Thursley!

After a wet Saturday, I took a trip out to Thursley Common with the girlfriend for hobbies, lizards, and interesting invertebrates. Thursley Common is one of the largest continuous segments of lowland heath in the UK, thanks in large part to the MoD frog-marching cadets and trainees across it on a regular basis. After a slightly confusing journey through the woodland around Bagmoor we popped out into Thursley’s main plain. It’s beautiful in a way you infrequently see in the south of this country: unbroken land without roads or buildings for about as far as the eye can see. In the northern parts of the UK the uplands offer something similar but there it’s so windswept and cold it doesn’t seem quite so alive. Here the land was singing with grasshoppers and crickets, buzzing with bees and whining with hoverflies. A quick sit down and equipment faff turned into an impromptu study of a small area. In no time we’d caught our first Roesel’s bush-cricket of the day. What’s more it was a macropterous specimen. Most of the species are brachypterous (short-winged) but a minority grow full length wings allowing them to fly and presumably aid the dispersal of the species. Supposedly warmer summers due to global warming have brought on an increasing incidence of this development; it’s certainly rapidly expanded the range of this species which is still listed as nationally notable in the British Red Databook despite being very common throughout South East England.



A high-pitched buzz meandered through the heather around us and after a brief chase I caught what I’d hoped it was: Anthophora bimaculata. A small flower bee with pale blue patterned eyes that my photo didn’t manage to capture very well. I bought “Bees of Surrey” by David Baldock just a couple of weeks ago and it has some amazing photos of this species. Well worth checking any small high-pitched bees in July/August as they’re likely to be this one apparently.


We got up and carried on moving; a Mexican wave of grasshoppers leaping out of the grass in front of each foot. After a brief stop for lizards and what sounded an awful lot like a Dartford Warbler we decided to wander around a tucked out of the way more scrubby area looking for reptile refugia. We didn’t have much luck although we were surprised by a loud hissing from some heather at one point, we couldn’t actually see the adder and we respectfully backed away.
Further on we reached a pond with lots of black-tailed and keeled skimmers and sundews lining the edges. A hobby flew over, snap-rolling back and forth to catch insects on the wing.
Some more sweeping pulled up some interesting shieldbug nymphs including a tortoise shieldbug and a negro bug; a scarce footman moth which should be quite common to the area and a funky looking red crab spider.

Another evening sweep round Alexandra Park

I met up with a new-found friend at Alexandra Park this evening to see if the kestrels would return and also to show his niece some of the insect life in the park. They'd already had a good time; finding common blue damselfly, comma butterfly, small copper butterfly and a few other things.

Moving over to the "bulrushy bit" we got to a decent patch of long-grasses, umbellifers, bramble, nettle and willow-herb. I pulled out a green shieldbug, Palomena prasina, quite rapidly and followed it up with an adult Dock bug, Coreus marginatus. Further sweeping of the area revealed there were also lots of nymphs of this species in different instars in the area. The others swept up a nice male speckled bush-cricket and a blood vein moth for which I really wish I'd brought my camera. Nothing particularly special, but having laypeople asking me questions was interesting and I realise now how much I need to learn my mirid bugs; there's loads of them out at the moment and they're all quite distinctively marked. We returned to the kestrel area and still nothing. The others had been watching the area for 4 hours with no sign of them.

I found a few more groundhoppers and ladybirds which entertained the others but I think I've gone over the same spots a little too much now. Perhaps I'll start taking the northbound train straight after work with my net!

Obligatory end post photo:

Coriomerus denticulatus (Like the dock bug but hairier)
It feeds on black medick which I have found locally so I'm still hoping to find it here in London

It's been a while, baby

Since I last posted I've moved to north London, been on a trip to Portugal and more. I've shifted concentration back in to entomology as the warm weather has finally taken hold. I might post some recap posts later with the nicer photos but for now, here's today's stuff:

I went for a post-work wander to Alexandra Park today (my new local patch!) to watch the kestrels and do a bit of bug sweeping. A local birder was there near the nest box already and eventually one bird returned (juvenile?) with a mouse or vole and rewarded us with technicolour views of the insides of a rodent. The previous day I was lucky to watch one of these birds dust-bathe on the path from only a few feet away. My friend was a bit concerned that only one bird had turned up and consumed the animal on its own, he's been watching them a while and the last few days it's always been the adult feeding two juvies. We'll have to wait and see if they're all still alive.

