I arrived on The Isle of Wight nice and early, soon arriving at Chateâu Telfer and immediately began by year-ticking the Wood Calamint that has established itself across the rear patio. Mark welcomed me into the house and pretty soon we were heading off across adjacent Rew Down in search of a truly fearsome monster. Mark, it has to be said, was a bit hesitant that we would score, what with the last sighting being a good few weeks prior to my arrival, but I was having none of it. This was my first time in the field with Mark for a couple of years and we were not about to start with a dip. An hour or so later, having unsuccessfully tried all known spots, I glanced down as I strode uphill towards yet another bramble patch in hope of finding the monster...and saw this
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| I know - amazing, right? |
I couldn't believe our luck, I had almost trodden on it yet here - finally - was my first British Praying Mantis. And yeah, it was awesome!
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| An exceptionally gravid female! |
After a few minutes of me trying to get her to perch on my hand, she pretty quickly scampered through the grasses and brambles and hid herself out of my reach. It's difficult for me to describe quite how bloody awesome it is to have a wild Praying Mantis crawl across brambles, into your hand, then out the other side again. I didn't know it just yet, but this was to be the first in a whole series of incredible orthopteran encounters for me whilst staying with Mark. We saw everything exceptionally well and exceptionally close too. But first I need to mention the post-mantis-finding coffee break in Mark's garden...
Mark is very proud of his Garden List. So proud in fact that he's planning to see more species in his garden during 2026 than I see on the whole of Skye in 2026. I think he may do it too. He'd just finished telling me this when I happened to glance up and see five, then six and finally seven White Storks wheel into view directly over his garden. "Do you need those for your garden list?" I calmly asked from my patio chair, pointing upwards. The next five seconds were pure class - one second of Mark staring upwards, one second of his mouth falling open, a further second saw him leap into action, yelling for Jo to look up whilst he sprinted back into the house for a camera, and two seconds of pandemonium as he burst back onto the patio, camera in hand, desperately trying to relocate the storks whilst still in full-on panic mode.
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| Mark and Jo adding White Stork to the garden list |
The birds truly were a magnificent sight, and the first I've seen for a good few years, but Mark maintains a very strict set of Rules when it comes to his beloved Garden List. These storks almost certainly originate from Knepp, and as such do not qualify either as truly wild or admissible for the Garden List. They join the locally reintroduced White-tailed Eagles as 'unworthy' and the Garden List remains blissfully unsullied. Though they were still pretty damn cool to watch, plastic dross or not. Surprisingly, despite Mark notifying the island's birders via WhatsApp, nobody else saw the storks.
The back garden added such delights as my first Clouded Yellow of the year, several fleeting visits by at least one Long-tailed Blue, three totally tame Wall Lizards and two Boat Bugs, the latter being a full fat lifer for me. I went on to see several more of these, clearly well-established in the garden.
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| Long-tailed Blue with only 8 lives left |
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| Wall Lizards in Ventnor differ markedly from the other introduced British populations |
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| Boat Bug Enoplops scapha on the window frame |
Mark had to finish up some work, so sent me off to the slopes opposite Ventnor Botanic Gardens in the proximity of their greenhouses and plant nursery areas, promising to join me later. I spotted a couple of staff and thought I was about to be thrown offsite, but actually they were super chilled and assured me I was fine to 'snoop around' wherever I pleased. Then they finished up and quit the site. And just like that, there I was - the proverbial child left alone in the sweetshop...
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| Ginger-lily Hedychium gardnerianum |
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| Spotted Spurge Euphorbia maculata |
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| Tinantia pringlei aka the Mexican Inchplant or Spotted Widow's Tears |
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| Euphorbia serpens |
Highlights were many and the lifers came flying in thick and fast, followed by Mark himself (which is when the invert lifers also started flying in), a couple of children locked in the sweetshop....
Amongst the frankly ludicrous additions we found Ginger Lily growing amongst drifts of Bracken, every mullein was a Verbascum lydium with densely woolly spikes, mats of plants in the bare dirt turned out to be various non-native Euphorbias, Common Purslane or Spergularia rubra. We found a patch of arable weeds in disturbed ground; Small Nettle and Round-leaved Fluellin growing alongside Sharp-leaved Fluellin. Back to the exotics, we encountered Hairy Finger-grass, Solanum villosum in abundance, Haloragis erecta naturalised outsde of its greenhouse, Pelargonium inodorum smelling sweetly despite its name, Tinantia pringlei potentially as an addition to the British List, Witch Grass Panicum capillare, Shoddy Ragwort, Echium pinatum, Agapanthus praecox, Kangaroo Apple, Pot Marigolds, the list just goes on! We collected a few ants which Mark named as Hypoponera eduardi, Temnothorax acervorum and Solenopsis fugax, saw literally hundreds of nymphal Nysius cymoides, my first Small White of the year (!), lots of Beosus maritimus, Drusilla caniliculata and Tandonia cristata, a slug that I have yet to see anywhere away from Ventnor!
