The more confiding of our Red Squirrel visitors, the dark tailed individual, plucked up courage on Christmas morn to find their Christmas breakfast in the now, quite popular home made squirrel feeder.
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| Red Squirrel |
Indeed this squirrel has been visiting the feeder regularly, sometimes on stealth mode it seems, as the camera trap only caught it leaving, I'd seen it sitting on the feeder platform from the house but the trap was slow to fire for some reason.
It worked ok for these Wood Mice though.
And the Bullfinch also returned today (not camera trap).
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| Bullfinch female. |
A Christmas gift that was most well received was Volume 1 of Beetles of Britain and Ireland recently republished by the Field Studies Council. Andrew Duff is working on a revision of this first volume I believe, but this reprint is most welcome. I am hopeful that Volume 4 may also get the reprint treatment, although, again I believe AD is also working on a revision of that episode. I have originals of Volumes 2 & 3 but these other volumes had become impossible to obtain (and Volume 3 was tricky to get when I managed to obtain a copy).
To go with my Volume 1 my working through unidentified samples produced an excellent Harpalus laevipes from the back garden. This is a really quite rare beetle and a very good discovery.
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| Harpalus laevipes |
I've also been working on some diptera from 2024, Muscidae and the blow fly families. The excellent key to the blow flies by Olga Sivell is a such a useful book for learning about diptera morphology. The blow flies themselves are tricky to ID. I may have found Bellardia bayeri in the garden, but as good as the key is, it is easy to make mistakes and I need to re-key this before submitting to iRecord. I also need to re-photograph some important bits.
A wander around the patch yesterday included a visit to the fish farm where there were 22 Teal, three Mutes and a Moorhen. On the river nearby there was a pair of Goosander with the resident Mallard.
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| Mute Swan and Teal (now Green-winged Teal, but Anas crecca ref AviBase). |
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