Tag Archives: Tree Pipit

Tree Pipits and Cuckoos!

Tree Pipit singing sweetly. Its perch has been well drilled by Woodpeckers.
Wide views over heath, hill, and woodland as far as the eye can see: Puttenham Common from Hillbury Hill Fort
The Tarn on Puttenham Common, a remarkably big body of water surrounded by beautiful Oak – Birch – Holly forest
An enormous coppice stool of Holly, a most surprising tree to find coppiced, beside the main forest track running north from the Tarn. It must be ancient to have grown to such a size.
A fabulous big moss, I think Atrichum
Another gorgeous big moss, surely Polytrichum

Marsh Orchids, Downy Emeralds, Beautiful Demoiselles: Yes it’s Thursley Common

Marsh Orchid
Marsh Orchid

It was a cloudless morning, perfect for a walk around Thursley Common to look for dragonflies, other insects, birds, and bog flowers too.

The bog pools were surrounded by Marsh Orchids in lovely purple bloom.

A few lizards, one with a regrowing tail, sunned themselves on the boardwalks.

Masses of Black-Tailed Skimmers chased aggressively about the pools, along with a few blue damselflies and some Black Darters. Some Large Red Damselflies warmed up on the heather, well away from the pools.

Lizard regrowing tail
Lizard regrowing tail

A Curlew called (or is it sang?) its beautiful, melancholic mating cry, flying high, slowly, and holding out its wings in a distinctive curve: something like a small heron, but with its incredible long downcurved bill, and tail feathers spread showily. It’s a rare delight, not least because Thursley is the only place Curlews breed for many miles around.

Stonechats on dead tree
Stonechats on dead tree

Stonechats sang their brief grating song from conspicuous viewpoints all over the common, sometimes in little family groups.

A Tree Pipit gave a fine display of its song flight from a tall tree.

On a lake filled with Yellow Water-Lilies at the edge of the common, gigantic Carp lurked and splashed at the surface, and Downy Emeralds chased, seeming club-tailed.

Downy Emerald
Downy Emerald (I only got this distant reflection)

A Green Tiger Beetle whirred on to the path – a very strange flight jizz,  but easily recognized once close enough.

Green Tiger Beetle
Green Tiger Beetle

Scorpion Fly
Scorpion Fly

Perhaps the most tantalizingly lovely insect of the day, however, was this Beautiful Demoiselle, shining iridescent Lapis Lazuli blue against the delicate pale green of a birch sprig.

Beautiful Demoiselle on Birch
Beautiful Demoiselle on Birch

Click Beetle, Shield Bug at Gunnersbury Triangle

lick Beetle on goose-grass
Click Beetle, Athous haemorrhoidalis, on goose grass

Coreus marginatus shield bug, distinctive horns between antennae
Coreus marginatus shield bug, distinctive horns between antennae

As well as the handsome insects, a migrating Tree Pipit called from the wood near the Picnic Meadow. These once common birds are now scarce on farmland and have disappeared from London as breeding birds, but still drop in occasionally in spring and autumn migrations, and breed on larger commons such as at Thursley.

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.

 

Thursley Common: a Special Place

Heath landscape at Thursley with birch scrub, scattered pines
Heath landscape at Thursley with birch scrub, scattered pines

Thursley Common is one of those few, special places where the quiet visitor is almost guaranteed a beautiful experience of nature, at least if busy weekends are avoided. The area of a few hundred hectares offers several habitats, all acid: pine forest; dry sandy heath with heather, gorse and birch scrub, ideal for Whitethroats and Stonechats; acid bog with sphagnum, bog-cotton, marsh orchid, round-leaved sundew; bog pools buzzing with dragonflies; open water with teal and tufted duck.

Marsh Orchid, Round-Leaved Sundew at its foot, Thursley
Marsh Orchid, Round-Leaved Sundew at its foot, Thursley Common

Dragonfly habitat: bog pools at Thursley
Dragonfly habitat: bog pools at Thursley; in the background, white of bog cotton, birch scrub and pine forest

Over the pools were half-a-dozen swallows in a loose flock, mostly flying high, keeping a wary eye out for hobbies. Two hobbies at least flew across the heath on their long grey wings, diving at speed to snatch dragonflies low over the water. A cuckoo called from the pines; another replied cuck-uck-oo from the other side; one flew hawklike across the heath, its wings remaining almost entirely below its body, an odd and very distinctive flight pattern.

