plant.

More butterflies

Today I was at Loynton Moss to complete the butterfly transect, like the one from my last post at Mottey Meadows NNR.

The survey involves walking a set route around the reserve, recording the species seen.  You can find out more details here - http://www.ukbms.org

Species seen included gatekeeper, speckled wood, meadow brown, small white and small copper.  There were also many dragonflies about including migrant hawker, southern hawker, brown hawker, emerald damselfly, common darter and ruddy darter.  A kingfisher was seen on the canal and several bullfinch were in the small glade at the southern end of the woodland.

One butterfly, two butterfly

I've been helping Natural England complete their butterfly transect at Mottey Meadows NNR recently.  The survey is part of a series of ongoing monitoring programmes to assess the condition of the reserve and the impact of management work and climate change.

Sadly it was a bit breezy here and there so most of the butterflies seen were out of the wind on the other side of the hedge, and thus outside of the transect so couldn't be counted.  In the end I finished with large white, gatekeeper, small white, meadow brown, small tortoiseshell, red admiral, green-veined white and a skipper species which blasted past not to be identified.

'Peek-a-boo' with a red admiral