27th June

Contrasting fortunes on the weather front today with a dreary, quiet morning with occasional spits and spots of rain giving way to a sunny and increasingly breezy afternoon. The quality of the birding didn't change at all: the Hooded Crow was again in and around the Grove pig farm, a new Blackcap showed up at the Obs and a few Manx Shearwaters were milling around off the Bill.

With the exception of a single Bulrush Cosmet Limnaenia phragmitella at the Obs, overnight mothing was uniformly poor: in comparison with the last fortnight numbers and variety were very subdued, with 10 Rusty-dot Pearl and singles of Diamond-back Moth, Dark Sword Grass and Silver Y the only immigrants caught in the Obs traps.


Bulrush Cosmet - Portland Bill, 27th June 2014 © Martin Cade
 
...we could really do with knuckling down to getting the Portland moth records together in one place: our base-line survey of the all-time records is getting on for 20 years out of date and everything since is still tucked away in notebooks or lost on ancient spreadsheets on nearly defunct hard drives. For this reason it's often difficult/impossible for us to be sure how many records there have been of occasional wanderers like this that aren't enumerated in full in the Obs annual report.