Messing about in the gutter

Gutter is the word used here in Orkney for muck and grime, something can be guttery. I'm getting involved in the gutter in my quest to find more and different creatures in our garden and nearby. Searching in the litter under the sage bush revealed a smart wee beetle. But although the rear abdominal segements were exposed I wasn't sure this was a Staphylinid. Unwin's FSC key was consulted and that took me that far. Next, it was Mike Hackston's online key to genera (Mike's keys are really excellent if you've not experienced them). That took me to subfamily Omaliinae and a bit of a full stop. However, if in doubt head over to Mark Telfer's website, my next destination. Unfortunately, the news there was not initially very encouraging, Mark refering to C.E. Tottenham's 1954 RES  key as "the most accursed key in the British beetle literature!" Mike Hackston to the rescue again, as Mike had posted to Mark's site that he had translated a German key and adapted it with other references and thought it might be helpful (for some reason I had failed to find this key earlier). This key was reasonably plain sailing, one tricky couplet, and took me, hopefully, to genus Anthobium, a genus with just two UK species. Unfortunately, Mike's key doesn't separate these two. C.E. Tottenham does though and these old RES keys are freely downloadable. A. unicolor, and a look at our local database showed one record (slightly disappointing as I had hoped I might have a county first).

Anthobium unicolor.

 Sage litter and gutter, up close. Note the very small critter hiding in the photo, identity revealed later.

The site.

(Post incomplete, more to come later.)