Yes, a shepherd in London. Mid-March is lambing time, and she was out with her Land-Rover on the wide grassy banks of the reservoirs at Wraysbury, just beyond the end of the runways at Heathrow, checking that the new lambs were healthy. The ewe looks as though she’d like a rest, unsurprisingly. The grassy banks are quite steep, and mowing them would be costly and dangerous; how enlightened of Thames Water to use sheep instead. Genuinely “green”.
Also on the walk, several Brimstone butterflies, and a couple of Peacock butterflies (presumably overwintered in a hollow tree or some such place). Near the sheep were two Buzzards and a Red Kite, on the lookout for some carrion, I won’t mention what they were hoping to find. Also about was an early Chiffchaff singing its simple song (its name, over and over), a Cetti’s Warbler, and a Song Thrush. And a flock of Goldfinches finishing up the last of last year’s seeds in a big patch of thistles, burdocks, and teasels.
After a long cold spell, it again felt like spring today, and despite the cloud I went to Wraysbury, thinking that it could be a good time for warblers.
I was greeted by a pair of Cormorants on a bleached branch beside the lake. And a moment later by the first of many Blackcaps. Warbler the first.
A little way along the path, a rapid and rich warble went on .. and on .. and on – aha! A Garden Warbler. (How to tell Garden from Blackcap? “Blackcap’s Brief.” Well, good enough for a first approximation.) Warbler the second.
I walked on a few paces, and glimpsed something small and brown in the willows. Binoculars showed an unmistakable Garden Warbler – Sylvia borin[g] – pretty much uniformly coloured, or rather, so beautifully countershaded that it looks flat in sunlight, quite the clever camouflage trick.
It started to sing – and was almost drowned out by the deafening repetitive din of a Cetti’s Warbler (roughly, Chwit-i-Pit-i-Pit! Chwit-i-Pit-i-Pit!), as usual without a glimpse of the songster. Warbler the third.
I then saw my first Banded Demoiselle, indeed my first flying damselfly or dragonfly, of the year. It’s always a lovely moment. A few bright yellow (male) Brimstone butterflies skittered about or sunbathed: perhaps the butter-coloured insect is the original “butter fly”, or perhaps the name refers to the fluttering flight of the whole group – it must make them very hard for predators like birds and dragonflies to catch them, and given how common it is to see a butterfly with holes pecked in its wings, it is easy to believe that anti-predator adaptations are highly advantageous.
Other conspicuous insects were a lot of Sawflies, looking much like tiny red wasps with black-and-yellow striped tails, and numerous large Bumblebees enjoying the purple Comfrey which is abundant beside the river.
The droning chatter of a Reed Warbler came out of another Willow beside the lake: Warbler the fourth.
From across the river, just audible but quite definite, came the Chiff-Chaff-Chiff-Chaff-Chiff-Chaff song of .. you guessed it. Warbler the fifth.
Across the bridge and onto the flat scrub, and in almost the first bush was a Whitethroat singing its short simple scratchy ditty. (Presumably female Whitethroats find it enticing. Or other males find it repellent, one or the other. Maybe both, actually.) Warbler the sixth.
I reconnoitred the wood-and-scrubby area for possible Willow Warblers (they don’t inhabit willows any more than Willow Tits do), but they don’t seem to have arrived yet. Some Song Thrushes improvised their fine, repeated melodies of many different repeated phrases.
Northward Hill, looking over oakwood, scrub, grazing marshes, and river
Well there are some things one just has to do, even if it means braving the traffic. Nightingales, once common all over the south of England, can now only be heard in a few special places, and Northward Hill is one of them. There are some others in the southeast, like Lodge Hill, and guess what, they want to build houses all over it. Better go and enjoy the birdsong while it lasts.
A very shy Wall Brown, now a mainly coastal butterfly, the first I’ve seen for years
I was greeted by the song of blackbird, chaffinch, robin, song thrush, and wren as I walked in. A few ‘whites’ – large white, orange tip, green-veined white – skittered about as I reached the attractively rough scrub of hawthorn in full May blossom, blackthorn, wild pear, wild plum, and wild cherry, topped by the occasional whitethroat singing away scratchily.
Into the woods, with a handsome old cherry orchard on the right. Some of the oaks were straight out of Lord of the Rings, splendidly gnarled, knobbly, with massive trunks and holes to hide a good few goblins in.
Nightingale country: a fine old Oak. It looks to have been pollarded at about 12 feet up some centuries ago, so it was probably cut to that height while smaller wood was coppiced all around it.
