Black-headed cardinal beetle

The day dawned with torrential rain, causing me to postpone my fieldwork trip to Milton Keynes for a couple of hours. Instead I dropped Alex at Peterborough station, came home and had a leisurely breakfast and set off again just after 9am. By the time I finally arrived at my hay-meadow the worst of the rain had passed, but much of the field was under about 2cm of water, and the tall grassland was dripping wet. I was wearing my waterproof jacket and trousers, along with snazzy red wellies, but rapidly discovered that they weren't actually waterproof anymore, so spent the day with hot, wet feet....The wellies have now been consigned to the dustbin.

I helped set out the canes and then started recording my thirty allocated samples. I had been allocated two days to complete the work, and almost stopped after 15 samples, but when I checked my phone it said that there would be rain and high wind on Friday, so I set to and completed the whole lot in one go, and it only rained heavily for the very last one. Of course, it was too wet to sit down, so I had six consecutive hours of standing, plus over three hours of driving, which left me a bit stiff and tired in the evening.

Fortunately I came home to a wonderful meal. Chris had decided it would be good to have another family meal before he set off for Sweden on Friday, and cooked Chicken Basque. Pete made it into a veritable feast by producing an interesting starter of Dates in Duvets, and a Spanish Almond Cake soaked in Orange Syrup for dessert. And he remembered the mints!

There hadn't been any chance for photography during the day, but Pete had brought back a few beetles from fieldwork earlier in the week. The smartest was this Cardinal Beetle Pyrochroa coccinea. This species is the rarer cousin of the common Cardinal Beetle Pyrochroa serraticornis, and can be easily distinguished from it by its black-head. It's more strongly associated with ancient woodland and trees, and has a much more restricted distribution, being most frequent in the far south-east and along the Welsh Borders. Here it's been supping nectar from dogwood flowers and got pollen all over its face. The slightly blurred left leg is being used to clean the worst of the pollen off!