Great Orme

It's a good time of year to be on the Great Orme and there are really good numbers of silver-studded blue and cistus forester on the wing at the moment, plus all of the usual flowers putting on a great show.

Cistus forester

Cistus forester and common rockrose.

Common rockrose.

Grayling, not too difficult to see close up, but further away it gets a bit more difficult, it even replicates the orange lichen in the wing!

Female silver-studded blue.

The same photo zoomed in and cropped.

Male at silver-studded blue.

Back for the Great Knot

With the great knot lingering in Norfolk for its second weekend we decided to have another try for it today. The weather was much better than on our first visit, bright blue skies and lovely warm sunshine, and the whole place looked that much better than it did last week. True to form the bird decided yesterday to change it's habits the day before the weekend and for the first time during in its stay it spent yesterday evening on the beach near Holme, which is where it was found first thing this morning. However the rising tide pushed it off the beach before we arrived and it flew to it's favoured roosting site at Scolt Head Island, about 5 miles to the east and just off Brancaster. It was a distant view at Scolt  Head Island with a few hundred red knot, but as the tide receded the flock spread out and came a bit closer and the great knot was one of the closest birds feeding in the water. Though still quite distant you could clearly see the dark mantle with chestnut scapulars and more particularly the black spotted breast which made it look very like a giant summer plumage pectoral sandpiper to my eyes. Also offshore here a few little and sandwich terns.

Then we moved to Titchwell  in the hope that the great knot might relocate there as the tide receded further, but unfortunately that never happened. Still we saw some decent birds at Titchwell, including 5 spoonbills, 1st sum little gull, red-creasted pochard, 250 avocets, 2 bearded tits and a nice selection of waders.

UK Life 414 (Great knot), Year 235 (Great Knot, Little tern)

Twitching the great knot on Brancaster beach.

NOT the bird I saw yesterday! In the absence of any photos from Scolt Head Island, these are great knot I saw in Australia last October. Unfortunately being in winter plumage they are nowhere near as nice as the Norfolk bird which is in summer plumage.

Avocet at Titchwell.

Titchwell. Black-tailed godwit and Knot in flight, with avocets in the bottom left.

A couple of new damsels at Pennington Flash

Well for me at least! Yesterday I found a male banded demoiselle near Ramsdales hide and today two red-eyed damselflies on the nearby Leeds-Liverpool canal.

Banded demoiselle at Pennington Flash today, in the Himalayan balsam near Ramsdales hide. It's a species of unpolluted well vegatated reasonably fast flowing rivers and it occurs commonely at Sankey Brook in St Helens. I wouldn't be surprised if it's on the golf course at Pennington but I've never seen it there. It does wander a bit and can occur around lakes, e.g. I've seen it at Eccleston Mere and on Bold Moss where there are no rivers.

Red-eyed damselfly on the Leeds - Liverpool canal at Pennington Flash this evening. I've spent a lot of time over the past few days looking for them to no avail on the lilly pad covered pond at the back of the yacht club. This evening I was cycling along the canal and spotted a couple close in to the side on just a handful of pads. I find these quite timid damselflies and these are about the best photos I've ever managed of them.

There was a time when Leg O'Mutton dam in St Helens was the most northerly population on the UK west coast, but not any more because these are further north than Leg O'Mutton. However, they've probably extended their range a lot further north even than this in recent years so I'm not celebrating!

Apart from the eyes being red, they also look quite bulbous compared to the eyes of other damselflies.

Grey bulrush and a few other sedges and rushes from Pennington Flash

Really quiet for birds at the Flash at the moment, so I've moved my attention to other things.  Yesterday I had a look at some of the sedges and rushes that are growing around the small pond near the point at the bottom of Ramsdales Ruck. I was particularly interested in what initially looked like bulrush but on (much) closer inspection (i.e. under the microscope) turned out to be grey bulrush, a largely coastal species which apparently can be found at ex-colliery sites in the North West due a saline element to the seam. I don't know if this is due to something that they used to get the coal out of the ground or if it is naturally in the ground and has been brought to the surface and dumped with the slag but it's certainly resulted in enough salinity in the water to allow grey bulrush to grow.

Grey bulrush Schoenoplectus tabernaemontani.

This is a grey bulrush inflorescence or flower head made up of many spikelets.

This is a single grey bulrush spikelet under the microscope on 20x magnification. The spiklet is made up of several flowers or florets. In reality this is about 6mm long.

