Firebugs

After an easy drive down to Kent, the first part of the day was spent working. While Pete and Chris were catching invertebrates, I was given the task of photographing some of the habitat features, but I temporarily got side-tracked by a thriving colony of European Firebugs, which are well-established at the site and feed on the seeds of Common Mallow. Not that many years ago this was a very rare species in the UK, with just a couple of sites on the south coast. It's now turning up much more regularly - one of the many insect benefiting from climate change, particularly warmer winters.

We'd hoped that last week's rain would encourage emergence of the autumn generation of beetles and bugs, but most of the rain seemed to have missed this corner of Kent, and the vegetation was drier than ever. As neither Pete nor Chris were finding anything new, we decided to give up at about 4 p.m. which gave Pete and I time to walk along the edge of the saltmarsh at Pegwell Bay and  explore the old hoverport, which closed in 1987. Lots of interesting things to see including a huge population of Pointed Snail, the tallest Acute Rush I've ever seen (over 2m) and plenty of a subspecies of Rock Sea-lavender that I hadn't seen before, though it was mostly past its best.

We left it a bit late to head back to our hotel in Sandwich, so ended up attending a Zoom meeting on my phone, while standing in a car-park drinking white wine from the top of a flask! A first time for everything!