Missed a tick!

The Safari was looking through our notebooks and spotted a gap on our list yesterday...American Golden Plover; crikey a Lifer and we nearly managed to miss it off our list. Got the Pacific GP a few years ago and can remember dipping the AGP at Blackburn on a really cold and miserable day so this little beauty makes up for that one. Also takes our local Fylde list to 236, (obviously excluding our 10 bad dips!)...nowhere near the top 10, not even in the top 15, but trundling along nicely!

A brief Patch 2 pre-work visit only gave us a very distant Gannet and an unseasonal adult Common Gull.

Mid-morning we played host to the Children of Chernobyl, actually they wer from Belarus rather than the Ukraine but it made little difference as our Russian is niet so goot. However with the aid of a charming interpreter we got by.

The kids done good, finding this shell which we've not seen before, it's a ????? Possibily Fabulina fabula, Bean-like Tellin

Amongst the hundreds of Brown Shrimps and Common Prawns that were wrangled from their hidey-holes were two of these Common Sand Stars.

The fishermen were packing up and we asked if they had any lugworms to show us. They kindly gave us a Green Lug which left its green 'slime' all over our mitts; two washes with Fairy washing-up liquid, two of alcohol hand steriliser and two of standard soap it is still there!

Plenty of Green Shore Crabs were found many alive today and only a few shed skins unlike last week. The top one is about to wrestle the large female from under the Barnacle encrusted male. Hardly a tussle more of a 'move over wimp she's mine'

We saw a small Blenny/Goby in the shallows and offered a prize to the child who caught a fish. Little did we know they'd find a small dead Smooth Hound, type of dogfish shark and then nearly broke the bank with this rather large Spotted Catshark.

Nice set of dentistry!

They didn't get any prizes, we reckoned pointing out dead fish was too easy, what we really wanted was for them to catch some live fish!

Then our own youngsters turned up for a spot of sea watching before volunteering to lay waste to our wildlife garden.

The trouble with 'employing' naturalists to work in a wildlife garden is that they kept finding wildlife and it was down tools every ew minutes as the next moth was spotted. Today's super sighting was of a Hummingbird Hawkmoth laying eggs on Goosegrass, so that won't be weeded!!! Unfortunately thia was the first moth seen and the cameras were still back in the office...b*gger.

Nice Hoverfly for someone to help ID

And if there are any parasitic wasp 'experts' out there, here's one for you...looks a bit funny at the back end as it was meticulously cleaning its back legs. Lost an antenna along the way too.

Where the 'real' gardeners had trashed the Gorse hedge we found this Dunnocks nest lying on the floor. The Gorse was too spiky for the window cleaners to work near so it had to be 'attended to'...at the wrong time of year and without a proper nest search...

Last up are three moths for ID...a Pug

Micro 1

and Micro 2

All goes to prove there is wildlife in our wildlife garden...that's deffo put all the weeding on hold!

Where to next? Normal patch service may be resumed tomorrow. Reports from CR of White Letter Hairstreaks seen on patch 1 today in the afternoon sunshine.

In the meantime let us know who needs the dentist in your outback.