Chalking it up to experience

I had a spare couple of hours yesterday afternoon so I paid a quick visit to Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits in south Cambridge. This is a Wildlife Trusts site and is quite a hidden gem surrounded by lots of housing and the local airport. The pits used to provide chalk for building and lime for cement but stopped production a couple of hundred years ago. I've weirdly never visited but shall return a bit later in the year, especially once some of the flowering plants are out.

Walking into the East pit you are hit by just out of place the place looks given the surrounding geography. 

It really feels like another planet. It wasn't helped by the fact that I could hear all the traffic but couldn't see any people.

I had a look under a few stones the only thing of note was my first pill beetle, one of the Byrrhidae.

At just over 9mm it is a big one and keyed out to Byrrhus pilula. The coolest bit about this one was that the tarsal segments fold and hide into a grove on the tibia. So much so that they are almost invisible.

When I arrived home I noticed a bug on the wall, which looked unfamiliar. Turned out to be Himacerus mirmicoides, the Ant Damsel bug, and a new species for me.