Tag Archives: Skylark

October in Richmond Park

Stag Roaring. The Hinds seem unimpressed.
Young Parasol Mushrooms. The caps open out to the size of a dinner plate.
Acorn, plump and beautiful. The Squirrels were having a feast in the woods, popping in and out of the shade of the Oak trees.

Walking down from the woods across the wide rough area with rushes, two Skylarks got up, twittering, and perched briefly on the Bracken: a very special sight for London.

Down past the Pen Ponds at the side of a wood, a Green Woodpecker flew handsomely up into a tree, swiftly hiding itself round the back of the trunk.

Puffball

On the Swale NNR

The Swale National Nature Reserve, seen here looking southwest from Shellness, is an extensive area of brackish saltings, formerly saltmarsh (top right), with a shelly beach and rich mudflats (left) beside the Swale, the channel that separates the Isle of Sheppey from mainland Kent. A Second World War blockhouse is in the distance.

To reach Shellness one has to jolt very slowly along a long, straight, dusty, potholed track, minding out for one’s shock-absorbers. The reward is a magically quiet, spacious realm of … nothingness. Wide mudflats with occasional Shelducks. Wide horizons. Long empty shelly berms above empty windswept beaches. Sea kale. Sea lavender. Sea campion. Sea everything. The song of skylarks over the wind.

A Meadow Pipit chooses a good vantage point on the lichen-covered blockhouse.

The cry of a Black-Tailed Godwit over the marsh draws my attention to an elegant medium-sized wader with its long straight bill and agile flight. On the groynes and mudflats are plenty of cheerful Oystercatchers, resting or foraging in little groups. A Little Egret flaps distinctively past.

Beside the path is a little beach, marked off with a sign, posts and a plastic rope for a “rare” colony of Little Terns. I scan it with binoculars, and am lucky enough to catch one in flight; it lands out on the mudflat, its long wings poking out past its tail, a slender sea-swallow.

Three Oystercatchers feeding on the Swale mudflats

Even as I parked up, some chunky Corn Buntings flitted overhead giving their sharp calls. They were once common in farmland everywhere. A single Swallow flew past.

Sea Campion

Along the mudflats occasional Ringed Plovers went their solitary ways. The telescope showed little groups of Shelducks in quite large numbers — perhaps I saw 50 all told. A few Black-Headed and Herring Gulls, and as always a few Starlings (convinced they were waders) visited the marsh. A sudden flock of a hundred Dunlins, wheeling and sweeping together, made me catch my breath, a glimpse of wild beauty.

Sea Beet, the origin of Spinach Beet, our favourite green leafy vegetable

Over the marsh, Skylarks kept lifting up for their song-flights, pouring out their astonishing, continuous, rich melody until they were almost invisibly high in the sky. It was impossible not to think of Shelley’s poem To a Skylark (“Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert …”), so marvellously immaterial did they seem in the wind and the bright sky.

At the little headland, bounded by a muddy, marshy creek, a Redshank flew up, piping.

This Yellow Wagtail landed just in front of me at the end of the walk, hawking quietly for flies, mostly on foot.

As I returned, a Yellow Wagtail, seemingly almost tame, walked unconcernedly along the path in front of me. I ate my picnic sitting below the dyke out of the wind, absorbing the space and sunshine, my heart full of birdsong.


Therfield Heath, Royston – surviving chalk grassland in East Anglia

On Therfield Heath SSSI (Royston Hill) with Yellow Rattle, with the plains of Cambridgeshire behind

Much of East Anglia is flat, and very low-lying, indeed parts of the Fens are basically at sea level. But there are some hills, and even a Chalk escarpment. It’s pretty low, but still affords a fine view northwards across the plains. The nearly complete “failure of a major escarpment” is the result of the Ice Ages – the ice sheet, maybe a mile thick, ground interminably over the hills and plains, reducing most of the chalk to rock flour with flints, creating the sticky Boulder Clay that carpets much of eastern England. But at Royston, a delightful range of low hills survives, and has somehow survived the plough and the developers.

