My local records centre SEWBReC, the South East Wales Biodiversity Records Centre, likes to support local recorders like me and has recently, very generously, given me a book grant, with which I’ve purchased guide books to help me identify spiders, craneflies and, yet to come when it’s published in October, a book about flies.

Now, I feel duty bound to look more closely at these creatures (of course, that’s why I chose these books), and this week I found a spider I’d never seen before. At first, I thought this tiny spider, just 2.5-3.5mm in length, was a Spitting spider but the size, location and daytime sighting didn’t fit – Spitting spiders are slightly larger, night time roamers and favour indoor locations, particularly museums for some reason. So, I posted some photos on social media, and got an almost instant answer from SEWBReC’s partner organisation Cofnod, the local environmental records centre for north Wales.

My spider is almost certainly an adult male Platnickina tincta, a species that’s usually found low down in shrubs and tree branches. It’s a bit of an opportunist it seems, feeding on other small spiders and stealing their prey from their webs. It’s uncommon in Wales; the Spider and Harvestman Recording Scheme website shows the distribution in Britain, where this species is abundant in the southeast but increasingly scarce as we track north and west.