It's hottin' up...

The sun finally put his hat on proper last weekend, so it was with some excitement and anticipation that I went to Clifton to conduct my 5th butterfly survey of the year. It wasn't excellent, but things certainly are picking up. In the hour I walked my transect I saw 50 individuals, of 6 species. The browns are starting to emerge in numbers, and should be peaking within the next week or so, with hopefully some Gatekeepers making an appearance towards the end of the month. It was also nice to finally see some skippers, a couple of Large Skipper, a wonderful conspicuous golden creature sitting pretty on blades of grass. Speckled Wood seemed to be doing great as ever on this site, with 21 individuals seen.

Birding-wise, nothing out of the ordinary, the same species seem to make an appearance but I guess that's to be expected when walking the same transect every week or so. Saying that though, a few Coal Tits at the end of the grove was a nice surprise, as i've never had them here before, they're usually restricted to Clifton Wood. Juveniles were noted throughout the area, with a family of Wrens at Holme pit, joining the Mute Swan, Mallard and Coot families nearby. Juvvy Blue Tits were also noted on the grove, and some humbug-headed Great Crested Grebe young were on the river.

The diversity of odonata was increasing at Holme Pit, where Common Blue and Blue-tailed Damsels have been in abundance for a few weeks. Today they were joined by several copulating pairs of Red-eyed Damselfly, a species i've not seen before, as well as my first dragons of the year, Brown Hawkers. Several Banded Demoiselles were noted too, which are infrequent visitors to the pond, usually preferring the river and my transect up on the grove.

Since then I've noticed, probably in the advent of this lovely hot weather, that butterfly numbers seem to have exploded in the last few days. I went out for a walk on Tuesday morning and was surprised to see good numbers of Small Tortoiseshell. They were everywhere but highly mobile so I struggled to get a good shot. It seems strange to remark on such a 'common' species, but they seemed to do disastrously last year, as I didn't see ONE in Notts during the whole summer. Hopefully these butterflies are a sign they had a good breeding season early on this year. I also saw the first Comma I've seen since early spring, obviously a recently emerged second-generation insect.

Buff arches

Dark arches

I also ran the moth trap again on Monday night, and was happy to see it was again a success. 18 moths of 10 species, all but 1 new for the garden, seems little compared to other peoples catches out in the countryside, but I was still very happy. The highlight was a Buff arches, a splendid, intricately patterned moth. I also got to grips with trying to seperate the aptly named 'Uncertain' from the frustratingly similar 'Rustic'. I am not totally sure if my decisions were 100% correct, but it was interesting trying to find out anyway.

Uncertain - note the centre bar joining the kidneys

In comparison, a Rustic, displaying no centre bar 
and a pale fringe to oval and the kidneys