It’s sad when huge old trees fall or need to be felled – I’m not sure what happened to the tree I found at Cardiff’s Heath Park one day last week – but it does provide opportunities for fossicking around logs and branches and under slabs of bark. And on this particular day, when I turned over one of several pieces of bark, I was delighted to find this harvestman, Nemastoma bimaculatum, a species I’d never seen before.

I’m reliably informed, by someone on social media who’s seen many of these harvestmen, that ‘they tend to freeze when you first turn over a log and expose them but then make a sudden run for it’, so I was exceedingly lucky that this one stayed perfectly still the whole time I had its home turned upside down. I was able to focus-stack some images but these harvestmen are tiny, just 2-3mm long, and the light was dull so my photos are not very sharp.

Fortunately for me, Nemastoma bimaculatum has distinctive markings – those two white spots on the black body, so it was easy to identify. This harvestman is not often recorded but the species is probably quite common – it’s just that most people don’t go looking under logs and bark to find them.