Amongst the inverts there was the usual damselflies, Roesel's bush-cricket, Ragonycha fulva (everywhere) and 7 spot ladybirds. Of most interest were the groundhoppers (fairly sure they were Common Groundhoppers, Tetrix undulata) which turned up over one particular patch of grass next to some bramble with no special discerning features.

Finally, I guess I'd better include a photo, so here's an Anthophora bimaculata bee from the weekend:

The pale green eyes are awesome and my photo doesn't do it justice

Ooops

Ah crap. I've neglected the blog again.

During my hiatus I took a trip to Norfolk, had some job interviews, made my resignation, went on holiday and started a brand spanking new job with a massive commute and loads of learning to do. I'm now an IT support specialist for a telecomms tech company and I've come into it without any experience with networks or Linux beyond being an end user. I have a pile of reading almost 2 feet thick and I'm not even kidding.

Once I've settled in more I might be able to make more regular updates. In the meantime here's my best pic yet of a Kestrel from Norfolk. Presumably it was flying this low due to inbreeding induced myopia or summat.

Rainham blows

What a pile of poo. I blame the met office entirely. Rain-predicted days were clear and vice-versa.

Spent Friday and Saturday largely cooped up anticipating the bad weather. Saturday having originally been a trip to Orford Ness had now become a day-in; sorting out a bank account and tidying the house. I got up early on Sunday to go walking with my bro which was great as I don't get to see him much these days and we covered quite a bit of ground going from Ightham Mote to Toys Hill on the Greensand way. As a warning to any one else taking this track: be aware that it splits in three in several places with 3-4 mile spurs that go absolutely nowhere yet are marked the same as the main track! We came out the wrong side of Knoll Park in Sevenoaks town centre thanks to this.
For Monday I agreed to wake up early once again for a trip to Rainham with Ben. Lured in by the great day we had last week and the possibility of hoopoe, I took the bait. It was bitterly cold with a strong wind blowing in across the Thames. Bugger-all was about and the most exciting thing I saw was probably Linnet. Rainham seems to switch between amazing and god-awful with no middle ground. After ~8 hrs out and about Rainham getting wind-blown, we called it a day. Back to a pub in London and three drinks on top of the tiredness and dehydration had amusingly rapid effects. And I've now heard that perhaps 15 minutes after we left, an Alpine Swift was seen at Rainham. BAH!

This should bring me back up to date....

The weekend before last (20th/21st) was a quiet one:

Saturday was a damp and dismal day at Chobham with a Coal Tit, Parus ater, and a glimpse of a Roe deer being the highlights. On Sunday I joined the LNHS at Crane Park Island LNR which was underwhelmingly advertised as "looking under some old wood piles". Instead it turned out to be a nice combination of disciplines with insects, fungi, plants and birds all taken into account. I was introduced to the Hairy-footed Bee, Anthophora plumipes, of which several individuals were drifting around as well as the Nursery Web Spider, Pisaura mirabilis, and several bees of the Andrena genus. I heard my first Chiff-chaff, Phylloscopus collybita, of the Spring and we saw a kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, up close for a change. There was plenty of red dead-nettle, sweet violet and shepherd's purse pulling in all the spring bees and flys. Finally a couple of Carabid beetles were picked up of the ground but apart from one maybe being a pterostichus sp. we were in the dark. It was nice to be out looking for inverts again and the weather held up nicely all day.

