Two Patch Surprises

Last night I fired up the light trap for the first time since 1st January. It was relatively mild and I really did expect a small haul of goodies to be attracted. As it turns out, a male chironomid was the only insect inside the trap and a male Trichocera hiemalis on the wall nearby appeared to be the only other insect lured in. I headed off to look elsewhere for invertebrate interest, pausing to raise the sheet of ply that has been laying on the back lawn for a few weeks now. Bingo! One of my favourite invertebrates lay there before very slowly heading off away from the bright light of my headtorch.

Kontikia andersoni - an alien terrestrial flatworm

When I lived in Uig, a few years back now, I used to regularly find these beneath piles of dumped bricks and the like. I've also found it once at Aird Woods, right down at the southernmost tip of Skye. But this is the first time I've ever found it anywhere else on Skye. Notably, I seem to only ever see these in the winter months - but that may well just be observer bias as I'm usually too busy swiping my net at flying inverts during the summer months. The common flatworm here is the New Zealand Flatworm, one of my least favourite invertebrates, I see them every time I lift debris here at the hotel. The novelty has well and truly worn off and I now find them mildly disgusting. 

Arthurdendyus triangulatus the New Zealand Flatworm. Yuck.

These are typically found beneath anything heavy that is in contact with bare soil. I see several each time I roll logs or check beneath compost bags and plant pots. Usually they are coiled up as shown in the image, but sometimes they are sliding away and that's when you realise quite how large these are. The longest individual I've found here was about 15cm long, which is pretty huge compared to the 1cm long Kontikia andersoni. 

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by the smaller of tonight's flatworms and headed off to check around the external lights in case a moth was sat under one. No joy there, but I did find this lady

Female Steatoda bipunctata

To say I was surprised for the second time on this headtorch safari would be an understatement! Discovering that a population of Steatoda nobilis live around most of the buildings here was a bit of a shock, to now find a second species of false-widow was equally shocking. This is Skye for crying out, how on earth did these spiders get here?? 

Today is my birthday. Yesterday I pre-warned the boss that it was unlikely I'd be at work... 

...and today I took myself on a trip around the top end, finding a low-flying adult Golden Eagle, an exceedingly pale Buzzard which caused a fair degree of panic until I realised what it was, a flock of 90 Barnacle Geese and (best of all) a flock of ten Woodpigeons! I'm probably the only guy who gets as excited about Woodpigeons as I do about eagles (I had a White-tailed Eagle sat in a field today...) I then spent a lot of time scanning a huge area of land for the handful of Greenland White-fronted Geese that turn up most winters. No joy this time, I don't think they've been reported at all this winter, but a bonus sighting of two Roe Deer way out in the fields was my first sighting of that species this year. 

I checked out a couple of rivers, finding the freshwater flatworms Polycelis felina and Dendrocoelum lacteum on the underside of submerged stones, along with River Limpets. But best of all was this Bad Boy. Talk about charismatic megafauna (as Ghostie once named it). Or, as I stated at the time, a pebble with its gob open...   

Freshwater Pearl Mussel. Good luck spotting it!

Back to work tomorrow, so far I've managed to add something to my yearlist every day of the month. That's three weeks without a blank, will I make it to month end I wonder?