Night roaming

I caught a new moth, Mottled Umber. I'd not seen this species before but most likely because I rarely trap this late in the year and it is rarely this warm and still.

 I love the little, sinister face on the thorax.

Mottled Umber

Now I know this species is here it is worth looking for the flightless females. So out I went with torches and macro camera, looking on the Sycamore boughs in the evening just after dark. I found lots of slugs, Tree Slug  Lehmannia marginata, and Green Cellar Slug Limacus maculatus.

Limacus maculatus

Arion sp

And I also found this which is not meant to be here... Oligolophus hanseni (not found in Orkney before) . But possibly here because years ago my neighbour imported conifers from Aberdeen - further investigation required.

Note the dark hair on the central member of the trident, one of the key features.

Another new species for me found at the weekend was this cranefly Tipula pagana, the females are easily identified as they have these reduced wings.

Finally the night time hunting produced this minute and beautiful mushroom, Mycena sp

 Mycena sp

Little Egrets and Goosander

The Little Egrets at Loch of Banks were successfully ticked for the year. Nice morning at Palace, lots of birds but nothing remarkable.

At home the reason for an increase in Greenfinch became apparent as the bird crop appears to be attracting some things now with 50 Linnet in there today. 12 Greenfinch and three Brambling around the feeders today.

A late afternoon wander to Loch of Bosquoy found two Goosander on the bank, it is a favourite place for them though.

 Whoopers

Reed Canary Grass 

 Mute Swans

New Moon

Moth traps are out but it might be a tad cool at 5C we'll see,

Helophorus species

During the summer, when it was warm and sunny there were hundreds of Helophorus beetles in our small barrel pond, and elsewhere, on my car one day! These were either H. grandis or H. aequalis and at the time I was struggling to identify these to species. The problem here was that the couplet in the key is about a small feature to do with shape. In the end I gave a specimen to LL who identified it for me as aequalis. Today I went back up to the trough where I'd found some Helophorus a couple of weeks ago, fortunately there were still some animals there. I took a specimen. Under the camera and microscope the id feature became clear, an evenly serrated edge to the final abdominal segement. And the reason I couldn't be sure of the id of aequalis in the summer, as I thought I couldn't see the feature.

 Evenly serrated hind edge to the last abdominal segement = grandis, irregularly serrated hind edge = aequalis.

The beetles were only in the bath and not in the nearby concrete trough.

 Rookery

Loch of Harray

A sunny breezy day. Bit of an aurora going on now.

Tooth

Feeling a bit sorry for myself as I had a tooth extracted yesterday. The small flock of Brambling with a Chaffinch and a surge in Greenfinch numbers to 14 (the most for a very long time) was cheering.

I dipped the Grey-cheeked Thrush because the text message system strangely failed :-( and the Tengmalm's Owl is at an undisclosed location, although from the photograph it looks rather sorry for itself, perhaps incontinent.