Saturday 27th, however, was a beaut'. Shoddy time-keeping and buses failed me; and I caused both myself and my friend Ben to miss the train to Minsmere. We were both bummed and I was feeling very guilty. I suggested Rainham as an alternative and hoped bleakly that it'd somehow match up to Minsmere expectations. After getting lost trying to find Fenchurch St station (most hidden station in central London maybe?) and arriving at Rainham to find the reserve still closed, things did not look good. We decided to head down the Thames-side and see what turned up while we waited. The hoped for tree or water pippit turned into a mippit perching on a bush and I started to think we might be looking at a miserable, ruined day. Then an angel in olive, carrying a scope turned up and said (I paraphrase slightly here) "Lo, fear not! For there is a ring ouzel yonder". And after a short walk eyeballing every blackbird we saw, we spotted a small black bird skulking in a very broad hawthorn. We approached slowly, needing to get closer anyway to move to the other end of the track, but this was enough to scare it down into hiding in a ditch away from us. We continued over to another three birders with scopes to a decent distant viewing point that looked down the length of the dry ditch. The ring ouzel was happily pulling up worms and giving us amazing views. After watching this for a while we saw that the draw-bridge was down at the reserve visitor centre and we would be able to go in. Still feeling bad about "Missed-mere" I was hoping to spot a water vole for Ben as he hadn't seen one for years! Keeping my ears keen I was twitching at every ripple and splash but they always turned out to be coots. Then the rushes next to me rustled slightly out of sync of the wind or my leg brushing past. I paused and listened carefully and realised it was a water vole right next to us hiding under a small arch of Phragmites reeds. Standing slightly to the side we could watch it nibble through a small larder it had collected before it eventually wound its way through the reeds and plopped into the water. From there on we saw marsh frogs which I shamefully mis-ID'd as common frogs (I'd never seen marsh frogs out of the water!), a pregnant lizard sunning itself on a black pipe and a glaucous gull out on the western marsh. The weather started to turn so we headed back round the last half, saw a peregrine in the pylons and snipe and golden plover in the large northern scrapes. We got back inside just in time for the rain, while waiting it out we heard reports of sedge warbler and sub-alpine warbler reported inside the reserve and as soon as rain stopped we went back out. No luck with either but we did manage to see a Little Ringed Plover near the northern scrapes again. We headed back in and decided on one last walk out along the Thames embankment to look for water pipit. We went beyond the car park and started to see a lot of linnet when a pinkish-brown-fronted "maybe pipit" flew past. Following it round the corner it turned out to be a male wheatear. The spring migrant bonanza is working its magic! Making our way back down the embankment towards Purfleet I saw that the top of a fence post in the reeds was a bit taller than it ought to be. It was a Short-Eared Owl relaxing on the fence post, presumably waiting for it go get dim enough not to be mobbed by crows. Neither of us had had a decent look at one before and it posed for us brilliantly for ages with that awesome angry stare. A well-rescued day with some fantastic wildlife!

(PS Ben managed to cadge a lift to Minsmere the next day anyway and caught the Lesser Kestrel, the lucky git)

Elmley Marshes - 13/03/09

I'm trying to figure out a balance in my writing. The last few have been un-naturally "blokey" so I've probably gone too far the other way this time into Pseud's Corner wankery. Fuck it, no one actually reads this...


On Saturday (2½ weeks ago) I took a trip to RSPB Elmley Marshes on the Isle of Sheppey. It was fantastic. I've only visited a couple of times before as the round trip from Swale station to the furthest hide and back is about 18 miles.

I arrived at Swale station after a dull train journey and walked over the old bridge. A barge bellowed in from the east and the whole bridge lifted up to make way. It's surprising to see a rail line on a moveable bridge but here was just such an example. Anyway, back to the birds, high tide was in so no short-cutting under the bridge, instead it was time to use the "safari driveway" into the reserve. Elmley sells itself partly on the long road into the reserve surrounded by grazing marsh and shallow floods.

It compares this to a safari and encourages the visitor to remain within their car to avoid startling the wildlife and to use it much like a hide. The driveway is also a public footpath and my only realistic way in to the reserve when the tide is high. It's a little disconcerting that a conservation society is advising that I use a more environmentally damaging mode of transport.
I carried on and soon had house-sparrows and starlings all around me on the rooftops of barns and farmhouses. Out on the fields ahead were reasonably large flocks of winter thrush, mostly fieldfare with a few redwing. Skylark song opened up from the air above, hard to spot initially and once you have them they're still small, flickering silhouettes in your binoculars. Following them down they sing till the last minute then pull a quick low lateral flight, an audible equivalent to insect flash colours; throwing off a potential predator by switching from conspicuous to cryptic in the blink of an eye. Even when you've found them, followed them down, followed their attempt to trick you and they land in short, cropped grass; these plain, brown birds manage to disappear into the green.

Giving up I decided to practice my poor field observation skills and count something. 150+ wigeon flew off rather quickly, mocking my attempts. By this time a few people had driven past, noticeably speeding up a bit to get beyond the annoying pedestrian scaring off the birds. Rounding the first bend in the track I approached where most of the Lapwing were displaying and the majority of roadside ponds were, all of which were a bit drab. Last year around this time the ponds were carpeted in white Water Crows-Foot flowers. The lapwing were very relaxed letting me relatively near and displaying right over my head. Banking side to side and sweeping low they came near enough that I could hear the wind in their feathers which made a zipping sound with each stroke. I've not heard this before with large flocks in winter even when they've circled low. The use of mechanical sounds generated by feathers is well known amongst birds in general but relatively unexplored from species to species. Perhaps this builds into the display repertoire of the lapwing? It was audible from over 10m away and occured with more than one bird so I don't think it was just an aberrant or partially moulted individual.