Yellow Rattle

The grass of Therfield Heath (Royston Hill) is thinned by the parasitic Yellow Rattle (Orobanchaceae, the Broomrape family of parasitic plants): it helpfully weakens the grass, allowing in many other flowers, so it’s a bit of a Keystone Species, one on which the health of the ecosystem depends.

A colourful assemblage: Yellow Rattle – Red Clover – Birdsfoot Trefoil

The plants let in by the weakening of the grass include a colourful and increasingly rare assemblage, which includes Kidney Vetch, Birdsfoot Trefoil, Rockrose, Thyme, Wild Mignonette and many others.

Rockrose and Thyme, attractive plants of Chalk Grassland

The flowers in turn support butterflies including Marbled White, Meadow Brown, and Small Heath. Half-a-dozen Skylarks were singing all around; one got up pretty close to us for a brief song-flight, quickly followed by several of his neighbours. A Swift dashed overhead. All these once-familiar and widespread species are becoming rather special, a measure of the ecological disaster that has spread not just across England but across Europe and, really, the whole world.

Kidney Vetch

Meadow Brown on Thyme

Small Heath

Wild Mignonette

Therfield Heath landscape with Elder-Hawthorn bush

Greater Knapweed

Perforate St John’s Wort with interesting small pollinators

It’s interesting to see a pattern in the distribution of plants. I last saw Dropwort on Helsington Barrows, a limestone hill at the southern edge of the Lake District (not a place with much limestone, given the area’s ancient volcanic rocks and slates). Here it’s on a very different form of limestone, chalk, but if the soil is alkaline and supports open grassland, that’s fine with Dropwort.  It’s a plant with a beautiful foamy white cluster of flowers on a rather isolated stalk rising from the grassland. The attractive foaminess is reminiscent of Meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria, and indeed Dropwort is in the same genus: it’s Filipendula vulgaris, though it could hardly be called common these days.

Dropwort, Filipendula vulgaris

Thursley Common, not just dragonflies

Round-Leaved Sundew Drosera rotundifolia, an insectivorous plant

Red-topped Cladonia floerkana lichens

OK, ok, you wanted some dragonflies. There were masses of Black-Tailed Skimmers chasing about in groups at Pudmore Pond. Black Darters, Common Blue Damselflies, and Small Red Damselflies skittered about the smaller ponds. A large Hawker or two dashed past, unidentifiable, probably Southern Hawker. A Keeled Skimmer perched conveniently nearby, daintier than the Black-Tailed.

Female Black-Tailed Skimmer (doing a Tiffany Lampshade impression)

Keeled Skimmer

Among the birds, some 50 Swallows were roosting on telegraph wires early in the day. Families of young Stonechats gave grating contact calls, unlike the stone-clicking call of the adults. A Redstart flicked its tail in the bushes. Skylarks rose and sang almost too high to see against the clouds over the heathy hills, Shelley described it perfectly in his ‘To a Skylark’: “a flood of rapture so divine”.

Black-Tailed Skimmer

Birds, Bugs, Blooms in Bornholm (Denmark)

Cormorants basking off Hasle, Bornholm
Cormorants basking off Hasle, Bornholm

Mason Wasp Odynerus spinipes (Eumenidae) on aphid-sticky leaves
Mason Wasp Odynerus spinipes (Eumenidae) on aphid-sticky leaves

Goosanders in the Baltic sea
Goosanders in the Baltic sea

Three unlucky  Dor Beetles on cycle track
Three unlucky Dor Beetles on cycle track

Blue! Cornflowers across a Cornfield
Blue! Cornflowers across a Cornfield

Bornholm is in some ways as Britain was half a century ago or more: there are still swathes of cornflowers and poppies, though many of the fields are plainly weed-free except for narrow margins. The sky over arable fields and set-aside is loud with the song of skylarks; the hedges are full of the cheerful little-bit-of-bread-and-no-CHEESE song of yellowhammers. Swallows race in numbers low over the corn; the towns are busy with house sparrows, swifts and house martins, the many handsome old houses and churches offering plentiful nesting places to suit all parties. The woods held good numbers of blackcap, with willow warblers in the more open areas, a chiffchaff or two, plenty of whitethroats in scattered bushes, a garden warbler or two.

Some things are simply modern, despite the unspoiled rural look of the island: butterflies seem to be few – red admirals, speckled woods, peacocks, small tortoiseshells, meadow browns, and what I think was a fritillary over a marsh-fringed lake – it was quite big and fairly pale, roughly like a dark green: perhaps it was a marsh fritillary, but I couldn’t stay to find out. It was somewhat windy all week, so perhaps there are many more species on windless days, but I rather doubt it (and wind does seem rather usual on the island).

Of course in many ways it is quite different. The presence of eider ducks and goosanders in numbers on the (brackish) Baltic Sea, along with the occasional mute swan and mallard (and a less surprising shelduck), is strikingly unfamiliar. The crows, as in Scotland, are a reminder that this is the North: handsome grey-mantled hooded crows instead of their all-black carrion crow cousins; and there are rooks in numbers all over, including in the villages, boldly scavenging.

England: Paradise Lost

England: Paradise Lost

While inveighing against all things Brussels, the English gentleman was able to take the fullest advantage of the Common Agricultural Policy, developing the agribusiness of the seventies and eighties, expanding subsidized yields by grubbing up hedges and copses, ploughing up verges and making vast stretches of monoculture kept sterile by aerial doses of pesticide. As a result, millions who grew up before this onslaught mourn the loss of grasshoppers, skylarks, the songthrush, even the common [house] sparrow, and many unseen others, which their children will never know. The countryside of Shakespeare and his successors in all the arts, Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, for instance, no longer has a true point of reference.

Maureen Duffy England— Maureen Duffy. England. The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square. Fourth Estate, 2001. Page 250.

Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

Orchids Surviving, Butterflies Vanishing in West Wiltshire

I had the good fortune to get down to West Wiltshire in hot if sometimes humid summer weather.

Pyramidal Orchid in Flowery Meadow
Pyramidal Orchid in Flowery Meadow

It was a pleasure to find the Pyramidal Orchid in a flowery meadow near a town: despite the dog-walkers, the increasingly uncommon flowers were clearly spreading from a small patch across the meadow, which is mown annually.

Less pleasantly, there were next to no insects pollinating the flowers: we saw one Small Tortoiseshell, a fly or two, and one (white/buff-tailed) bumblebee. It was a stark contrast to the masses of bees and beetles I’ve seen on the reserve in London. Of course, in London there is now very little use of pesticides, and basically none on an industrial scale.

This year (2014) does seem to be particularly poor for butterflies. It was an extremely warm winter and a very wet and windy spring, so I wonder if the result has not been a bad spring for insect pests … and perhaps, whether England’s farmers have not sprayed insecticide especially heavily? It’s a question that could clearly be answered by someone. If the answer is yes, then our ‘useful insects’ have suffered very heavily as a consequence.

The next day we went to Cley Hill, a western outlier of the Salisbury Plain chalk downs, sticking up above the plain below the chalk escarpment.

Bee Orchid
Bee Orchid

In the short grass, full of lovely flowers – Sainfoin, Milkwort, Horseshoe Vetch – were Bee Orchids, and happily both bumblebees in this special place protected by the National Trust and Burnet Moths – mostly Five-Spot Burnet, with some Transparent Burnet too, quite a treat.

Five-Spot Burnet Moth
Five-Spot Burnet Moth

Transparent Burnet Moth
Transparent Burnet Moth

On the top of the hill, above the Iron Age earthworks, we came across a group of about five Wall Brown butterflies, all very tatty and worn: perhaps they had been blown across the Channel from France on the warm southerly wind that is accompanying this anticyclone (centred to the east). Nearby were a few Brown Argus, small butterflies in the Blue family: not uncommon in France, far from common in England. Their coloration may seem odd for the Blue family, but females of quite a few species are brown, contrasting with their bright blue males, so the genes for ‘brown’ are clearly available: perhaps it takes just one or a few genetic switches to turn on brownness in both sexes rather than in just one.

