Bob, you look like you've seen a ghost

The reserve is looking really colourful at the moment.  When it's warm, there are lots of butterflies on the wing. We have seen the first gatekeepers this week, numbers of meadow brown have increased and there are lots of red admirals, and a few common blue and speckled woods too. We have also seen a few silver-Ys, day-flying moths that visit here from the continent in the summer, and our first narrow-bordered five-spot burnet moth.

Volunteer Bob Evans has started to moth trap here this week, and caught 122 moths of 33 species in his first session, including an impressive poplar hawkmoth. The good news is that he also saw some male ghost moths and they were lekking.  You may have heard the word lek: a couple of British breeding birds do it (black grouse and capercaillie). A lek is a gathering where the males show-off to the females.  Black grouse do it by fanning their tail feathers and making an amazing warbling call. Male ghost moths lek by slowly rising and falling over open ground, or hovering in one spot.  A ghost moth lek, which happens at dusk on calm evenings, hasn't been seen for several years, though local moth recorder Julian Thompson did witness it a few years ago.  Now we know that they're still here, we can manage the habitat in that area to keep it good for ghost moths.  I wonder if they'll be lekking in a month's time for our Big Wild Sleepout?

We've seen quite a few damsel- and dragonflies too: azure, blue-tailed and common blue damselflies, common darter, broad-bodied chaser and emperor dragonflies. The bridge pond is best for damsels, and the rapidly-drying ponds at the start of the Heron Trail are best for the bigger dragons.  Our bumblebee identification course on Sunday was a rather wet affair, but we all enjoyed getting to grips with the challenges of identification, and found seven different species, including tree bumblebees (hypnorum) which seem to have built a nest above the back door of the Coffee Shop - see, we are giving nature a home all over the site!

A few passage waders have been spotted this week: up to five black-tailed godwits, richly-coloured in orange, a couple of dunlins, green sandpiper on a few dates, a summer-plumage knot (on Tuesday 7th) and two little ringed plovers on Sunday (5th).  Several common sandpipers are around the lagoons, including the chicks that have fledged from the Deep Lagoon.  A kingfisher was spotted here on Sunday, the first of the autumn.

The orchids have been wonderful this year, but most have now finished flowering. We counted 1,564 spikes of five species, with southern marsh orchid being the most common.  There are plenty of other flowers to look out for though: two abundant ones are self-heal and yellow-wort, both pictured below. 

Self-heal is a low-growing purple flower that grows in the grass, and was used by Native Americans to soothe boils, cuts and inflammations. Yellow-wort is easy to identify, because its leaves grow in pairs and are fused around the stem.  But if you come in the afternoon, you may find that the yellow-wort flowers have closed up for the day!