SMG event Gunton Meadows Friday 8th June

The SWT reserve at Gunton Meadows is small compared to their marshland sites the other side of Lowestoft. But this small area is rich in its variety of species of trees, shrubs and wildflowers and as we walked round on Friday evening picking the spots for our 9 traps we were admiring the fine show of wild orchids in full bloom.
Good management is encouraging plants such as Yellow Rattle to thrive and in time hopefully this could encourage some of the less common species such as Grass Rivulet to move into the site.
Four recorders and the assistant warden assembled for the evening and we had the luxury of four generators between us. There was no specific target moth as this was a first occasion trapping at the site so none of us knew what to expect.
However it wasn’t long before we agreed which moth was to be the most abundant of the night. Common Swifts started to arrive in great abundance with several pairs using our traps to spend the evening in their mating activities.
It was quite a pleasant night for recording, with good cloud cover, calm conditions and a temperature of 14 deg. and easy access to the site was a bonus. Just short of 100 species recorded including a few that Stewart Wright found in a before-dusk search that produced Dusky Plume larva and case bearers Coleophora follicularis and paripennella. The traps produced good numbers of moths. I lost count of how many Common Swift but there were at least 40 in one trap and most of them had similar numbers. Ghost Moth and Waved Umber were unusual to record on the same night and a couple of Seraphim off the poplars were probably the least common of the mainly typical time-of-the year species. But we did get a few hawks including Eyed, Poplar and Elephant that were kept with a few other colourful species overnight in my fridge to show visitors to the wildlife event on Saturday. One of the traps was also retained (not in my fridge) with its contents and provided great interest to the visitors.
Further visits in the future could turn up something unusual.

Brian

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