, ,

A Cornish Paradise

In spring, A and I escaped to the country. The Cornish countryside to be specific. I managed to find somewhere for a decent price online, a whole flat to ourselves in the middle of green fields (with views of a lake too!). To make the most of the decent weather (rain was on the horizon), we took ourselves off for an evening walk.

Beautiful evening light

I did not expect to see alpacas!

The way is shut. Apparently not all the local footpaths are maintained

We weren’t really sure where to go or what to see, it’s been years since my last proper visit to Cornwall (a drive through on the way to the Isles of Scilly doesn’t count!) – but we knew that one place we had to go to was the Eden Project. I’d heard amazing things about it – and the history behind it is fascinating (more info here).

Inside the rainforest dome – very warm and humid, it was wonderful!

 

I couldn’t help making friends with the biome’s inhabitants – this is a male roul-roul partridge

Statues in the Mediterranean biome – these are covered with vines in summer


A giant bee!

The rain struck and my oh my did it tip it down! In one of the lighter spells of rain, we visited a local nature reserve – Kennall Vale, which was a gunpowder works and is now fascinating site. Wandering around it felt a bit like being in Middle Earth, I half-expected to orcs to appear!

The river was flowing well with all the recent (and ongoing) rain
– you can just about make me out, slightly camouflaged in my waterproofs!

 

Amazing to see the old water wheels still at the reserve 

I also wanted to try and see choughs at Kynance Cove, as they would be a new species for me. No luck, but we did spot a seal!

A break in the rain to admire the sea

A boat pulled up

Seal!!! It wasn’t up to much, just occasionally bobbing about with its nose sticking out of the water

On the way back from Cornwall, we decided to take a break by visiting a nature reserve – Goss Moor National Nature Reserve. As you can see, it was very wet!

Trying to listen birdsong in the rain

I think this is the bit where my feet got wet

/1 Comment/by
, , ,

Dreaming of summer – Latvian wildlife

Spring is taking forever to properly arrive, and more cold weather is due. I’ve sown various seeds, and even have a few seedlings, but spring (let alone summer) feels like years away!

Which makes me dream of last summer and its various adventures, especially our week in Latvia in late July / early August. We had gone for a wedding at the end of the week, and made a really wonderful week’s holiday out of it.

Latvia shares a lot of the same wildlife species as the UK, so I saw a lot of very familiar species – blackbird, robin, house sparrow, various butterflies and other insects. However, there it is just different enough for there to be some exciting new species – some of which I managed to identify while in Latvia, and some of which I am still puzzling over!

I won’t go through everything we saw, but here are a few of the species we saw:

Rose chafer (Cetonia aurata).

Spotted in a park in Riga city, also found in the UK.

 

Robin feeding a juvenile cuckoo (Erithacus rubecula / Cuculus canorus)

Seen in Kemeri National Park. Both found in the UK, but robins are rarely a host in the UK.

 

White stork (Ciconia ciconia) – very grubby looking!

Spotted somewhere between Kemeri and Sliteres National Parks. Not found in the UK.

 

Sooty copper butterfly (Lycaena tityrus).

Seen near Kolka Point. Not found in the UK.

 

Map butterfly (Araschnia levana f. prorsa).

Seen near Kolka Point. Not usually found in the UK, any sightings are normally released individuals.

 

Otter spraint (Lutra lutra).

Found in Guaja National Park – even in a different country, I can’t help finding otter spraint!

 

/0 Comments/by

Wistful thoughts of spring

A few days of sunshine and it feels like spring could actually be on its way!

I counted five 7-spot ladybirds (Coccinella septempunctata) in a Bedfordshire garden at the weekend, basking in the weak warmth radiated by the sun. They may regret waking from their slumber, it’s meant to be cold again in the next few days!

Signs of spring continued during a visit to Irthlingborough Lakes and Meadows, where I spotted (and ate) my first hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) leaves of the year. I’m also pretty sure I saw some nesting material being carried by a long-tailed tit (Aegithalos caudatus) – hard to tell as it was distant and fast-moving, standard behaviour for long-tailed tits!