This is a single glume taken from the spikelet. Each floret has a pair of glumes at its base which protect the floret. Apart from being a generally greyer plant which is a bit subjective, grey bulrush differs from bulrush Schoenoplectus lacustris in that it's glumes are densely covered in small red spots. This is grey bulrush. Interestingly it is a sedge NOT a rush!

There were several other interesting rushes and sedges around the pond, including false fox-sedge Carex otrubae.

False fox sedge

False fox sedge

Not the cleanest of cuts, but this is a section of the stem of false fox sedge showing the classic triangular stem of a sedge. If it was true fox sedge Carex vulpina, the three "wings" of the stem would be a lot more pronounced.

A glume (the small scale at the bottom) under the microscope. The glume of false fox sedge has a green mid rib as you can see in the photo. True fox sedge does not show this feature.

Here are a few rushes from the pond.

Hard rush Juncus inflexus

Soft rush Juncus effusus

Jointed rush Juncus articulatus

Little Owl, Croft

Caspian Tern at Gibraltar Point

Just got back from a day on the east coast. We set out at 6am in the direction of Titchwell on the North Norfolk coast in the hope that the great knot which had been there for about 4 days would be present again after going AWOL yesterday evening, with the back up plan being that we would divert to Gibraltar Point near Skegness if no news or negative news was received by the time we got to the Boston roundabout on the A17.

At 7:15am we were still a good two and a half hours drive from Titchwell when we received news that the bird was again present on Titchwell beach so Gibraltar Point was forgotten and we headed for Norfolk. Unfortunately we then got news that the bird had disappeared again at about 7:30am. However, at least it was still in the area so we pressed on undettered and confident that we would see the bird. How wrong we were. The bird was not seen again all day up to the time of writing. A couple of year ticks in the form of red-crested pochard and spotted redshank plus at least 250 avocets and an adult Mediterranean gull were scant consolation, and at 11:30am, just over 90 minutes after arriving but 4 hours since the bird was last seen, we decided to abandon Norfolk and get to Gibraltar Point to try to salvage something from the day.

Two hours later we were watching a stunning Caspian tern on Tennyson Sands at Gib Point, one of two birds which have been here for 5 days. Well worth the effort. It was a 440 mile round trip, which is exactly half what Ray did last Saturday, so not too bad really!

Year: 233 (Caspian tern, spotted redshank, red-crested pochard & little bittern (last week))

eDNA surveying

I was eDNA surveying for great crested newts this morning at the site of a proposed new development on the Welsh borders. It's a technique of collecting water samples from ponds which are then sent away to a lab and analysed for newt DNA to check for GCN presence in the pond. I like the scientific aspect of this work and it avoids the need to wade around in ponds at dawn and dusk putting bottle traps in or taking them out, but you're generally not going to see a newt during an eDNA survey. As a naturalist I like finding newts and other aquatic animals in bottles and I enjoy searching for newt eggs or seeing the animals by torch light etc. From a purely personal perspective, eDNA is good if you have a pond where you're unlikely to find newts or it's in a dodgey area where you might meet a few unsavoury characters at night, but if you have a pond in a nice location where there might actually be newts, give me the bottle trapping method any day!

Presumably this is the sort of "red tape" that the EU brexit campaign would do away with if we leave the EU. Why worry about wildlife if it gets in the way of making a fast buck?

I've been in the area all week doing different types of survey, breeding bird, phase 1 and eDNA. Grasshopper warbler and a couple of singing lesser whitethroats have been the bird highlights, and plants have included a nice selection of orchids.

Bee orchid.

Pyramidal orchid.

Common spotted orchid.

Southern marsh orchid.

Pennington Flash

Nice views of a little ringed plover chick with two adults at the flash this evening, also 4 redshank and a common tern.

Why I'm voting to Remain

Ok first off, I don’t think we should be even having a vote on EU membership. Why, well because an ordinary bloke like me can’t possibly have all of the information to hand to make an educated decision on whether it’s better to remain or leave. Too many people are likely to vote on petty prejudices or things that affect their own personal circumstances. You only have to watch ordinary folk being interviewed on the telly. Q: “Why are you going to vote to leave?” A: “err, well too many migrants taking our jobs” or that other favourite A: "We want to take back our country". Anybody know what that actually means? One woman when asked why she was going to vote to leave just shrugged her shoulders, struggled to answer and then just said “because we should, shouldn’t we?”. Should we? Have you really thought this through?

