White campion

An early start again, taking the Corsa in for its MOT and service. I tried to clean the inside a little first thing in the morning, but gave up against a swathe of dog hair and at least several dust-pan loads of soil in the driver's foot-well. It is an ecologist's car!! Fortunately everything was OK and they cleaned and valeted it for me, so now it's sparkling :) It won't last though....

As soon as I returned home from the garage Alex and I headed off in the Galaxy to a disused sand quarry in Bedfordshire to do our annual monitoring. It's amazing the effect that a wet year can have, and the vegetation was much grassier with a corresponding increase in the volume of birch scrub. We were excited to find a population of a very rare species, smooth cat's-ear Hypochaeris glabra, which is considered to be vulnerable in Britain. It's not a very photogenic plant though - rather like a tiny dandelion - and the light was appalling so the photos I took are not very sharp.

Home again in time to pick up the car, go to Sainsbury's and cook tea. I just managed a five minute wander round the garden to find something to blip. This is white campion Silene latifolia, a wild species of disturbed areas such as arable field margins and waste places. A fine plant has popped up in one of our flower beds. I suppose I could consider it a weed, but it seems just as beautiful as many garden plants and is a lot easier to grow!

Chris was delighted to report that he'd actually managed to catch the rare fly that he's been searching for (all of 4mm long and black), the first time it's been recorded in the UK since 2000, and just where he'd predicted it would be. I spent some of the evening photographing his specimens, to include in his report.