Prominent features

Overcast skies and light rain greeted us at Tophill Low NR, East Yorks, on Saturday morning. Still, a great day to be had and new things to see... just got to put your mind to it and look hard!

With four lights out overnight, despite the overall catch being typical, some nice moth year ticks were trapped.

Plenty of Prominents in the boxes. This Pale Prominent was set up to pose.

Also, a number of Swallow Proms and single Coxcomb and Pebble Proms were caught, a couple of Shears were trapped (causing a minor headache... can't remember catching one in recent times so I need to find my notebooks for the last one!), Rustic Shoulder-Knot and Flame Shoulder made up the best of the rest with a Water Carpet and a Sandy Carpet.

This Buff Tip alongside the path near the visitor centre was the first of the year. Presumably, despite showing well 10cms off the footpath, it was missed by most!

Here are some of the new species of Lepidoptera added to the Tophill list today.

Twenty-plume moth

Micropterix calthella

And one that isn't new... but looks smart enough.

Platyptillia gonodactyla

So which way now? Birds or Dragons? I hear comments about there not being enough bird news/photos on this blog... so I'll go birds first...

Birding wise, 7 Common Terns included a pair using the raft on Watton Nature Reserve. A Greenshank and Common Sandpiper were also present around the south end with 6 LRPs. After that it becomes a struggle... no Temminck's Stints - surely a matter of time! Some flava wagtails over the south end, perhaps local birds. We didn't see any but heard a few. Hopefully some different races to find if an assortment pops up on the res walls in the coming the weeks when time allows to look.

This was just the day's observations, Tophill's latest news can be found by clicking here on the warden's blog, which features sounds of a Martian invasion!

Odonata wise, the wet weather and lack of prolonged sunny spells resulted in a low count of species and numbers with 5 Red-eyed Damselflies the best of the 6 species encountered, albeit a total of 336 individuals of the group, given the weather, was rather good.

With increasing species of Dipteria and Orthoptera on the go now, a few to take pot shots at with the camera today, the blogs of future Saturday events might get more varied and interesting soon! Time will tell I guess.