Literate herring, this way.: Talk.

Monday, 17 March 2025

Talk.

Yes, well shutting me up can be the issue.....

However, I gave a talk recently, in support of our Community Woodland, we are trying to record all the species found there. I haven't done a talk for a while, and when I got the projector out it was kaput. Fortunately it is possible to buy quite cheap, but low power projectors online these days. The one I bought for £85 will suffice for small group talks.

Here's the link to the talk slides - https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:c1a9ef69-0611-4a91-92f3-0b1563bcce2b

The idea was to encourage recording of wildlife at Comrie Community Woodland in iRecord in an "Activity" and also to support identification with Obsidentify, but helping folk to understand that the AI is fallible and the outcomes need to be checked.

It seemed to go ok, the projector survived the outing, and excess cash over the room rental cost will go to Butterfly Conservation. This because I'm a verifier for BC for Orkney (still) so some of my iRecord learning is down to my involvement with BC.

I heard the first Chiffchaff of the year here the other day. New bird species for the Patch, on consecutive days were Peregrine and Green Woodpecker. The former was found on prey in one of the fields, when it was flushed by a Buzzard stealing its prey, a second bird appeared and they called and squabbled as they headed off. The Green Woody was calling repeatedly from across the Ross somewhere as we were chatting over the garden gate yesterday afternoon. 30 Curlew have been on the sheep fields and Pied Wagtails are re-appearing.

Hand-held bin-scoped, 30mm macro through x8 bins, I don't always carry a telephoto lens these days.

There was a hybrid Hoodie/Carrion in attendance as well. And talking of bins I'm just using the (relatively) cheap Nikons (see a previous post) all the time. They are light, fit in the hand nicely, pin-sharp, focus very close and are just great to use. These are really very nice bins for the what I need them for these days, I guess I could have splashed out on one of the more expensive versions, but I'm not sure how much more gain I would have got for much more money.

We've got an allotment, well a half, quite enough anyway, and had the first couple of trips down there. Of course, rather than dig much or do any of that I kicked off by delving around in the collapsing fruit cage, looking for species. Winter-cress was new to me. And pulling it up and examining what crawled out was an interesting exercise.

Winter-cress

Leiosoma deflexum, a small but common weevil.

There were three Carabids, two Bradycellus species, one of which might be new to me and Amara ovata. There were three Stapylinids, a Stenus that refused to key out but was probably S. ossium, Xantholinus longiventris which keyed out ok, and a Tachyporus. The new book proved its worth with the Tachyporus, a tricky genus identified by the setae on the elytra. The original paper that developed this means of identification was not the easiest to interpret, I've used it quite a few times, but Andrew Duff has done a great job turning this into a dichotomous key.

Tachyporus identification sorted! T. dispar (slightly embarrassing if I've got that wrong).

Other beetles included Protopion fulvipes, another weevil, and there was a Chrysomelid that Obsidentify insisted was Agelastica alni but it wasn't. Assistance from the very helpful folk at Beetles of B & I FB Group pointed out where I'd gone wrong in the key when I was checking the ID. The correct genus was Altica, a very confusing and difficult genus. However, CW put me on to the genitalia illustrations and a quick dissection got me to Altica lythri, the commonest species of the genus,but a species I had not seen before.

Altica lythri, fortunately a male, here's the aedaegus which proves the ID.

Something of an added bonus was that the Bradycellus harpalinus was infected with a fungi and this would have to be Laboulbenia eubradycelli.

Bradycellus harpalinus infected by Laboulbenia eubradycelli.

There were a few more interesting beasts and plants at the allotment. But I've been out at the Community Woodland finding some things in the last few days, material for the next post.

Spring is springing, Coltsfoot, Primrose and Common Whitlow-grass all in flower in the last few days.