Sunday June 29 - Morton Bagot (mostly)

 Let's start with today. I joined Dave for our weekly bash around Morton Bagot. A distantly calling Cuckoo was a good start, its highly likely he'll be off to Africa in the next few days.

It was a cloudy, humid morning ideal for photographing insects, but before I get onto them there's the small matter of a decent bird on the nearest flash. Before I show my lamentable attempt to photograph it I'll get my excuse in early. The bird is fully in shot in the following, but I challenge you to find it.

Give up? Ok here is a massively zoomed in image taken shortly afterwards.

There you go, a Water Rail. Just to give a little context, the species is surprisingly scarce here, and I've never seen one in mid summer. As we last heard one on April 13, it's tempting to speculate it may have bred. Obviously the shot is out of focus due to the bird being the size of thrush and miles away from where we were stood.

Also present today were the family of Shelducks, all eight juveniles now flying. The flash had been reflooded since my last visit but we still located four Green Sandpipers.

I mentioned insects earlier. We found a good selection of butterflies, moths, and dragonflies, but nothing exceptional for the site. Here are some of the more interesting ones.

Brown Argus

Six-spot Burnet

Small Red-eyed Damselfly

At the end of my last post I mentioned I would be putting out the moth trap on Friday night, and I thought there would be lots. 

The result was 115 moths of 32 species, a lot fewer than the previous weekend, but still a decent haul. They were mostly moths I'd seen previously this year, but five were new for the year, and one was new for the garden.

I have to admit that the new one was a micro and I only managed one shot of it before it flew off, so I wasn't 100% sure until @MothIdentificationUK confirmed it for me. The species was Lettuce Tortrix Eucosma conterminana. They are quite local in distribution as well as being tricky to identify. However, a rival on-line moth expert, Ben Sale, believes it to be a similar species Common Knapweed Tortrix Eucosma hohenwartiana (which I have previously had confirmed by gen det in the garden) so I suppose the identification is unsafe.

Eucosma sp

A similar species spotted was Hoary Tortrix Eucosma cana, only the second for the garden.

Eucosma cana

The other ones new for the year were the macros Double Square Spot and Single-dotted Wave, the latter being the first for three years, and the pyralids Oak Knot-horn Phycita roborella and Beautiful Oak Knot-horn Acrobasis repandana.

Single-dotted Wave

I have to say it was a difficult morning because a lot of moths flew off before I could look at them, and the remainder were being harassed by a couple of hungry Wasps, which I eventually dealt with.