The refreshing walk also included sightings of shoveler (Anas clypeata), some black-headed gulls (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) coming into their summer plumage and I even found some lovely otter spraint (Lutra lutra). It wasn’t very fresh, but it still definitely stank of fish / musk / jasmine!

I think the recent snow and/or rainfall had quite an effect on the reserve! It felt a bit like walking through the dead marshes from Lord of the Rings. I half-expected a ring-wraith to fly overhead on a fellbeast.

With the wish that spring is around the corner, I’ve sown a few vegetable seeds (in peat-free compost, but in plastic pots). It’s probably too early, and they’ll either not germinate or die in the frost, but I live in hope.

 

/0 Comments/by
, , , ,

Making friends with dragons

Everything is beginning to calm down and sort itself out in my life, which is wonderful and also means that I may just have some time to write my blog again! Fingers crossed! There is a lot I could write about in this post, but I am going to focus on a nature walk I took recently – the first in ages and it was wonderful!

(c) Andrew Kerwick-Chrisp

A friend and I decided to use a weekend day to visit Irthlingborough Lakes and Meadows in Northamptonshire. This was a new nature reserve for me so I didn’t know what to expect, but it is on his doorstep so he knows it quite well. However, he isn’t wildlife-mad/obsessed like myself so it turned out to be a learning experience for him too. Not to mention that he hasn’t seen me in wildlife-mad/obsessed mode before, so that also turned out to be a learning experience for him! (Yes, I do actually associate with people outside the world of natural history!)

I managed to find quite a few plump and juicy blackberries to snack on, although we are beginning to near the end of their season sadly. We even found a dragonfly – which I believe to be a Common Darter (Sympetrum striolatum) though I am completely out of practice, so do let me know if I’m wrong! We watched it for a minute or two, and I tried to get a decent photo of it. I think I did quite well, though not an amazing photo. It then flew off and we didn’t see where it landed, until we went to walk on again at which point my friend noticed that it had landed on my hair! It actually stayed there for about 5 minutes or so, and only flew off when I went to carry on walking. On an unrelated note – how fantastic does my plait look in the photos?!

Further along the way, we were intrigued by the sight of a lady crouching down in the grass by the side of the path. What could she be up to? Something nefarious or was she, like I usually do, looking at something interesting? It turned out that she was photographing Shaggy Ink Caps (Coprinus comatus), a lovely fungus that it is one of the easier species to identify. Apparently it is edible and quite tasty, but before the black ink begins to appear. I wouldn’t take my word for it though, as I don’t know much about foraging for mushrooms!

What with there being lakes at this nature reserve, there were a fair few birds about – Grey Heron (Ardea cinerea), Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus), Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), etc etc. I had my duck identification skills tested, after quite a few months of not even attempting any duck ID. Racking my brains, I managed to remember that they were Wigeon (Anas penelope) and Teal (Anas crecca). It shouldn’t have been quite so difficult to remember, but I am very out of practice with ducks! Must work harder!

We almost passed by this female Blackbird (Turdus merula) without noticing her, she was sitting ever so still and quietly in the Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) tree. A little later, we spotted another Blackbird, this time a male who was not so still but instead was enjoying some haw berries.

Our last find was a good one – a grasshopper! I had wondered if it would be too late in the year or too chilly to find any Orthoptera, but I was not to be disappointed it seems. With the side keels of the pronotum being so straight and almost parallel, my guess would be Lesser Marsh Grasshopper (Chorthippus albomarginatus)?

All in all, a rather nice nature walk. I bet it is even better in late spring and summer when I am sure it is buzzing with even more Orthoptera, and filled with exciting wildflowers and other insects!

In other news, I have left National Trust’s Wimpole Estate (though not before finding a rare fungus!), moved house, and have exciting plans for the near future. Watch this space! For now, a few tweets of what else has been happening recently:

/3 Comments/by
, , , , , ,

Life goes on

I haven’t managed to write a blog post for three months now, which is just crazy. Due to a combination of being incredibly busy at work, very busy with A Focus On Nature work and some not-so-great stuff happening in my personal life, I haven’t had the time to write. And when I have, the latter has meant that I am not feeling particularly inspired either.

I hope that everything will calm down and sort itself out soon, and that I can return to writing. If so, it is likely that posts will be sporadic for a while before I manage to make a regular posts again. Until then, you can see what I have been up to in the past few months below (most recent first). I haven’t managed to include anywhere near everything I have been up to, but it will give you a flavour of how busy I have been!

 

/4 Comments/by
, , , , , , , , ,

#30DaysWild – Days 24 – 30

I had a manic few days to finish off the month of June and thus 30 Days Wild – pond dipping, moth trapping, butterfly chasing … the usual stuff really. Rather than go through all 6 days, I have included the highlights below.

Day 24

Day 25

Day 28

Day 30

/2,315 Comments/by
, , , , ,

#30DaysWild – Day 23

Another day at Wicken Fen today with another school group. I was leading two of their activities today: pond dipping and a guided walk on the Fen.

However in other news, this week is National Insect Week and today I published my post for the A Focus On Nature blog about NIW and how AFON members can get more involved with this fascinating group. Read the my post here.

/2,315 Comments/by
, , , , , , , , , , ,

#30DaysWild – Days 15 – 22

Ok, so I fell behind somewhat on my #30DaysWild blogging – oops! Not to worry though, I have been connecting with nature every day despite being busy with work, AFON bits and pieces, and general life stuff. I won’t go into every single wild act that happened every day, so here is a summary, shown through my tweets.

Bee Orchids (Ophrys apifera)! <3 <3 <3

Somehow, and after quite a bit of searching, I found the Bee Orchid from last week again. And in fact, I found a further 6 plants! Then later that day, I was informed of two more locations of Bee Orchids on the estate, which is fantastic news indeed.

 

I was able to put the moth trap out at Wimpole for the first time in ages (since I need to be there two days in a row to run the trap). There wasn’t much, but I did catch this beautiful Pale Tussock moth (Calliteara pudibunda).

 

/2,315 Comments/by
, , , , , ,

#30DaysWild – Day 14

I was at Wicken Fen again today, and I wasn’t actually pond dipping! Instead I was leading the sessions on minibeast hunting for a local school. We went pretended to be centipedes and millipedes – at one I was the centipede’s prey, and we were hungry dragonflies looking for lunch, and we also did some log rolling. Under said logs we found two Lesser Stag Beetles (Dorcus parallelipipedus), a Glow Worm Beetle larvae (Lampyris noctiluca), and many many ants, other beetles, worms, snails, slugs, spiders, millipedes, centipedes … At one point I had a moment of “wow, I’m getting paid for this?!”

Despite not doing pond dipping, my highlight for #30DaysWild had to be a creature that they found during pond dipping. One of the children managed to scoop out a female Great Crested Newt (GCN, Triturus cristatus). You can see how big she is and the typical GCN patterning – orange background with black spots, plus mainly black chin. Apparently each GCN’s patterning is unique to that individual – maybe I should try to build up a photo archive of the GCNs at Wicken Fen?

/2,315 Comments/by
, , , , , ,

#30DaysWild – Day 13

I was back at Wicken Fen today and in charge of 110 children! Fortunately they were ever so well-behaved and not too loud. I was doing the pond dipping sessions with them, and one of the children caught a dragonfly nymph that had started to emerge. However, it was absolutely chucking it down so I took the nymph inside to (a) warm up and (b) dry off!

You can see that it didn’t help all that much as the wings didn’t open properly, not helped further by the fact that the dragonfly kept falling onto them. At the time of writing (c. 7pm), the wings are still quite folded and crumpled. I’m not feeling hopeful for a full recovery.

On an additional note, my photo made it onto the BBC Cambridge Local Live page (posted at 17.49).

/2,315 Comments/by