Rainfall: 93.2 mm

Temp High: 21.3^oC on 17th

Temp Low: -0.6^oC on 12th

Temp Average: 9.9^oC

We've been trying to get a decent photo of the bat roosting behind one of our shutters. Today he was a bit lower down and was lit by the sun, so hopefully we'll get an ID on the species. **UPDATE** Local bat expert Christian Dietz says that this is probably a pipistrelle as it has been roosting with us since at least August.

Enthused by photographing the bat successfully, I went into the cellar underneath one of our sheds to see if I could find some cave spiders. I found a few, but also there were a couple of hibernating Herald moths.

There were also a couple of weird-looking fungi which are probably going to be difficult to identify.

We have a micro moth, Mompha subbistrigella, hibernating in our bedroom too.

We had a quick turn around the garden before we went on an excursion to try and find the eggs of the Scarce Copper butterfly in a valley a short distance from here. In Christine's herb bed we found this blue mint beetle - I'd noticed a lot of larvae feeding on the mint that was in the bed in Summer.

We spent several hours searching for the butterfly eggs and found none. Luckily, the expert we went with found 3. Here's a photo of one of them. I'm deliberately not mentioning the location as this is an extremely rare and endangered species.

I can't remember if we've ever had a greenfinch on every perch of our sunflower feeder before. They are usually a bit feisty and there'll be some argy-bargy before this occurs. Today they were a picture of serenity.

A bit of dry, warm weather allowed me to put my moth trap out in a rare late autumn timeslot. Even though there was an extremely bright full moon, there were a few moths in there this morning, including two new species for the garden: a Delicate moth and a Black-spotted Chestnut. That takes us to 502 lepidoptera species recorded.

These two are not just new for the garden, they're new for me too in that I never recorded either of those in the UK. The Black-spotted Chestnut was difficult to photograph and he was off before I got anything decent.

I did a quick tour of the garden today IDing some more fungi and seeing what else was still about. We've had our first frosts already so I was surprised that there was so much to see.

The Exidia glandulosa fungus was beside the pond - but it had probably fallen off the nearby willows. The common bonnet mushrooms were growing out of our poorly plum tree that I mentioned a few days ago.

The photo of the comma on a verbena flower looks like it could have been taken at the height of summer.

There are still a few fire salamanders about in the woods - unfortunately most of the ones I see have been run over as there's quite a lot of early morning traffic going along the woodland tracks at the moment. I spotted this youngster while out on a run (that's me running, not the salamander). He was sitting in the danger zone so I moved him to the side.

This distinctive blackbird was in our back garden today.

Christine spotted this caterpillar in the new wildflower and grass patch in our front garden. It's a Knot Grass moth caterpillar - not rare or a new species - it's just quite a pretty caterpillar.

A group of five mallards landed in the pond today. There were a couple that looked unusual. I originally thought they might be hybrids, but I'm now pretty certain they are males in moult.

There are a number of mushrooms growing in the garden. I had a go at identifying them and there are a few new species for the garden. The Shaggy Scalycap is growing at the bottom of one of the willows in the upper garden - this is an indicator of a tree in poor health (as is the bark falling off). It probably got damaged during the garden work a couple of years ago. It's all quiet now, but this tree is probably not going to survive. Although we said that about the plum tree in our front garden which has been looking really bad for several years now and it surprises us nearly every year with a bountiful plum supply.

And, later in the evening I spotted this tiny, unassuming micro moth in our living room. It's a new species for us, Mompha divisella, and it triggers great celebrations as it is our 500th lepidoptera species. Normally, this would be hard to identify to species-level, but M. divisella is a generalist Epilobium (willowherb) feeder whereas the other two confusion species are specialists on Epilobium hirsutum (Greater willowherb) - which doesn't grow near to us.