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Welcome to the St Helens Birds and Wildlife blog. We welcome your reports from across the borough regarding all forms of wildlife. Please click on the "Report a sighting" tab if you would like to contribute to this blog.

We ask that you refrain from posting exact breeding locations of any species which may be considered scarce or vulnerable, and in particular schedule 1 species. In the context of St Helens, schedule 1 species usually means kingfisher and little ringed plover. Little ringed plover should not be reported at all on this blog between 1st May and 1st August.

Scarce or vulnerable species include but are not restricted to any species of wader, ducks other than mallard, all owls, any birds of prey, grey or yellow wagtails, grey heron, all grebes, Cetti’s warbler, water rail, willow tit, corn bunting etc. If in doubt, please ask.

We reserve the right to edit or delete posts which contravene this rule.

Slender grasshopper

On Saturday I found this tiny grasshopper in my backyard, it's about 15mm long. I was quite excited by it, because I knew that I'd never seen this species before, and to find it in my completely flagged back yard in November seemed strange to say the least, for a group of inverts that I normally associate with flower filled meadows on hot sunny days in summer! On top of that, we don't really see very many grasshoppers of any species in St Helens, so I was quite keen to find out what it was.

The first thing to say is, I've been decorating recently, and this unfortunate insect seems to have walked into some white paint. So ignore the white bits, it's really completely dark brown!

A few tweets and messages later, I had my answer, it's a slender grasshopper (or groundhopper)  Tetrix subulata,  a species which is largely confined to the midlands and south east England, with just a handful of records from the Sefton coast and around Bolton. So it's not a million miles away from St Helens, but so far a I can tell, this is the first record for the borough.


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