And yes, sure enough, a nightingale obliged by singing its hesitant but amazingly rich and varied song from the thick cover. A little further, another; and a cuckoo kindly sang its unmistakable song from an oak almost in front of me, then with a ‘gok’ call flew, sparrowhawk-like, from the tree, a special sight.
Down to the hide overlooking the pool in the top photo; I wasn’t expecting more than a coot and maybe a mallard, but there were breeding lapwings chasing off the crows; breeding oystercatchers, and an avocet sitting with them; and a couple of solitary little egrets, stalking and stabbing at small fish or frogs. A redshank gave its wild teuk-teuk-teuk call and flashed its wingbar briefly.
Little Egret Stalking
Overhead a few swallows flitted about, and three swifts raced over the marsh.
The Hoo Peninsula is still a wild, spacious, lonely place, even with the swelling villages. You can see the Shard and Canary Wharf in the distance (some 30 miles); the river with its cranes and giant ships is ever-present; but the North Kent Marshes are special, as is Northward Hill with its fine old woods, still unspoilt for birds. Go and see it while you can.
Some of the Ladybirds we made for the children’s nature trail
Edita with everything you need for Pond Dipping
Strangalia maculata longhorn beetle, a wasp mimic
Jersey Tiger Moth at Chiswick Park Station, very hasty photo
Jersey Tiger Moth in kitchen, later in the week – must be thousands of them all over town, presumably
Small Skipper GT small meadow
Gatekeeper GT small meadow
Hot work debrambling the Small Meadow
On a sorry note, Netty spotted a small tuft of feathers, still attached to a bit of skin. The scrap was whitish, spotted brown, like a Song Thrush’s breast, torn off by a Sparrowhawk: probably one of the pair that nested here until last year, but must now be nesting somewhere nearby. I reflected that I hadn’t heard the male Song Thrush singing for a fortnight. What a sad bit of fluff to pick up.
Stag Beetle, Lucanus cervus, just landed, wings not fully folded
I was just walking around the triangle, talking to one of the Garden Design students about its natural history, when a mouse-sized animal scurried across the top of a post that we had hammered in to form a dead-hedge above the boundary stones. In my binoculars, it was at once clear what it was, a Stag Beetle. As I pulled out my camera, it spread its wings impressively, and flew a few feet across to the woven top of the dead-hedge, folding its wings but leaving the ends still sticking out of its wing-cases for a while.
Stag Beetle, side view
So, all that work on loggeries may have paid off. Or perhaps it didn’t: behind the dead-hedge was simply a pile of brash and logs, abandoned for several years. Anyway, we’re very pleased to see a handsome adult male out in the sunshine.
Azure Damselfly recent hatch
The triangle’s first batch of Azure Damselflies, surely within a day of hatching, perched on leaves of emergent water-plants, or flew around in cop, laying eggs already. One or two Large Red Damselflies sunned themselves also.
Large Red Damselfly
P.S. A week later, on 4 June, a Lesser Stag Beetle crawled across the lawn in my garden. I guess it emerged from the dead wood stacked in odd corners for that very purpose. It’s a lot smaller than the Stag.
Lesser Stag Beetle in garden
Lesser Stag Beetle, playing dead
I picked it up to ensure I got a photo, and was rewarded with a fine display of thanatosis, shamming dead.
The first cycle of trapping at Gunnersbury Triangle has been completed, and the action has moved on to Perivale Wood. This beautiful reserve is owned by the Selborne Society, the oldest nature conservation society in the world, founded in 1885 and thus a few years older than the RSPB.
Despite its name, Perivale Wood includes pasture (for horses), damp scrub, secondary wood on disturbed land, some hedges (we saw one newly “laid”, the trunks almost cut through and fastened at an angle with beautifully-woven withies), three ponds and two streams.
Walking in, we heard a Song Thrush, and much calling and drumming of Greater Spotted Woodpecker and Green Woodpecker. From the bare Oak trees of the photo above, I briefly heard an early burst of song from a Chiffchaff, my first of the year.
Lindsey scribing the data
We met some new Vole Patrollers, including Lindsey, seen here acting as “scribe” for the all-important data, and Nicola, seen here weighing a Wood Mouse.
Nicola weighing a Wood Mouse
The team quickly sorted itself out, everyone sharing the necessary roles – fetching traps, opening them, weighing, measuring, sexing and coding the mice, recording the data, returning the mice to their exact locations, baiting the traps, and returning them to their locations. It’s not really complicated, but there is enough to do, and with over 30 traps in the different habitats around the reserve, each task has to be done many times.
Vole Patrol in Perivale Wood. In the distance, team members are fetching traps. In the centre, a trap is being opened inside the large bag,for the catch to be weighed and measured. In the foreground, a mammal is being coded before release. And behind the camera, a team member is recording events!
