25th June

Another miscellany of comings and goings on a day that was always too warm and sunny for the curtain of fog that surrounded a good part of the island for several hours to penetrate very far across the land. Singing Reed Warblers are typical tardy 'spring' migrants at this time of year, and singles showed up today at the Bill and Southwell, with the Bill also hosting singles of Turtle Dove, Blackcap, Willow Warbler, Chiffchaff, Spotted Flycatcher and the long-staying Red-legged Partridge. The sea there came up with at least 25 Common Terns feeding offshore and 4 Oystercatchers, 3 Manx Shearwaters, 2 Great Crested Grebes, 2 Common Scoter, a Mediterranean Gull and a Sandwich Tern passing by. Also in the seabird line, overnight another 7 Storm Petrels were tape-lured and ringed at the Bill.

A single Harbour Porpoise passed by off the Bill.

Hummingbird Hawk-moths at several sites made up the bulk of the immigrant moth interest, with little in the way of either variety or numbers in the moth-traps.


Silver-studded Blues - Admiralty Quarry, 25th June 2015 © Ken Dolbear
 
Also from today, thanks to Sean Foote for bringing to our attention his discovery of an Orange-spot Piercer Pammene aurana at the Bill this morning; on the face of it there'd be nothing too special about this event as the species is relatively widespread in Britain (although seemingly it's actually not that common in Dorset) but we were pretty excited because for a moment we thought this was a first record for the island! A quick check of the Dorset Moths website revealed there was in fact a record for the Bill which turned out to be of one from our own traps at the Obs, but so long ago - July 1994 - that we'd completely forgotten about it (on having a look, the specimen is indeed in the Obs voucher collection). Since aurana is mainly a day-flyer we popped up to the site of Sean's discovery and quickly found several dozen whirring about the hogweed patch below the Coastwatch lookout:
 
 
 
When a pretty, conspicuous and clearly quite numerous day-flyer like this can escape attention for so long within a few feet of well-trodden footpaths it does make you wonder what else we're missing...