Further up the road, my vertical form scared a few hares out of their holts. Everything here is a little on the tame side. The lapwing don't panic and the hares only run a little bit and then wait and watch. There's a lot of grandiose talk of wild land and wilderness and so on and I'm going to be guilty of it too. But I think land like this is better termed "feral". It was once tamed and retains an uneasy co-existance with modern man. Half-wild, half-urban, relatively easy to photograph. A lens the size of a traffic cone protruded from the car in front as the hare was standing alert and photogenically only a few feet from the lucky photographer.

I walked straight through the car park into the main reserve. There is meant to be a pair of Little Owls in the oaks below the farm. I generally have bad luck with owls and hadn't even seen a little owl despite it supposedly being common. Up ahead a small group were scoping the oaks which was a good sign and sure enough, after a brief search there it was roosting on a fairly low branch. Hooray for a lifer! I seemed to be in for a lucky day with owls as a Barn Owl flew by beneath us for an excellent view as it tracked down to the embankment and headed west over the more abandoned marsh.

Carrying on to the hides I saw quite a lot of Marsh Harriers riding thermals in the distance, ringed plovers were laying claim to the small shingle isles in the scrapes and acting fiercely territorial and I felt I could confidently identify the knot roosting there amongst the grey plover. In the background 70+ avocets were milling around. I moved on after a while to the first Swale hide and carried on working on my wader ID skills (not much variety to really stretch anything here though). I was weighing up the pros and cons of moving on to the Spitend Point hide (a few more kilometres away) to look for Red Breasted Merganser when a pair came into view only ~50m from the hide! 2 lifers in one day; not bad going! I watched these two for quite some time and decided to head back while it was still light and the tide was low. Two pheasant cocks duked it out on the grass near where I'd seen the barn owl earlier, doing what looks a lot like a capoeira dance. Leaping and thrusting and dodging and never quite actually hitting each other.

Taking a different path directly towards the old bridge I bumped into the reserve and farm manager in his vegetable patch. He's quite an interesting guy. We chatted for a while about the owls (the Barn owls have declined heavily this year due to the snow), the Swale reserve further east on the island, finding a career in nature conservation and the outdoors and the presence of the rare "Pride of Kent" beetle, Emus hirtus, an awesome bee-mimicking rove beetle only found at Elmley and one other site on the Hoo peninsula. It seemed like he had his dream job, farm work is really tough but the land is beautiful if you have the inclination to appreciate it. A genuinely happy bloke.

After being pointed in the right direction I wandered on, large paint-brush strokes of starling flocks flew over the trees and a kestrel and yet more marsh harriers flew by. The walk back was otherwise uneventful, I got under the bridge without hitting quicksand and crossed the Swale. Then a pale shape drifted from between the new bridge's pillars and a barn owl turned up! Talk about getting lucky. It seemed oblivious to me in the semi-darkness and hovered over a patch only 10m from me. The train rolled in and sent the owl to the far side of the field, so I hopped on and finished a good day's birding.

Northward Hill

The cormorant post is turning into the Duke Nukem Forever of ornithological blogging. So instead here's another "Places what I visited over the weekend" post.

I trekked out to Northward Hill on Saturday. The forecast was middling crap (drizzle, cloud, wind, rain showers etc) but I've come to ignore the forecast unless it's absolutely dire. Sure enough it was cold, overcast and windy. But it didn't rain all day and the clouds started to clear up leading to an all-round quality day!

I took the bus out to High Halstow and started the long walk out to the Thames bank. As soon as the roar of the bus disappeared behind the hedgerows the sound of singing courting skylarks started to come in from both fields either side of the track. So while the cold and the lack of flowers suggested spring was still hiding somewhere, these guys were cheering me up all the way down through the mud and ditch jumping to the tidal defenses. I found a useful bit of discarded closed-cell foam to sit on and set up the Aldi cheapo scope to check out all the waders I'd spend today trying to get to grips with. I carefully edged my head over the wall and crept the scope up onto it. The waders had moved into the middle of the bay making it hard to get close from any angle but directly across from me were hundreds if not thousands of teal and a few hundred wigeon. I've not actually seen so many teal together and generally not so many on a tidal section but there they were. I relaxed behind the wall and out of the wind for a while to let the tide bring the birds closer. I had a bite to eat and watched the clouds dissipate a bit. The day was getting more and more hopeful. A fox out on the grazing marshes drifted from grass-clump to grass-clump following its nose. It clearly caught something out there and had a good chew of frog, mouse or shrew. The sun shone for a while and the black section of my rucksack started to attract inverts. Nothing I could recognise but a small spider and a froghopper nymph were nice to see. I had a few more attempts at watching from the sea wall side and decided to loop round Egypt bay to the east end and marine crawl onto the embankment there with the scope on the mini-tripod. This was great; the topology of the mud there pushes the waders towards the bay as the tide rises and swept them towards me. I started using the scope on the nearest birds and worked through my books trying to finally work out the differences between knot and dunlin. There were 30ish shelduck, 1 turnstone, butt-loads of sanderling, a hundred or so grey plover, butt-loads of dunlin and I'm still not sure if I clapped eyes on any knot at all. I'll keep trying till I have it worked out properly. And I think it's about time I started taking notes and counting the birds.