In several places on the hill, often on bare chalk paths or short grass, we saw the glowing blue and purplish blue of Adonis Blue butterflies, with their chequered wing borders. So we saw some rather special butterflies, though with the definite feeling that they are only just hanging on in the area.

Milkwort, once a common plant in (cow) meadows
Milkwort, once a common plant in (cow) meadows

The hill is also host to Chalk Fragrant Orchid, Pyramidal Orchid, Spotted Orchid and more: it was lovely to see them all, though we were moved on swiftly by an anxious pair of Skylarks circling rather low overhead, trying to get back down to their nest, clearly not far from where we were sitting. All around in the thorn bushes were Tree Pipits, singing away, with some twittering Goldfinches and one Yellowhammer, my first of the year: yet another species that was once commonplace in every hedge.

 

Star Species of a Seven-Warbler Walk was … Skylark

I did wonder, before I began writing a nature journal here, whether half the entries wouldn’t be ‘nothing much to report today’. Well, so far I haven’t been there.

I went down to Wraysbury again in the hope of finding the Lesser Whitethroat. I arrived rather early, driving out of town only to see a gigantic queue of cars crawling in the other way, trying vainly to beat the Tube strike. No-one was about as I wrapped up in an extra pullover and listened intently to the morning chorus.

My day was already made when I actually SAW a Cetti’s Warbler – for about a second, before the rich brown bird with the rounded tail dived for cover. A Cormorant flapped heavily, taking off from the lake like a lumbering military transport, showing glossy blue-black plumage like a giant crow, circling three times to gain height. Two pairs of Gadwall (only one pair last time) swam shyly near the far side of the lake; Green Woodpeckers laughed their loud ringing call.

Comfrey flowerhead just starting
Comfrey flowerhead just starting

Blackcaps were singing all over; Song Thrushes too, at least three of them; a considerable flock of Long-Tailed Tits made their extraordinary “Tsrrrrrp” noise (try it); Chiffchaffs spoke their name, and (Common) Whitethroats sang their rasping songs or chattered from inside their thornbushes. Great clumps of Comfrey, the medicinal herb used in mediaeval times to knit bones, have suddenly sprung up with their dark, foxglove-like leaves and clusters of flowers in a range of anthocyanin colours – reds and violets.

There were more Willow Warblers and Garden Warblers, too, making them easier to find; more must be arriving each day now.

Whitethroat habitat
Whitethroat habitat: Hawthorn bushes in damp open scrubland

I made my way over the bridge and out into the dry scrubland. Whitethroats were all around now, singing competitively; a few Blackcaps joined in. Then, yes, I heard the simple, flat trill of a Lesser Whitethroat. I sat down and listened, heard it a few more times to make sure: it was a Seven Warbler Walk, I think actually my first, at least when I’ve taken the trouble to count them and write them down. I took a swig of water; an Orange Tip and a Brimstone butterfly flickered past.

DSCN0214 Roe Deer slots (with penny for scale)
Roe Deer slots (with penny for scale)

Looking about the bushes carefully, I noticed a trail of Roe Deer prints, medium and small. Their numbers have been increasing steadily, certainly since 2007, and they are close to becoming a nuisance. About 350,000 are culled each year; another 74,000 or so are killed on the roads, without limiting their growth. Clearly we need some predators, though what our farmers would say to having Lynx back, let alone Wolverines, is easy to imagine.  Where they are most numerous, woodland shrub vegetation and bird numbers are suffering.

On the way out, some Goldfinches sang near the road, and a Swallow flew overhead by the river Colne. I felt I’d had a good day, and braced myself for a tricky drive home. On a whim, I went via the airport road. It’s a bit slow but not uninteresting, and there’s a nice tunnel. Waiting at one of the sets of lights, I opened the window, and at once heard a Skylark singing its rippling song. I looked up, and there it was for a moment, a little flickering dark shape against the bright sky, pouring out its aerial music. The lights changed, and a jet growled in to land, the air whistling over its fully-extended flaps.

Fancy, a Skylark at Heathrow, seen and heard from a car, the highlight of a seven-warbler walk, Lesser Whitethroat and all.