Sunday June 18 - testing the tech at Morton Bagot

 I arrived at Morton Bagot this morning on a mission to see whether the Merlin app was any good. This is the one aimed to help novice birders learn to identify birds aurally. By the time Dave arrived I had waved my phone at a newly arrived Reed Warbler, which it got right, and at a fairly obvious singing Reed Bunting, which it couldn't hear.

I soon tired of the game, but concluded it did work for birdsong as long as the subject was reasonably close. However it was pretty fiddly juggling phone, bins, camera, and notebook so I decided to continue with the old approach of just identifying birds using forty-five years of birding experience.

To be fair to Merlin it didn't make any obvious mistakes, and I can certainly see it would be invaluable as a teaching tool. 

Another plan for the day was to count butterflies. This does get in the way of the birding, but the results were remarkably different from my farmland counts last week. We logged 111 Meadow Browns, 24 Small Heaths, 14 Large Skippers, 13 Marbled Whites (nfy), 13 Ringlets (nfy), eight Speckled Woods, four Common Blues, a Brown Argus (a tatty individual we had thought was a female Common Blue, re-identified as this species by county recorder), three Red Admirals, a Comma, and a Small Skipper (nfy).

Small Skipper

I suppose it's not surprising, but clearly HOEF land scores massively over the surrounding farmland. It was also good for moths. I soon got fed up of peering at the 100 or so grass moths fluttering periodically from the grass, but those I did look at were almost all Garden Grass-veneers, the other was Crambus pascuella. There were some nice moths new for the year though; Burnet Companion, and presumed Narrow-bordered Five-spot Burnet.

Burnet Companion

Narrow-bordered Five-spot Burnet

So, did we record any decent birds? Well the Grasshopper Warbler was still singing away, and late in the day we heard the bubbling call of a female Cuckoo, the first female I've heard here for a few years. A Sedge Warbler was getting very agitated near the little pond, presumably it had fledglings or a nest, and I got a shot of it before we moved on.

Sedge Warbler (ringed I notice)

The flash field now has water in it again, and I understand there has been a Green Sandpiper here during the week. Unfortunately we couldn't see it, and the Quail seems to have moved on.

The dragonfly pools produced the first Small Red-eyed Damselflies of the year as well as the usual Emperors, Four-spotted Chasers etc.

Walking through the undergrowth on the way back, we had the chance to see something completely new when a small bug fell onto my clothing. We had no idea what it was, so this was a chance to put another piece of tech to test. The Obsidentify app is usually very accurate, but can struggle with smaller forms of insect life, so we were surprised when it came up with an unequivocal 100% certain identification of the bug.

Deraeocoris flavilinea

This is a plant bug too obscure to be referenced in my insect book, and it wasn't even in its final instar. So it was still a nymph. I checked it against photos on line and it looked identical.

Hats off to the tech. I wish we'd had all this stuff forty years ago, but I also wish we had as much wildlife now as we did then. Ironic or what?