My. Bach

A walk around My. Bach mid-levels in the warm sunshine (21c) looking for passage Ring Ouzel proved fruitless, with the best bird being a female Goshawk. I bumped into Colin Richards returning from the top plateau where he saw 6 Golden Plover and a female Merlin chasing pipits, which outshone my sightings.

Insect wise it looks like this will be one of the last recording days for the year. With numbers of species and overall individual numbers declining rapidly. I managed 7 species of hoverfly mainly on a few patches of Meadow Buttercup and Creeping Thistle. Eupeodes corollae (1) being the best and Episyrphus balteatus (6) the most numerous. 2 species of butterfly were seen - Speckled Wood and Comma. Plenty of Honey Bees and Common Carder Bee were seen lower down as were Common and Tree Wasp. Green Shieldbugs and Harlequin Ladybirds were also seen on various plants. Also seen on one of the mountain ponds were 2 late male Southern Hawker. And finally another new fly leaf-mine in Phytomyza ranunculi on Meadow Buttercup.

 Eupeodes corollae

 Harlequin Ladybird - four-spot form

Phytomyza ranunculi - fly leaf-mine on Meadow Buttercup, there are 2 similar species but neither of these has the frass grains close together forming short (black) lines in the mine as seen in the bottom of the photo.