Saturday 20 May 2017

Roving clouds and a well-camouflaged carpet

During the past week or so, I've seen about half a dozen rove beetles scurrying around Tense Towers. Lounge, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, they're everywhere. Each one has been carefully encouraged onto a piece of paper and relocated outdoors, and I'm pretty sure that it isn't the same one six times.

Being vaguely aware that there's a lot of beetles in the world, I was still surprised how difficult it was to key this one out to a positive ID. Folk with much more idea than I, hazarded a few guesses from my phone photo (below), but the only certainty seemed to be that it belonged to the genus Philonthus.


Those gradations are millimetres, by the way.

The most recent days have been sunny and warm with pleasingly light winds. However, immediately preceding this fortuitous meteorology, there was a bit of a sploosh. Talk about brooding and leaden!


Yesterday, at work, I was attaching some cable to a wall, when a movement caught my eye. To be honest, if it hadn't have moved, I wouldn't have seen it!


I'm reliably informed that this moth is a Garden carpet.

Today is dreich. Constant rain and poor visibility, so there's not much enthusiasm for wildlife watching. Tomorrow promises much better weather, so we've booked ourselves onto an event at the Orkney Nature Festival. Fingers crossed!

6 comments:

Mark said...

Good morning MrTense, hope all is well at Tense Towers. There are a lot of Beetles in our house too I've identified one as the White Album and Abbey Road a close second :)

Imperfect and Tense said...

I see what you did there!

Spadger said...

Ha ha very good! I too have Beetles living in a cupboard and draw in my cabinet!

Imperfect and Tense said...

Here's hoping some wee six-legged insect doesn't evolve the ability to eat vinyl!

Spadger said...

There was an eating incident in the office today. Some type of moth in the last few days had attacked some items causing feathers to fall from face.

In other news a huge overnight water leak from a dishwasher flooded the canteen and adjoining offices. After a day out of action, we were informed the canteen would return to near normal service and the Thursday cavalry would be available as usual!

I'm looking forward to my portion of horse meat tomorrow!

Imperfect and Tense said...

That first sentence sounds like the world's slowest, demure and most ecologically-friendly striptease.