KEYWORTH MEADOW.
I was doing my best to come up with a complete inventory of the flora of the meadow but spotted this chap in a damp hollow. The photos are awful, sorry and I can’t be certain of the id. Given the location it is a Slender Groundhopper Tetrix subulata but given climate change it could (perhaps) be T. ceperoi which I can’t tell apart. I should have potted it up rather than taken (or rather, attempted to have taken) its portrait. I’ve recorded Common Groundhopper Tetrix undulata in the meadow before.
Unlike grasshoppers, groundhoppers overwinter as adults or final instar nymphs, so this one is fully developed even in May. It will die in a month or two after mating and then there will be a range of developing nymphs until the end of the summer when they will be ready to enter dormancy.
I was told that a Little Egret had been in the meadow earlier and I’m happy to accept the record (the first). Tim saw a Muntjac with a fawn in one of the pastures.
In late afternoon from my front door I could just about see a couple of distant Swifts but a scan of the sky through binoculars revealed several along with a few House Martins and a further scan of apparantly empty space showed what has to have been a Hobby at great height and climbing before it coasted north till lost from view. I’ve eliminated Eleanora’s and Red-footed Falcon on the grounds of probability!