Pretty sure they are Black-tailed Prairie Dog Cynomys ludovicianus.

It could be a scene from the prairies ... but for the oilseed rape field.

Nearby, a few miles up the A1, we dropped in to look for Firebugs Pyrrhocoris apterus at some dilapidated glasshouses in Beeston: a site which I heard about from this blog. We only saw two, both adults and both walking on the tarmac track where it passes between glasshouses on either side. Jo saw them at the Surrey colony soon after they were discovered in 1996 so it was high time I caught up!

Firebug Pyrrhocoris apterus

Autokatcher frame

As far as I know, only two people have ever used a vehicle-mounted Autokatcher in Britain, though honorary mention must go to B.S. Williams who used a bicycle-mounted version in the 1930s! Alex Williams used an Autokatcher in the lanes of Kent in the early 1970s and found quite a few rare and unexpected species – there is a great photo of it in the Coleopterist’s Handbook. And Richard Lyszkowski told me he’d once spent an evening using an Autokatcher which generated an immense haul of mostly tiny beetles that he has never managed to identify!

There’s a great article about using Autokatchers, including the occasional misadventures, on Andreas Herrmann’s website here.

Lots of photos of cats as well – I think I should make the gaps smaller.

Many coleopterists have struggled to identify these beetles. Even the name Amara is reputedly derived from the Latin word for bitter (amarus) in reference to the bitter experience of trying to identify them! I have now produced a detailed identification guide with photos of all but one of the species which I hope will sweeten the experience.

Download here: Identification guide to the Amara and Curtonotus (Carabidae) of Britain and Ireland.

The guide also introduces new English names for all the species as Sunshiners, Moonshiners and Stem-climbers.

The commonest British Amara is Amara aenea, or the Streak Sunshiner.

True, most of the time it’s just a bit of a chore. But it makes identification of many beetles much quicker and much more accurate than making difficult judgements about, say, the relative breadth of the pronotum.

Occasionally, dissection reveals structures that really are a marvel to behold. I well remember a lunchtime conversation in a busy pub nearly 20 years ago with Brian Eversham and an aleocharine staphylinid expert: let’s call him “Mike”. I think I was probably expressing disbelief that anyone could find the will to try and identify such horrible little beetles, let alone dissect them. Mike’s response, delivered for all in the bar to hear, was “But under the microscope THE FEMALE GENITALIA ARE ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS!!” The next few moments were mortifying but gradually the hubbub of bar conversation returned.

Gyrophaena is a genus of 19 British species of small aleocharine staphylinids that breed in rotting fungi. The male genitalia are truly extraordinary in this genus. I look at these and wonder why all these hooks, corkscrews and knobbles have evolved and what function they perform? I guess they must make it difficult or impossible for a male of one species to mate with a female of another, like trying to fit a key into the wrong lock. All four of the Gyrophaena species pictured below were found in a single tuft of oyster mushrooms.

Gyrophaena joyioides aedeagus

Gyrophaena manca aedeagus

Gyrophaena gentilis aedeagus

Gyrophaena affinis aedeagus

Oh yes, and in case you’re wondering about the title of this blog … when I told my wife I was writing a blog about genitalia, she said “Jenny who?”

Simon's sketches from 30th April 1994.

As Simon said, this is from a time when birders used to carry notebooks instead of cameras. But few have Simon’s artistic talent. It is entirely thanks to Simon that this website he designed for me looks so good.

But fail we did. It would have been 811 miles to drive direct to the northernmost headland of the northernmost Shetland isle, plus three ferries. To dip a mega-rarity that had been present for 15 years! We kept going back for 5 days, initially hoping it was just on a foraging trip and would fly back in at any moment. But as the days wore on, all hope was lost. We thought the chance of a lifetime had gone.

Dipping. One of us would go on to serve as one of the Ten Rare Men. Click for a bigger image.

That’s not the end of the story though. Albert returned to Hermaness three years later on 27th March 1990: a totally unexpected second chance. I set off hitching north from London on the evening of 5th April. This wasn’t the usual hitch, chatting to a succession of generous strangers but the other sort – weird, frightening and dangerous. On the following morning in Glasgow I decided to fork out for a bus instead to get me the rest of the way to Aberdeen in safety. Finally, I arrived at Hermaness to savour the sight of a Black-browed Albatross sitting on its nest, alone and in the wrong hemisphere. The only good thing about dipping is that it makes it all the sweeter if and when you succeed.

Albert returns

So, for beetle survey work, when you want to maximise the number of records you can make for each day’s fieldwork, May, June, July and August are the best months, especially May.

But there’s more to beetling than survey work. What would be the best time of year for me to go out and get a beetle tick? Over the 20 years, most of my ticks have come from May, June and July. But that’s largely thanks to a massive amount of recording in those months.

Surprisingly, when I’ve gone beetling in October, November, December and January it’s been much better for ticks. And August has been the worst month. A beetle found in November is over three times more likely to be a tick for me than one found in August!

Compared to most other branches of entomology, one of the great things about being a coleopterist is that it is a genuinely year-round activity. Admittedly, winter beetling tends to be pretty grubby work: tussocking, and sieving through compost heaps, manure, wood-chip piles and flood debris. But I’m obviously going to have to man up and do a lot more of that sort of beetling in my next 20 years as a coleopterist.

Sieving wood-chip at Dinton Pastures, with Tony Allen and Andrew Duff.

Sieving manure at Denham Marsh Wood with Tony Allen.

Even this list only tells part of the story. There are quite a few other people missing (e.g. Max) who have helped with suggesting or confirming identifications that I’ve ultimately computerised as my own.

Getting into British and Irish beetles is a hard journey. I realise that I couldn’t have made as much progress as I have without the generous help of those who have cleared the trail ahead.

In twenty years of beetling in Britain and Ireland, I’ve made 33,453 records of beetles, from 525 different 10-km squares and on average seen a new beetle every 3.3 days. So it doesn’t feel like I’ve been mucking about at it! But take a look at this graph:

There are two really surprising things about this graph. Firstly, I’ve only seen just over half the British and Irish beetle fauna (the red line marks the half-way point). And secondly, my list has grown in pretty much a straight line for 20 years and I’m still seeing new beetles at about the same rate as when I started. Clearly I am still on the steep beginners’ part of the learning curve with no sign that I’m approaching the broad, sunlit plateau of being a beetle expert!

It just shows what a big job it is to get to know all the British and Irish beetles. I once had the chance to pick the brains of veteran coleopterist Alex Williams during a car journey and got onto the subject of aleocharine staphylinids and the many obstacles that have to be overcome to be able to identify this group. I was looking for advice, or at least sympathy! But Alex’s simple yet profound response was “Well, we wouldn’t be coleopterists if we didn’t enjoy a challenge!”.

Alex is right. Coleoptera is a big, challenging group, guaranteed to last a lifetime and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I’m glad that it is getting easier to identify beetles. And anyone taking up the challenge of beetles now should be able to hit the half-way mark in much quicker time.