Immigrant insects featured again, with 7 Painted Ladys and 4 Clouded Yellows amongst the many hundreds of Red Admirals about at the Bill; 5 Red Admirals and singles of Painted Lady and Emperor dragonfly were also caught overnight in the Obs moth-traps. A Pale Shoulder at Weston and a Lunar Thorn at the Obs (the fourth and second island records respectively) were nice rarity highlights amongst the moths caught overnight; common immigrant numbers also increased, including 35 Dark Sword Grass, 27 Silver Y and 19 Rusty-dot Pearl at the Obs.
We arrived at the Bill tip just in time to see the Great Shearwater fly off and disappear over the horizon but these Balearic Shearwaters provided some compensation © Martin Cade (apologies for the poor quality of several of the recent videos we've posted here - the speed of our internet connection at the Obs has recently declined to such an extent that we're currently unable to upload to YouTube from here and have had to resort to uploading some inferior footage via our phone whenever we've got a 4G signal):
Although a good national record - the UK total is still only around the 40 mark - the Pale Shoulder was the fourth record for Portland © Duncan Walbridge/Martin Cade...
...and in a typically peculiar quirk of distribution the Lunar Thorn - that's an uncommon resident in part of north and west Dorset - was actually a rarer moth for the island (there's just a single previous record) © Martin Cade: