A Mump and a Murmuration

Tags

Avalon Marshes, Barrow Mump, Burrowbridge, Ham Wall, King Alfred Inn, murmuration, National Trust, RSPB, Somerset, Somerset Levels, starling

I’ve tried to find a female equivalent of ‘avuncular’, but, although there are suggestions on line, there is no such word authenticated by common, or even rare, usage. Anyway, I had an auntly visit for the two nights either side of Christmas Day, and we fully exploited the lovely day that was to be outdoors.

A short, sunny, very local morning walk, with Glastonbury Tor to our left (on the outward leg) went unrecorded as far as images are concerned, but it made a good start to the day. After a light lunch, conscious that daylight would not last long, we drove across the moors (formerly known as the Somerset Levels, now renamed the Avalon Marshes) to Burrowbridge, where the King Alfred Inn was the headquarters of the unofficial relief operations during the terrible flooding in 2014. We parked at the National Trust car park, and I offered young-in-heart B. the chance to climb up Barrow Mump, a sort of mini Glastonbury Tor.

She was game. (She always is.) I really should have thought ahead and suggested she put on trousers.

We took a gently spiral route, and looked back from time to time at flooded fields, a normal phenomenon at this time of year. Somerset is thought to mean ‘Land of the Summer People’, from the time before the Levels were drained, and people lived on the ‘islands’ in the winter, grazing their cattle on the flat lands in the summer only.

Some people think that this sort of selfie is just not on (private joke).

It was VERY muddy and even more slippery.

Two-thirds of the way up

We made it just a little further

Coming down

Looking back, we saw that some people made it to the top.

It was not for lack of energy that we decided to abandon our target, but because it just became so difficult and dangerous underfoot. We thought that discretion was the better part of valour. Indeed, we were pretty pleased with our achievement.

A backward look at the ruined church from the car park.

The low sun was getting lower , and I was very aware that these were ideal conditions to see the starlings coming in to roost, since it is only in clear skies that they do their amazing murmurations, their swirling and whirling to avoid attacks by birds of prey. (I presume the latter do not hunt in cloudy conditions.) Otherwise they just arrive where they have decided to settle for the night and go straight down to bed.

I had rung the starling hotline, which tells you where our local starlings have settled the previous night. (They come in numbers to feed in my garden during the day!) It is not guaranteed, but likely that they will choose the same place, out of three possibilities, the following night. By a series of questions during the ten-minute drive to what I made a mystery destination, B. managed to work out where, or at any rate why, we were going. We found many people already gathered at RSPB Ham Wall. Ten minutes later the starlings started to arrive. And to murmurate, possibly the best I have ever seen there.

Those were all taken towards the north-east. The rest are to the south-east.

We stayed for about half an hour, and could have stayed for the same time again to see all the stragglers in. The light was going fast and the birds were still streaming in as we left.

I was, as they say, right chuffed, that nature had laid on this spectacle. B. had not visited Somerset for eight years, so this was real treat for both of us.

Starlingrise

Tags

Avalon Marshes, cormorant, Ham Wall, lapwing, RSPB, Somerset Levels, starling, swan

A few photos and a couple of videos I took this morning at the RSPB’s Ham Wall reserve on the Avalon Marshes (Somerset Levels) before and at sunrise.  I had been to see the starlings’ murmuration yesterday evening, and was inspired to return to see them get up for the day.  A couple of hours later 30 of them were squabbling over the bird seed I put out in my garden. 

My camera made some light conditions appear brighter than in fact they were, and I’m not clever enough to undo that effect in Photoshop.

Little egret

Cormorant

Lapwings

 

I must get to the reserve more frequently. It’s so near where I live …

Andalucia 10

Tags

Acebuche, Andalucia, Andalusia, azure-winged magpie, black-winged stilt, Blue rock thrush, Cattle egret, cinereous vulture, cormorant, Donana National Park, Eagle owl, Egyptian vulture, El Rocio, Eurasian black vulture, grey heron, greylag goose, griffon vulture, Iberian great grey shrike, Iberian magpie, Imperial eagle, Jandula, lapwing, littel egret, Naturetrek, Red-legged partridge, rock pipit, Sardinian warbler, Sierra Morena, spoonbill, starling, stonechat, White stork

