First new beetle of 2022

Well, it has taken almost 2 months to find the first new beetle species of the year. To be fair I haven't been looking too hard and the vast majority of my spare time has been curating my reference collection and trying to get it into better shape and a bit more organised.

Carabids were first...

I still have a fair few of the early additions on big cards and hand written labels. These are gradually being replaced by better set specimens or are re-carded and labelled. I have been using the WatDon plastazote lined boxes although given the price I only have 4 of these so weevils, clicks and some assorted other families are stored in other containers.

Anyway, with the weekend weather having a bit of a sun and not needing any excuse to get away from the news I spent half an hour doing some sieving, mainly of the vast dried grass pile at the bottom of the garden. There weren't huge numbers of species but this small Philonthus stood out.

Fairly non-descript with rows of 5 punctures on the pronotum. It actually didn't key out that easily and I took a couple of wrong turns. However, as so often happens, as it was a male the aedeagus was fairly distinctive and took me straight to P. debilis.

Looking at Lott and Anderson I was rather pleased to see the following

Good job it was a male too.