At quarter to seven this morning we wrapped up well against the cold, on a beautiful clear day, the crescent moon glowing in the southeastern sky, and gathered at the hut. After a welcome cup of tea, we picked up haversacks full of boxes of bait balls, a little bag of apple slices and another of maggots, and a rubbish sack. We trooped off down the reserve to inspect the traps arrayed around the wood, meadow, and pond.
Was there a mammal in here? Inspecting one of the Waterside traps
A Song Thrush sang loudly and beautifully from the Willow Carr thicket.
Bait Taken from Meadow Trap
In the anthill meadow, trap M3 showed unmistakable signs of a mammal visit spilling from the entrance.
Did we catch something by mistake?
Another of the meadow traps caused a flurry of excitement. The trapdoor was up! Had we somehow caught a mammal, despite checking that all the trapdoors were locked down? Huma carefully opened the trap in a large plastic bag to prevent escape. There was nothing inside. Probably the trap had been left with the door closed.
Making Bait Balls
Back in the hut, still with surgical gloves on, we mixed up more bait and rolled it into balls. The little boxes that protect the bait balls in the haversacks are on the table.
After the bitter cold of the New Year, down to a surprising -12C in London, suddenly spring (as it were) is back in the air, and the Daffodils are resuming their progress towards full bloom in gardens and on roadsides.
The warmth and sunshine tempted me out to Wraysbury. With the heavy rain and perhaps also the rapid changes of temperature, a large Poplar had fallen across the river, forming a minor weir.
Muntjac print
On the path, a Muntjac deer had left its tiny prints in the soft mud. Unlike a lot of other mammals, at least this one is readily identifiable from its print, the two small sharp slots of its slim feet not mistakable for anything else.
The lake, which had been full of birds as big as Swans last time I visited, was almost empty: a few Coots, some Great Crested Grebes, a Black-Headed Gull, a few roosting Cormorants, a few Tufted: and happily two of the area’s specialities, three pairs of Goosander, and nine Goldeneye (including three males).
A Kestrel hovered and dropped slowly after a small mammal in the long grass. A Redwing flickered away around a corner. A Song Thrush sang sweetly from a thicket. One or perhaps two Bullfinches gave their distinctive “Deu” call from the middle of a bush. Half-a-dozen Fieldfares chattered and skittered about from the top of one bare thornbush to another. A few Wood pigeons and Crows looked out warily.
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. The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square. Fourth Estate, 2001. Page 250.
The sun is shining … in between the showers. Mayflies are resting all over the plants near the river. May blossom makes a bright show on every hawthorn bush. Yes, it’s May down at Wraysbury Lakes. The energetic breeze gives a cool feel, but out of the wind it’s very pleasant. Enjoying the brisk airflow are at least four Common Terns over the lakes and overhead; a few Swallows; and a small number of Swifts, newly arrived in the last few days, racing down to the water surface to catch flies — not the mayflies, which are active mainly at night. The warblers which are definitely about are hard to hear for the wind in the trees, but I caught snatches of Chiffchaff, Blackcap, many Whitethroats, plenty of Garden Warbler, a Willow Warbler, three Song Thrushes and a Blackbird, not to mention Robins and Wrens. A Cormorant lumbered past, climbing with effort, its jizz very much like that of the Boeing 747s lumbering heavily into the air.
Mayfly look, but no tails. Hmm
There are some pale mayflies, with neither antennae nor the 3 tails: maybe these have broken off in the vegetation.
Beautifully iridescent green-bronze: a female Banded Demoiselle
Also new today are quantities of damselflies: there are many brilliant iridescent blue male Banded Demoiselles, with their beautifully clear green-bronze females. This one seemed definitely to be watching me attentively. Two small blue species have also emerged, Blue-Tailed Damselfly and Common Blue Damselfly.
Over the lake, a long-winged falcon swooped at speed: I wondered for a moment if I had a Cuckoo, but the moustache and white face markings showed it was a Hobby, arrived from Africa in pursuit of the Swifts, and perhaps hunting damselflies as easier prey in this place. The low number of Swifts is worrying; they have been declining for years, as building renovation removes their old nest-holes, and increased human population pressure in Africa threatens them there too.
A small Grasshopper on Comfrey
This small grasshopper, missing an antenna, is my first of the year.
Further along, the bare damp area that often has teasels is bright yellow with clumps of a yellow Brassica that has clasping leaves like wild turnip (or cultivated swede). There’s a definite cabbagey smell. A Whitethroat, caught out in the open, makes a dash for a bush.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