Birds in Andalucia.  Look, I’m not very good with bird identification, but I do know that eagles tend to soar.  So when Simon said, incredibly excitedly, ‘There’s an imperial eagle on that post’, I quickly zoomed in on it and took this. I was not alone.  And not alone to realise, on examining the photo enlarged on the camera screen, that ‘that’ post’ was not that post!  What Simon meant was this – perhaps half a mile away.   When you go on a Naturetrek trip, they provide you in advance with a checklist of all the creatures you may see, with a column for each day.  There are always hundreds of species of birds on this list, and when we’re out I am in such awe as I hear naturalists/guides (and others) crying’, ‘That was the call of an X’, ‘There’s a Y.’  ‘Where, where?’ we all say, and they all do their darndest to help you see the creature.  I’m probably about average in being able to pick something out visually, no better, and am certainly poor on birdsong.  At the end of each day we gather together – nothing compulsory about it – and go through the list.  Of those seen or heard by someone, I will have seen perhaps a third to a half, the bigger the bird the more likely I am to have seen it.  I will have managed to take a photo of very few indeed. Here’s what I did get, with their identifications to the best of my recollection, (totally subject to correction, please).  Firstly in the Coto Doñana.

Original identification corrected to female or first-year male stonechat (Ack. BL)

Iberian great grey shrike

Stonechat

???

Cattle egrets living up to their name

And why not  take a bunch of starlings?  Especially when they are beautiful Spotless starlings, with wonderful glossy coats (though ordinary ones are pretty wonderful too!)

Griffon vultures

Griffon vultures

Best I could do to get a griffin vulture in flight

Easier to take this

We had driven a great loop and were now nearer to (but not very near) the Imperial eagle.  Only about 4500 left in the world

And then Simon spotted another, incredibly far away, and I’ve magnified this many times, but the nest can be seen in silhouette, and the eagle in a direct line with it, on the right.  Two Imperial eagles in view at the same time!

Almost as exciting to the leaders were a total of 6 Egyptian vultures coming in to two trees.

White storks and a heat haze

More cattle egrets doing their thing. To quote Wikipedia, ” It was originally native to parts of Southern Spain and Portugal, tropical and subtropical Africa and humid tropical and subtropical Asia. In the end of the 19th century it began expanding its range into southern Africa, first breeding in the Cape Province in 1908. Cattle egrets were first sighted in the Americas on the boundary of Guiana and Suriname in 1877, having apparently flown across the Atlantic Ocean. It was not until the 1930s that the species is thought to have become established in that area.”

We were taken to a tiny patch of the wetlands that was still wet.  I would have expected that there would have been vast concentrations of waders there.  There were not.  In addition to these Little egrets (I think) and lapwing/black-winged stilts (which, or something else?) we saw spoonbill and other species further away.

Greylag geese, on the ‘lagoon’ at El Rocío

Then at our picnic spot at El Acebuche, I managed at last to see an Iberian (or azure-winged) magpie.  I had heard them mentioned a few times, but this was the first time I had properly seen the beautiful creature, rather smaller than the common ones (and there were plenty of those around).   A few new birds (in terms of photographic opportunities) in the Sierra Morena. We saw a fairly rare Cinereous (a.k.a. Eurasian black) vulture over our picnic stop by the Jandula dam, but sadly this is not one, but a griffon vulture. (Identification BL)

Rock pipits at the dam

There is a Blue rock thrush in this picture, also at the dam.  Half way up the slope there is a bit sticking out.  The bird is not that bit. The bird is the bit sitting on that bit!

Two red-legged partridges. Some colleagues went out for a short early evening birdwatching trip on the second evening in the mountains, and came back saying they had seen an Eagle owl.  We all went to the spot the next day, and this is where we were searching.  (Well, the rock face was much bigger than this actually.)  A third of the way down, and a quarter of the way in from the left there is this. And within that there is this.  The Eagle owl is in one of these holes. See it?  No I don’t either.  Yeah, right, we’ll believe you Simon!

 

Several birds joined us at our last picnic spot, including this grey heron, which flew gracefully towards us after a while.  And then a troop (is that the word?) of Iberian magpies arrived at the same spot, and gradually made their way towards us, taking over the picnic tables as we left them. (Actually, the collective word for magpies is a murder, or a charm, or a congregation or a gulp. Take your pick.)

