BRECKS: Brandon liverwort & aphid

Mid-February 2022

Despite the miserable weather we decided to go for a family trip to Brandon Country Park, one of our favourite spots as it combines a good area for wildlife, a cafe, toilets and a play area. After visiting the latter three we had a short walk round, including feeding the ducks (although the Mandarin stayed amongst the vegetation, only emerging once it started raining).

 

I've been trying (and struggling) to get to grips with mosses locally, but am also keeping an eye out for liverworts (there's less of them!) and found some nice patches of Forked Veilwort (Metzgeria furcata) on the way round. The Norfolk aphid recorder had also given me a list of under-recorded species to look out for this year (although I was just into Suffolk on this visit) and several of them occur on Bamboo, so I checked out some clumps of Bamboo and found one of the three species Takecallis arundicolens.

Black-tipped Bamboo Aphids (either side of a barkfly)

NORWICH: A park rat and a rabbit

Late January/early February 2022

Various things colluded to restrict my wanderings, but I did increase my Norwich walk-to-work mammal list for the year to three, following on from Grey Squirrel (just about everywhere) with Brown Rats in Wensum Park and a Rabbit in Chapelfield (seemingly a bizarre location for one, but it appeared to be wild type rather than a pet and I have seen a couple nearby once before). A darkish mantled gull at Wensum Park didn't look quite right for Yellow-legged, and it appears the local consensus is that it's a Lesser Black-backed x Herring Gull.

I've not yet got into the swing of much invertebrate hunting, but a check of a small Pine tree on my way home from work (hoping for Striped Ladybird) turned up a couple of rather elongated aphids, which I think were Eulachnus rileyi.