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| I've kept bumping in to large Cheilosia hoverflies at Comrie Community Woodland, but on each previous occasion they evaded capture. |
On the 2nd June I had a wander with the camera on Comrie Community Woodland where I've been trying to build a site species list. I first visited exactly a year previously, after we'd been living here in Perthshire just three weeks. The site was part of Cultybraggan Camp, a British PoW camp in WW11, it has a fascinating, although gruesome history, have a look here - https://www.cultybraggancamp.uk/ We have our (half) allotment on the Camp. The Community Woodland are fields across the road and up the way from the Camp, more information may be found here - https://www.cultybraggancamp.uk/community-woodland On the site is a (very) small reservoir which was, I think, the water supply for the camp. And a small burn flows through much of the site.
The bird list for Comrie Community Woodland is 75 species. There has been consistent monitoring of the birds over recent years, at least. I've managed to see 53 species in my first year, plus Moorhen and Rook, seen from the site. There is a plant list which I haven't seen (I must get hold of a copy), my main focus is invertebrate monitoring, of which some occurred previously, but included mostly just butterflies and the more obvious, larger species. But I've also been recording bryophytes, fungi and a few plants. So far I have a total of 221 species in iRecord for the site. This isn't that many, bearing in mind my list for our tennis court sized garden is 468 species, with a few to add. However, the garden list does include birds and wild plants. The Community Woodland is a really nice site to work on, although light trapping requires a bit of an effort, taking the kit up there and then staying up all night, or getting back to the site very early in the morning. There are many hundreds (or thousands) more species to record.
Anyway, here are some of the species from the wander with the camera. I took one specimen on this occasion which was of a hoverfly NFM (new for me) Cheilosia albitarsis, which is a bit of a tricky ID, and I got no field images (the image above was from a previous visit and the animal proved unidentifiable from photographs). Here's one of the key identification features, front tarsus showing the colour of the five tarsomeres, and, importantly, the shape of tarsomere five.
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| Cheilosia albitarsis, fore tarsus. |
The following images are slightly more, er, populist.
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| Cantharis nigricans |
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| Cantharis pellucida, the red/orange ventral colouration being the easy ID feature. |
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| Pretty sure this is ok for Chrysopa perla, lacewings not really being my thing |
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| Clouded Buff, a male. It required some dogged pursuit and stalking to finally get this image |
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| Another "different" colour variation of Ctenicera cuprea, in Orkney I never saw anything other than the standard version. |
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| Empis tessellata |
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| Micropterix calthella |
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| Nematinus sp, there are three similar species and I need to see the dorsal surface of the abdomen in order to get a specific identification. It didn't open its wings.... |
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| Oedemera virescens I think, the swollen hind femurs make it a male of this species, I'm finding these a wee bit confusing at the moment and should probably take a few specimens. |
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Xylota segnis Ooops, more carelessness, this is actually Brachypalpoides lentus which was not at all on my radar until I saw a post on FB; I meant to check this one but RM beat me to it and kindly re-identified this. |
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| Panorpa communis a female Common Scorpionfly |
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| Triphragmium ulmariae, NFM this rust on Meadowsweet |
Away from the Community Woodland, the best effort of the week was to finally see a Beaver. A brief, but clear view was had on an evening when I wasn't really looking for the beasts, quite unexpected.