Frankly, I don’t trust the British public (including myself) to make the correct decision (whatever that may be). How can I possibly know what’s best for the UK as a whole, not only today but in the future as well? Perhaps naively, I vote for an MP to make these types of decisions on my behalf, in the hope that they are better informed than me. After all, my MP votes on lots of other important issues on my behalf and like it or not, that’s actually why we have MPs. So I don’t think that we should even be having a referendum.

However, given that we are having a referendum on EU membership, I’m voting remain. I said previously that I don’t have all of the information to hand to make an educated decision, which is true. However what I do know is that every living British Prime Minister past and present thinks that we should remain, the majority of economists think that we should remain, the majority of the present government thinks that we should remain, the labour party including the leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn and the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and most other opposition parties such as the Scottish Nationalist Party think that we should remain and Barack Obama the US president thinks that we should remain.

I find it very bizarre that in the face of all of this advice from respected figures across the political spectrum, many ordinary working class people are preferring to take the advice of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Gove by standing shoulder to shoulder with them and voting to leave. How safe will workers rights be with these people? How safe will the environment be with these people? The "red tape" they're talking about getting rid of if we leave is workers rights and legislation which protects wildlife and the environment.

So why am I even talking about this on a wildlife blog? Well it's relevant because there will be important implications to wildlife if we decide to leave. Most of the UK's wildlife and environmental legislation is based on EU Directives and there is no certainty as to how these would be replaced if the UK were to leave the EU. None of us can understand all of the implications of our decision, whether it be remain or leave, but I suggest that everybody with a love of wildlife and the environment should read ‘The EU & Our Environment: What UK membership means for the environment, and potential consequences of a UK departure from the Union’, a joint publication from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The World Wildlife Fund and The Wildlife Trusts, which is available to download here. The environment has done pretty well out of the EU, through, for example, the Birds and Habitats Directives. There is a real risk to the environment if we vote to leave.

Furthermore, in a vote of members, the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM, the professional body to which I belong), voted overwhelmingly (93%) in favour of remaining in the EU. You can read the full CIEEM statement here, but it concludes by saying “CIEEM is convinced that leaving the EU would have significant detrimental effects on the UK’s natural environment, on the economy, and on society. CIEEM encourages all who are concerned with the natural environment to vote to remain a member of the EU.”

So I'm going to listen to the advice of prime ministers past and present, the US president, the majority of economists, the majority of UK opposition parties, the RSPB, the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Trusts and CIEEM because I reckon that lot combined might have a pretty good understanding of what's best for the UK, and I’m going to ignore Boris, Nigel, Ian and Michael and vote to remain.

The barking Little Bittern, Old Moor RSPB

I was lured to Old Moor RSPB this morning by the presence of a singing male little bittern. Expecting the Bittern hide to be packed, I made my way first to the "Bus stop", a view point over the reedbed from where I figured I might have more chance of seeing the bird. This proved a good move since within minutes somebody picked out the bird climbing to the top of a bush near the closed Reedbed hide. However after a minute or two it took off and flew right over the Bittern hide and landed out of view in the bushes behind.  A decent flight view of the bird.

I joined the assembled throng of birders on the path near to the place where the bird was last seen, but this low down viewing was not easy through the reeds and bushes. Over the next hour we could hear the bird singing at relatively close range but couldn't see it, until at last somebody picked it up as it again climbed to near the top of a bush. Now it was a really good view and we watched as it called for a few minutes before it again flew and was lost to sight. A really nice bird, and great to hear it as well as see it. It's song was nothing like a great bittern, it was more like croaking or barking call, repeated every couple of minutes. I'm not sure I've ever heard little bittern song before, perhaps in Europe I suppose but I don't remember hearing it.

This is the second year that a male little bittern has been present at  Old Moor, presumably the same individual. I saw the bird last year, but it was much more distant, and only in flight.

Great Reed Warbler Paxton Gravel Pits

At Paxton Gravel Pits in Cambridgeshire this morning, the long staying great reed warbler was blasting out its song and occasionally showed well when it climbed to the stop of  a reed, before dropping down again and out of sight. My second great reed warbler of the year, but only my third ever in the UK.

The pits are well known for their nightingales which now total about 28 pairs, as well as an important inland colony of cormorants. Nightingales are now beginning to stop singing as I discovered last week at Whisby, but even so I managed to hear one at point blank range. Also today a few garden warblers and a cuckoo.