Found this Little Chap tonight

I was check the foxgloves  over  the waste ground at Robertstown with no joy but when walking back I looked at this daisy and found this gem.

Common Wintergreen Distribution

To answer your question, Martin, there are seven previous records of it, all from the Swansea Gower area and all referring to smaller numbers than you found.

Found this plant looks like Round Leaved Wintergreen

 I found this plant yesterday in Robertstown and counted over hundred of the little beauties

Bee Orchids

Taking Mark's advice, I emailed the RCT County Ecologist regarding the Bee Orchids at Navigation Park on Monday. This morning's walk to the station came to a rude halt, someone had mown the site yesterday. By the time I got home this evening, whoever it was had been back in and cut down the scrub.

Just as well, Martin has found some more up the Cynon Valley and the new colony at Parc Taf Bargoed. Phil has also informed his friend Gareth had found another site for them in the Cynon Valley.

RHASLAS 1 ORCS 0

A cracking game at the Caerphilly ground this afternoon where the Miller Argent team were, to be honest, absolutely slaughtered. They appeared ill prepared, ill advised and intellectually ill equipped to deal with the fast free flowing game of the UVAG front three. The Councillors, sitting in judgement, voted unanimously to; ".... refer the application back to the officers for reason to refuse the application". This is just round 1, Miller Argent will return, they are expected to ditch the classical Welsh Nepotism method and attempt a Meritocratic approach, although it is rumoured that their long time adviser 'Keith Bungalow', worried about transparency issues, is pushing for the no holds barred North Korean 'every ones got their price' method. 

Meanwhile back at Rhaslas the view on the bank, expressed by a couple of dunlin and a schedule 1 bird, who wishes to remain anonymous, was; "... if I had a BT pension I'd want my money out of Argent now !!!". For cracking replays of the first goal, type in UVAG and go to replay of the striker on loan from FOE, its a **&%$~* cracker.

Bee Orchids

 I went for a walk this morning before work and went to a site I have been to hundreds of times over the years to look for Dragonflies but instead found a Bee Orchid. I was chuffed to bits and took lots of photos, marked where it was by and started to walk back to go to work and was amazed by the numbers of Bee orchids I found as I walked, in total I found 49. I was not trying that hard so there must be a lot more. The photo below are where they are growing on the left I also saw one dragonfly which was a Common Darter which was just starting to colour up.

Something Lurks!

On my way home from work, I called in to the area around the Merthyr tunnel, in Cwmbach. A few odds and sods, but not a great deal, but at one point I caught the unmistakable whiff of a Common Stink-horn and after five minutes as a human (honestly) bloodhound, I managed to track this down, lurking suggestively in the undergrowth - the fungus, not me... well okay, me too.

Not far away, in a patch of Creeping Buttercup, I came across three of these handsome beetles. They seem to be the longhorn beetle Judolia cerambyciformis, which is apparently found visiting flowers as an adult, but otherwise, apart from the supposition that the larvae feed in wood, the rest of its life cycle is a bit of a mystery. They aren't a patch on your Bee Beetle, Martin, but they made my day.