Sieving for Beetles

It's taken me almost three weeks, but finally I broke out my sieve and tray and hit the large woodchip pile that has been sitting in the grounds for several months. This was formed when two large Wych Elms were pollarded before they started dropping limbs onto cars parked below. The logs were split and stacked and the brash was reduced to this large pile of woodchips.

I gave it all of about five minutes before quitting with absolutely nothing to show for it. It just didn't seem right, maybe I needed to be in deeper, or maybe it needed to be warmer. Who knows? Anyway, I moved elsewhere which soon proved to be far more profitable

This is the smoking shelter I built for some staff last springtime, hidden away between the back of a shed and a steep earthen bank full of Scaly Male-ferns and a little bit of Bracken. At this time of year it's clearly a bedraggled mess, but in the summertime it's luxuriantly green and lovely. I figured it could be worth ragging out some of the dead stuff and shaking it over my tray

The

The smaller debris that has fallen through the sieve and into the tray

I wasn't honestly expecting a great deal in the tray, but it held a surprising number of spiders and springtails, a couple of flies and quite a few small beetles, staphylinids mostly. 

The results of just two shakes over the tray

The brown beetles in this image are all Anthobium unicolor. The short black one bottom centre is Proteinus brachypterus. The two elongated staphs to the left are aleocharines and are well beyond my current abilities. The fly in the middle is a sciarid, the first I've ever recognised and it turns out to be a complete and utter bugger to key through. In the end I quit trying - I need higher magnification, better lighting and a greater understanding of fly morphology.  

Beautiful looking, but a nightmare to try and key through to family

And the little black dot next to the sciarid's wingtips is a Ptiliidae, one of the featherwing beetles, rocking in at almost a whole millimetre in length. Here's a close up to prove it really is a beetle and not just a full stop

I'm gonna have to gen det this - wish me luck...

So, within a mere 30ft of my room, I sieved more beetles in two shakes of dead ferns than I've seen over the past three weeks put together! Clearly I need to start taking my sieving gear with me when I go out into the woods. Gonna need a bigger rucksack, that's for sure. And another storebox (or two) for the backlog of stuff I'm identifying to family level but not species. Hmmm.