We returned to the house for some hearty food where I was shocked to discover how tall Bradley has grown, and even more shocked when he said HELLO in a great big deep voice! Wow, it really doesn't seem all that long ago I was piggy-backing him around the living room, pretending to buck him off my back rodeo style. I think he'd knock me out if I tried it now. After food, Mark and I piled into the car and headed for a remote set of fields somewhere near a place called Atherfield, dodging Badgers and Foxes and all kinds of wildlife I rarely see up north. We parked up and yomped through various fields by torchlight, eventually arriving in yet another field which is when Mark told me we had arrived at the appointed spot. Except it was silent. We should have been hearing Tree Crickets from a steep embankment and Southern Field Crickets from the cabbage field, but all I heard was a Moorhen and a couple of Canada Geese. Hmmm...
Suddenly Mark stated he could hear a Southern Field Cricket calling in the far distance. I strained, I really did, but in the end I wasn't sure if I could hear one or if it was just wishful imagination. Of the Tree Crickets there was even less. I thought back to this morning's mantis, of how badly I had wanted us to find one. I thought of how much I wanted us to find a Tree Cricket. I shone my headtorch in the general direction of the huge embankment. Fuckit, I'd just have to beam one by headtorch, how hard could this be? I stated my intention to Mark, who stared at me as though I were crazy, and just like that a Tree Cricket burst into laboured song!! "Torches off, keep listening, beams on at the very last moment. We'll triangulate it's position. Shhhh, follow me" instructed Mark. Fairplay, I was up for that. We closed in, the Tree Cricket fell silent. We paused, it chirped, we edged forward. It chirped once more "Light it up!" I screamed (in my mind this is how it happened, in reality we shone our torches and found an empty bramble staring back at us). How the heck? It was right there... and then yes, it really was right there, climbing up a bramble stem, then across to another stem and now heading down and out of sight! Huzzah, Tree Cricket falls!!! It continued to clamber up, down and through the bramble stems, annoyingly only pausing when it was on the back of a stem and hence offering rubbish photo opportunities. Presumably laying lengthwise along the back of a stem is some sort of predator evasion tactic, certainly it made it tricky to follow even though it was only two feet in front of us. I took a lot of pics, they were all crap!
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| My very best images of my one and only Tree Cricket Oecanthus pellucens |
According to my notebook, as written at the time, "1 male singing loudly. Closed to 5ft and torched it. Still took 1+ mins to locate! I saw it first, far smaller than anticipated. Sang for 2+ mins. Pics at 6" range = all crap." I wasn't kidding.
Elated by scoring a Tree Cricket just as we had given up hope of them being active on this cool night, we then heard (me for the first proper time) a distant Southern Field Cricket! I should mention now that both of these species were discovered on the Isle of Wight in August this year, there are no previous records, so they are still an exciting find for both visiting and resident naturalists alike. But I think I was the more excited out of the two of us, after all Mark has seen both species before. So we skirted the fields some more before hearing a very definite Southern Field Cricket seemingly not too far into the cabbage field beside us. Unfortunately for us, the only way to get closer would have meant trampling the crops, something neither of us was prepared to do. But we had plenty else to keep us amused in the bare margins. Mark pointed at a beetle on the dirt. "That's a Bombardier Beetle!" I cried (just in case Mark, one of Britain's most eminent coleopterists, didn't know...) before falling to my knees in an attempt to grab some piccies. Because yes, this low-listing scummer needed it as a lifer...
Mark had warned me that Bombardier Beetles don't tend to stay still for long, he certainly wasn't kidding!
Obviously Bombardier Beetles have a special trick up their sleeves when it comes to self-defence, one I had yet to witness. I gently pinned it to the ground with my fingertip and was genuinely amazed at the puff that exploded from its rear end, so strong that it actually blew away some of the loose surface soil!! Not wishing to deplete its reserves I let it go to continue barrelling its way around the field margins. Soon after we saw several more, plus what Mark called The Mighty Zabrus...
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| Zabrus tenebrioides - a lifer for me and the first IoW sighting for Mark! |
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| Phalangium opilio - with the largest set of chelicerae on the island |
Pretty much the final sighting was of a Vestal sat in the grass. Then we were heading back home with just enough time left to check the light trap which Mark had fired up a few hours earlier. You thought this post was over? Hell no, the trap was awesome!
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| Oedemera femoralis - several around the house walls and windowframes |
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| Portland Ribbon Wave - a lifer for me! |
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| The long-legged Spanish Dot Antigastra catalaunalis - also a lifer for me! |
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| Paloptera ustulata - yep, also a lifer for me!! |
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Golden Twin-spot. You guessed it, yet another lifer for me!      Despite checking closely, we failed to string any Scarce Bordered Straws into Eastern Bordered Straws, in spite of Mark's very best efforts. It's been an incredible year for immigrant moths, but maybe this will become the new norm and things like catalaunalis and and rare straws will be commonplace. Today was the first of several days in the company of Mark Telfer. Already I'd seen several species more readily expected in the Mediterranean Basin, species that were the stuff of dreams (especially to this naturalist who spends his summers on an island off the coast of NW Scotland) not so very long ago. Praying Mantis. Tree Cricket. Southern Field Cricket. Long-tailed Blue. White Storks. Roll on tomorrow was all I could think, as I slowly drifted off to sleep. |
