As regular readers of these blogs will know, we've been celebrating Minsmere's 70th anniversary during 2017 by highlighting the incredible variety of wildlife to be found here. You'll know some of the numbers by now: about 5700 species, including about 340 birds, 1200 fungi, 1100 moths, etc. You may remember, too, that back in May half term we celebrated this diversity of wildlife by hosting a week-long bioblitz, during which we recorded in excess of 900 different species.
Well, some of those numbers have grown again, with at least two new insects added to the reserve list. One was found during the Bioblitz but its identity has only just been confirmed. The other was found by one of our younger visitors.
During the Bioblitz, we were pleased to welcome two of the RSPB's Ecologists from our headquarters in Bedfordshire. Mark and Bex spent a day surveying various parts of the reserve on the hunt for invertebrates, specialising particularly in beetles and wasps and bees. Their efforts helped us significantly in our quest to find 1000 species during the week (we ultimately fell just short) as they added many insects and plants that might otherwise have been missed. One of the highlights of their survey was a beautiful, tiny psuedoscorpion called a marram grass chelifer that they found in the dunes.
Mark has now confirmed that one of the other species found that day was a first for the reserve. This was a lovely little weevil that goes by the name of Ceutorhynchus pumilo (picture below by Mark Gurney) - as with many invertebrates it doesn't have an English name.
Ceutorhynchus pumilo is a cute little weevil that feeds on a small plant called shepherd's cress, a member of the cabbage family. The foodplant is uncommon and the weevil is very scarce. There are good populations at Dungeness, in Breckland, and the Thames Basin heaths, but that is about it. Mark has looked for it several times on the shepherd's cress along the path to the beach, but never found it there. This one was found on an abundance of closely related thale cress in an exclosure where the rare red-tipped cudweed grows, quite close to Bittern Hide.
Now I'm happy to admit that weevils may not be everyone's cup of tea, but there is something about the long snout, known as a rostrum, that gives them a comedy character. It may also have inspired a few science fiction characters, as many other insects have.
The second new find was a much bigger, more distinctive insect. It was found on 16 July by none other than my own son, Thomas, age 8. We were enjoying a Sunday morning stroll around the Scrape, and decided to follow the upper path through the dunes north of the sluice, when Thomas stopped and asked me what the insect was that was resting on one of the WW2 concrete tank traps. As I didn't know, I took some photos.
My first impressions were that it looked rather like a horntail, or wood wasp, but that species has wasp-like colours. This one was a purple-black insect with brown wings and bright yellow legs. A quick internet search came up with Sirex juvencus or steely-blue wood wasp, a close relative of the horntail. As it's name suggests, it's larvae bore into tree trunks, so it can be a pest species in parts of its range, which stretches as far as eastern Russia. However, wood-wasps are not true wasps, despite their apparent similarity. They are, in fact, a species of sawfly. What's more, despite their large range, I couldn't find them on the reserve species list that we had prepared for the bioblitz, and Mark has now confirmed that this is a new species for Minsmere. The only previous for an RSPB reserve was from Pulborough Brooks in Sussex.
Thomas's surprise find just proves how you don't need to be an expert to spot something interesting, or even to add to our knowledge of of our wildlife. Again, regular readers will have read about some of the other exciting insects seen this year, such as the "pointy-bum" bees that have attracted so much attention on the lavender, the rare vagrant and lesser emperor dragonflies that put in brief appearances in July, or a rare bug found inside the visitor centre by one of membership team that hadn't been seen here since 2003!
While the albatross in 2015 or last year's purple swamphen may steal the headlines, sometimes it the smaller, less obvious species that have greater stories to tell. Will you be lucky enough to find something unusual on your next visit? All of the species mentioned above have one other thing in common. They were photographed, allowing us to confirm the identification. So don't forget to bring your camera or cameraphone with you to record your sightings!