If it’s one for sorrow and two for joy, what do 14 magpies signify? (BL suggests for two secrets never to be told!)

At the spot where we had seen the big fish, a kingfisher swooped along the river and under the bridge – no photo sadly – and these cormorants stood for a while and then took off. Next (and last) post: felines!

 

Wildlife in the garden, part 1

Tags

backswimmer, badger, borage, crabapple, damselflies, gatekeeper, green woodpecker, holly blue, long-tailed tit, peacock butterfly, starling, tadpoles, tiger moth, wildlife garden

Preparing to depart for a wildlife trip to the wetlands of Brazil, the Pantanal, at the end of the week, I thought I would do a photoblog entry about the wildlife in my own garden since the beginning of the year.  Except that it turns out that it is going to have to be three days’ worth of entries.  It also turns out that I only got down to a serious photographic record in August, before then being very haphazard.

My bird seed disappears very rapidly in the winter, the most numerous commensals being chaffinches, goldfinches and above all starlings.

Starlings congregating in the hornbeam in January

They roost at night with millions of others, after spectacular murmurations if the conditions are right, in the reedbeds of the Somerset Levels – and at dawn scatter to the gardens and fields surrounding for miles around.  There can be as many as 30 or 40 in this tree and on the ground at one time. In summer though, I can go for weeks without seeing a single one.

Robins – not necessarily the same ones, since they also migrate to a certain extent – are here year round.

Enjoying the February sun

In the same month, the frogs start getting amorous. Here are a couple in amplexus in my pond, and the results of their amours.

You can just see the female

The next six pictures were taken in March.

Goldfinches

Tadpoles stay close together immediately after hatching, eating the remains of their glassy first homes

Small tortoiseshell butterfly on Lesser celandine

(Common?) wasp on Euphorbia characias

Until I saw this I did not realise that backswimmers (a.k.a., but not, water boatmen) could exist outside water. But I now know they can also fly.

April sees the arrival of many bees.  Here is a solitary (that is, not living in a community) bee.

I always feel guilty that the nail-holes in this summerhouse will not provide the sort of nests that they want, and that the bees waste their time trying.  I really will buy or make a bee house for them soon.

When I stand under my crab-apple tree in blossom-time, the humming of, mainly, honeybees is almost deafening.  Butterflies also enjoy the nectar.

Peacock butterfly

Here is a damselfly (wings closed behind it and much smaller than dragonfly) on a field maple.

Just one of many clumps of primroses

Signs of bluebells

Holly blue butterfly on, I think, pear blossom

Craneflies are just one of the many kinds of insects which love the long grass, (pretentiously called my meadow)

Lady’s smock, a.k.a. cuckoo flower, which arrived spontaneously when I started letting the meadow grow. (It had not been very cared for before.)

Crabapple tree in full glory, thought to be part of an ancient hedge, like the hornbeam

We’re into May now. Just one picture. I don’t know what this insect is, but it’s rather handsome in my view.

June

 I do know that this is definitely an adult male blackbird

Badgers use my garden most of the year, and I have seen, and been able to stand among – badgers’ sight is notoriously poor – as many as eight of them, including young, foraging for insects in, or rather within, the turf. They emerge from their setts as it is getting, or it has become, thoroughly dark.  However in the long days of June they are forced to come out while there is still a little daylight, and I was thrilled to get this picture from my kitchen window around 9 pm one evening.

Last year I saw – and have seen elsewhere this year – Jersey tiger moths.  In June I was delighted to see in my own garden Scarlet tiger moths, so-called for obvious reasons.

 

 

 

Gatekeeper butterfly

Small white butterfly on Verbena bonariensis

Great spotted woodpeckers are not unusual in my garden, but I’d never seen a green woodpecker here before. This juvenile by loud screeching was determined to let me know it was there, and I was able to take this photo just by swinging round at my desk. Sadly I was not able to get a picture of the never-before-seen Treecreeper the following day.

Bumblebee on lavender

Only the buddleia in this picture is in my garden. These sparrows wait in a neighbour’s garden taking their turn to raid my feeders. There are more than 30 of them in this picture.

Once the borage is out, honeybees have a clear preference for its flowers, while the bumblebees stay with the lavender.

I love it when long-tailed tits flit through the garden.

We’ve arrived at August.  More pictures from that month next time.