January beetle target met!

Good day for additions yesterday. At about ten to midnight I decided to have a brief poke at some sciarids that came out of a stem of Epilbium hirsutum. I expected I would discard them unidentified in the end, but miraculously they only took 5 minutes to key out to Schwenckfeldina carbonaria. If only everything was that easy.

There have been a remarkable 12 additions to the reserve list in the first five days, six of which have been new to me. On each visit I've really only been there less than an hour, so this tally is from accumulated effort of about 5 hours in the field and maybe three times that at home. I started with a beetle target of 20 for January and then revised it up to 25 when I was feeling sassy. Now I'm at 25 and I have at least two more species on sticks to do. No point in setting a new target but it looks like it will end up being 30-something. The take-home message of that is that there are plenty of inverts around, even in January when everything is freezing.

52					330	coleoptera	Tachyporus dispar	A rove beetle	05/01/2021
53					330	coleoptera	Paradromius linearis	A ground beetle	05/01/2021
54			R		330	coleoptera	Phaedon tumidulus	A leaf beetle	05/01/2021
55					330	coleoptera	Trichocellus placidus	A ground beetle	05/01/2021
56					190	tick	Ixodes ricinus	Sheep Tick	05/01/2021
57			R		330	coleoptera	Psylliodes napi	A leaf beetle	05/01/2021
58		C	R	M	340	diptera	Limnellia fallax	A shore fly	05/01/2021
59					170	spider	Tenuiphantes cristatus	A Linyphiid spider	05/01/2021
60					330	coleoptera	Stenus brunnipes	A rove beetle	05/01/2021
61			R	M	340	diptera	Schwenckfeldina carbonaria	A sciarid fly	05/01/2021

(CRM: new to C=county, R=reserve, M=me)