Wednesday, 11 June 2014

Pembrey Forest again

I made my final butterfly monitoring visit to Pembrey Forest today. I was expecting a fair degree of cloud judging by the forecast, but it was in fact glorious and the sun stayed out all day.

Among the butterflies, Dingy and Grizzled Skippers were almost over and Small Blue numbers were also starting to decline, though quite a few eggs and empty eggshells were found on Kidney Vetch flowers. Two Marsh Fritillaries were seen on the Butterfly Ride, and three Small Pearl-bordered Frits in the north-western part of the forest. Ringlets were already out in good number and I was surprised to see two Marbled Whites (early for Carms?).

I saw few macro-moths but Blackneck and Four-dotted Footman were nice.

Four-dotted Footman
I also did about 30 seconds of sweeping among Bird's-foot Trefoil and netted this rather undistinguished looking micro which appears to be Scythris picaepennis. We only have one record in Glamorgan; I'll be interested to hear of its status in Carms in due course.

Scythris picaepennis

George
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3 comments:

  1. Interesting blog, George. I suspect that Sam is away at present, as he has n`t commented on recent blogs...he`s best placed to tell you re your micro.
    I started looking at the area between Foelgastell and esp just N of Drefach in the Gwendraeth Valley yesterday for marsh frits...but ran out of time. The area at cSN535139 etc, looks promising. Found a nice bog at SN540145.

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  2. Just got back on-line. Will be blogging to explain why... There's one 2003 record by Jon of S picaepennis from Pembrey, so yours is the 2nd county record. I must confess to finding Scythridae totally impossible!

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  3. Do you mean...impossible to find or impossible to identify? I was only confident with this one as it was swept from the foodplant, and because most of the similar ones are only known from SE England.

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