30 Days Wild Pan-species Challenge: Day 1

How the series will work:                                                                                                               For this year’s 30 Days Wild project I have decided to set myself the challenge of finding and blogging about at least one pan-species lifer on every day of the month of June. I’m probably going to target some birds and butterflies but aside from that I’ll see where the road takes me.

For those of you who don’t know; pan-species listing is the act of keeping a list of all the species you have seen in Britain, much as many people (including myself) do for birds.

Pan-species listing is a great way to make sense of all of the more obscure taxonomic groups in our country and a link to the website can be found here: http://www.brc.ac.uk/psl/.

At the beginning of the month, my list stood at 1437 species and if anyone sees that I have identified anything wrong, please let me know!

Day 1:                                                                                                                                                   We kick off the series in North Norfolk, and this morning I hit Burnham Overy Dunes as I have been doing recently, mainly looking for migrant birds which have all but failed to appear so far. However, the insects have been good value and today was no different; I found the extremely rare, beautiful, North Norfolk-restricted Clanoptilus barnevillei, on a hawkweed flower. It is our only malachite beetle with all-green elytra, my first lifer of the day and one with great rarity to boot.

Clanoptilus barnevillei

My family and I then got a bus to Holkham and walked back to Burnham Overy through the dunes and pines. Along the edge of the pines I was looking for the pits of the larvae of Suffolk Ant-lion, Euroleon nostras, which, like Clanoptilus barnevillei is rare and restricted to sandy soils. I had a little experience in this as I had found a pit on the edge of the trees next to the Burnham Overy Dunes, though I had failed to observe any activity.

After not too much time looking, I located a pit, and as soon as I tickled the side of the cone-shaped pit with a piece of grass and the larva started flicking sand at it and eventually attempted to grab the grass with its jaws. Crazy things!

Ant-lion

Ant-lion pit

Being in such an amazing dune system there is inevitably more lifers which need identifying, but I have picked the most impressive. Not a bad start to the series!