The trip back featured a very close flying kestrel and a bargainous copy of Biology 5th Ed. by Campbell et al from Oxfam. If I get my act together and go for the life sciences degree with the OU I can see this being very useful. In the mean time it's fascinating reading anyway!

Oh and and (once I've uploaded it), here's a bit of footage of the fox:



Sunday was spent volunteering at Mitcham common; clearing openings in the mixed scrub and gorse encroaching upon the acid grassland growing there. Clearance conservation work is massively satisfying - destruction as creative process! I'll be interested to come by in the summer with the bug net and see what's living in the grasses.

Southend

I've been slowly working on a post on cormorants for too long without posting about what I've been up to. So here goes:

Sat 6th Feb - LNHS field meeting in Southend

I initially blew this off as a bit of a laridophile's specialist trip and while I wouldn't mind seeing some Med. gulls I don't have enough knowledge or appreciation of gulls to spend hours watching them. In the end the 2km pier and promises of getting a long way out over the mudflats sold it to me. I also had my spanking new £20 Aldi scope to test out!

After a couple of stops to watch greenfinch and a robin we paid the extortionate 50p entry fee and made our way down the pier. Within a few minutes we had the usual flotilla of herring, common and black headed gulls flying overhead while on the flats we had good close views of a bar-tailed godwit, turnstone, oystercatchers, curlew and some slightly more distant sanderling.
I discovered that my scope is, objectively speaking, not particularly good and that I've probably been spoiled by having cadged views through friends' £££ scopes. But as a beginner's scope and for £20 it's great stuff. There's an incredible amount of colour distortion at the edges and in low light it gets incredibly dim. Although the eyepiece is supposedly 20x-60x I don't think it's worth using beyond 30x. It's still better than the 10x50 bins and will no doubt make a difference when watching waders in future.

On reaching the pier end we were edified by a scary hobo-ish man about why we were "doing it all wrong" and what great exception he took to our sandwiches... or something. In the meantime, some of the guys had their scopes up already and called out a Great Northern Diver! Woohoo a lifer! This is quite a muted but beautiful looking bird as streamlined as it is. It dives in a smooth semi-circular motion; lifting itself clear of the water and disappearing with barely a splash. More med. gulls soared around and perched on the pilings and, provided it sits neatly nearby, I think I might now be able to even tell the difference between a 1st winter med and black-backed gull.

Turnstones turned up on the boardwalk, looking for dropped food. Two weeks previously I'd spent quite some time sliding around on my backside and ducking behind groynes trying to take a close photograph of one of these fellows and here were two happily walking with in 10 feet of people.
Little tosser prima-donna individuals spoiling my inflated sense of achievement...What lovely birds!

Back on the mainland we started to make our way towards the Rossi's ice-cream parlour to see if we could find the resident vagrant, Rossi the Ring-Billed Gull. En route we watched some foxes sunning themselves in what was vaguely warm weather. Finally we reached Rossi's hang-out. The ring-billed gull is an American gull that looks like something halfway between a common and a herring gull. Rossi was surprisingly timid, when bread was thrown to draw the gulls in all it achieved was to pull the black-headed gulls away and leave him isolated on the beach and easier to spot. My scope wasn't up to much on backlit subjects but the ring marking was clearly visible. With all the scopes out on the promenade pointed at a bunch of gulls we soon had some of the general public taking an interest. What I found pleasantly surprising was that we managed to hold anyone's interest talking about a seagull. My impression is that seagulls on the coast are about as interesting to most people as a pigeon.

After that the group disbanded and Ben and I decided to use the remaining light to visit Two Tree Island down the coast. Water voles, owls, water rail and roosting little egrets were on the wish list and, predictably, none of them turned up. Ben tried to help me with IDing knot and generally waders in flight. On the way back we had a kestrel follow us all the way back to the water vole pond, ruining all chances of seeing that, but it did let us watch close up as it demolished a mouse in a couple of swallows.