A Perfect Day

It was a glorious day at Blashford today, to my mind the perfect balance of sunshine and cool temperatures, the ideal autumn day for getting work done on the reserve. It was also a pretty good day for birds, although many of them have been with us for a while now.

When I first looked from Tern hide as I opened up I saw the two young little gull and thousands of house martin, low over the water, I estimated 3000 at least but they were everywhere low over the trees, lakes with others high in the sky. I could see no sign of the black tern or grey phalarope. A small wader on the gravel island way out near the middle of the lake caught my eye, there was something of a redshank about it but it was not one. This meant wood sandpiper was the most likely candidate and after a little while it was disturbed by a black-headed gull and made a short flight confirming the identification, our second of the autumn.

Later in the day it turned out the phalarope was still present and I got good views of it as I locked up. Other birds included both great white egret, at least one green sandpiper and reports of common sandpiper, I missed that, so did not get the “Sandpiper set”. Locking up the Ivy North hide I saw a pintail, the first for a few days.

I got no pictures of birds, or anything else today (working too hard, obviously!). However I will post a few pictures of recent notable records from the reserve, not great pictures mind you. The first is of a small Tortrix moth Olinida schumacherana, which seems to be the first record for the 10km square that includes the reserve.

Olinida schumacherana

The next is the Australian Pyralid moth that we first recorded last year as possibly new for Hampshire. In appears to have been introduced with the tree ferns that the caterpillars eat, although it now seems to be finding local ferns to its liking.

Musotima nitidalis

It was first found in the UK in Dorset in 2009.

I will end with a couple of pictures from my garden, two late butterflies bringing  a little colour to the end of their season.

small copper on Sedum

A very fresh male common blue

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An Alien has Landed

We run a moth trap at Blashford on most nights of the year, we record the species and numbers. Some species are regular and others we see only once every few years and just occasionally we get a new species. When I opened up the trap yesterday morning there was a moth I had never seen before, small but quite distinctive.

small moth

When  I looked in the book I could not find it, luckily the internet came to my rescue and I managed to identify it as a Pyralid moth, Musotima nitidalis a species native to Australia and New Zealand and first found in the UK in 2009 near Bournemouth.

So how did it get here? It appears it feeds on tree ferns and is likely to have been introduced with plants imported from Australia. It seems it will feed on some native fern species here, such as black spleenwort and bracken. Now it is here it will probably stay, perhaps as a scarce insect having little impact, or perhaps not. Once alien species establish the consequences will only become clear many years later and certainly there is nothing we can now do about this particular one but wait and see what happens.