Last year in the early part of the year I did a lot of beetling. This mostly centered around tussocking and rummaging through an enormous grass pile at Cullaloe LNR. Until early March I was able to record 75 species, many of them new to me. This year, early March, I have recorded 65 species. So today I checked them to see how much was overlap.
Remarkably the total list for both years has been 111 species, which isn't quite double, but it does show a big gap in the lists. Only 29 species featured on both lists, with 46 unique to 2021 and 36 unique to 2022.
Two main reasons stand out - no water beetling thus far in 2022 and no giant grass piles at Cullaloe. Both of those things are a shame, but at least the water beetles can be remedied at some point. I expect also many of the "missing" species this year will be encountered at some point.
One thing I didn't do enough of last year was gardening, apparently. Yesterday when trying to reposition some slabs on the front path I came across the ground beetle Platyderus depressus, which looks like the third record for Scotland
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| Platyderus depressus |
And the lists.
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