Bittern and beetle.

 No sooner did I see two excellent birds in a day when a third one came along. One of the local birders went out to try and find my Rough-legged Buzzard from the previous day and stumbled upon a Bittern. I'd been out on the hill all morning with the hound. I threw a reluctantish Louise in the car once the What'sApp message had been received and within 15 minutes we were watching a very presentable Bittern, not too far away and showing rather well.

Bittern, Louise was suitably impressed.

The ninth Orkney record, and showing rather a lot better than the one I "saw" at the Loons a few years back. There were six birders present when we left, a real Orkney twitch. The rather funny thing was that one of them happened to be at the spot before us all but hadn't looked at his phone and was oblivious that he'd parked within 100m of the Bittern until he saw us all gawping, as he walked back with his dog, excellent surprise.

The Blackbird spectacle has finally ended with them departing the day before yesterday, the peak was probably 51 within the 1km patch or just a few yards outside it. We were back to a more usual 8 yesterday. Lots of thrushes on the move in the last few days. Surprisingly several hundred Redwing and Fieldfare on the in-by just below the hill yesterday. I now need to edit the Blackbird page of my The Shunan write up - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Z5Q8fAW1hjNdEtA2OcQJjtmS5cjxo3Na?usp=sharing

I'm currently reading this, fascinating. Birds see differently out of each eye, often one for close and one for distant sight, and this is determined by how much light each eye gets during incubation, in other words which way up the egg is, you'd expect that to be genetically determined, but it's not.

I mentioned the talk we attended on line with Tim Birkhead, Louise subsequently emailed him, as she'd worked on a paper with him when she was a zoology student. He replied very promptly and there followed a nice exchange. We knew that the funding for his 40 year project study of Guillemots on Skomer had been cut, Tim is continuing to fundraise for the continuation of this important work, the Just Giving page is here if you feel inclined: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/guillemotsskomer?utm_source=copyLink&utm_medium=fundraising&utm_content=guillemotsskomer&utm_campaign=pfp-share&utm_term=5d249b4935e94be5b15ac2f7521028de Long term studies provide some of our most important biological information, I'm sure you know that.

I continue to delve around in the Wych Elm leaf litter in the extractor (garden seive over a white washing up bowl). I bashed it about a bit and a few more beetles appeared.

Mmmm, an Aleocharine, I think we'll choose to ignore that....

This looks more fun, the tiny 4th tarsal segement and the very reduced final segement of the maxillary palps mean this is a Tachyporus (a Staphylinid beetle).

The wonderful Mike Hackston has written a key for these. https://sites.google.com/view/mikes-insect-keys/mikes-insect-keys/keys-for-the-identification-of-british-beetles-coleoptera

I duly dived in to trying to "do" this 3.2mm long beastie. I emerged with Tachporus pusillus, possible but I wasn't really sure, the key is tricky, and colours of the various anatomical parts are not supposed to be reliable for ID. Anyway, posting on Beetles FB group MT suggested another key, interestingly published in Circaea, the journal of the Association for Environmental Archeology. Apparently archeologists do try to identify beetle remains they find, impressive. The key was published in 1984 but is the most reliable way of confirming the identity of beetles of this genus. The back issues of Circaea are online, and this key relies on the arrangement of setae on the elytra (hairs on the wing cases). In this case the elytra were less than 1mm long. Unfortunately I'd mangled my specimen during my previous ID attempt and managed to lose the elytra, however, my photos proved just about good enough, probably my original ID is correct. I'll see if I can capture another specimen to make sure.

From the key and bottom corner what I can see from my photos of my specimen.