Female Four-Spotted Chaser
Female Four-Spotted Chaser basking over a bog pool, Thursley

Four-Spotted Chasers have a distinctive jizz, being generally brown, flying fast, and indeed the males aggressively chase off rivals. Today there were several pairs mating in flight; unlike many other dragonflies, they do not settle to form a “wheel”, but soon separate, the female at once starting to lay eggs, darting down to the water to dab her abdomen repeatedly.

Large Red Damselfly, Pyrrhosoma nymphula
Large Red Damselfly, Pyrrhosoma nymphula male on heather at Thursley

Large Red Damselflies were hardly in evidence near the water, but were around in small numbers on the heather, or basking on the boardwalk. Nearby, a pair of Reed Buntings blundered in and out of the bushes, the male handsome with his black head and white collar, singing his slow brief song. A Goldcrest squeaked its unbelievably high notes from the tops of the pine trees. A Tree Pipit’s repetitive but slightly random riff rang out again and again from somewhere in the same trees; the species, still marked by the book as ‘abundant’ (that’s a 2 not a 1, however), ‘breeds locally’ in places like this.

Bog-Cotton, Molinia
Bog-Cotton, Molinia

It is always a pleasure, too, to see the fluffy white seed-heads of Bog-Cotton. The thin fibres are too brittle to spin, so our native ‘cotton’ remains a symbol of wild and lonely places, from the mountains of Snowdonia to the Pennines. It’s a reminder of just how extensive the heathlands of Southern England once were, Cobbett’s “rascally heaths” famously extending all the way from the Marlborough Downs to the fringes of London. His opinion, loudly voiced in his Rural Rides, was that these unimproved lands were wasted, a sign of lack of proper agriculture. The Dig for Victory! campaign in the Second World War caused many areas of marginal land to be ploughed up, including acid heaths, alkaline chalk grassland, and neutral flowery meadows: all were lost by the thousands of acres in a desperate attempt to increase Britain’s arable production. That led, of course, to the surplus production of the Common Market years, the destruction of farmland wildlife accelerated by grants to grub out hedges, while the use of pesticides of all kinds created marvellously clean crops that even that old badger of a critical farmer, Cobbett himself, would have heartily approved of. The one small problem was that the crops were so clean that there were no wild flowers to support the bees that used to pollinate the fruit trees, the clover, beans and alfalfa, the cabbages and turnips and oilseed rape, the potatoes and vegetables that feed the nation. The cereals themselves need no bees, their grass pollen blowing in the wind: but the rest of the crops are tied to a more balanced ecology. Thus I meditated, even as I enjoyed a nostalgic glimpse of Molinia, the Bog-Cotton; and so it is that delight in nature’s beauty is tinged with sadness at the mess we’re in.

Tiny yellow clubs of Bog Beacon fungus, Mitrula paludosa, in marsh
Tiny yellow clubs of Bog Beacon fungus, Mitrula paludosa, by bog pool at Thursley

I was delighted to see the small but bright yellow Bog Beacon fungus. It appears as small clubs with white stalks, and it only grows on dead vegetation in acid bogs. Its specific name ‘paludosa’ means ‘of the marsh’. A single Broad-Bodied Chaser dragonfly scooted swiftly across a small pond.

Stonechat on fencepost of training area near Thursley
Stonechat on fencepost of Hankley Common training area near Thursley

Stonechat males displayed atop gorse bushes or fence posts, or dived into the bushes for cover, appearing nearly all black from above, with a bold white flash on each wing. Several young ones perched lower down in the gorse, much browner and more streaky than their fathers. They are rather few and far between on the Common itself; more on the training ground just across the road at Hankley Common. Like Thursley Common, the land has remained wild because the army needed it for training; so the Second World War both destroyed much of the wildlife value of our farmland, and saved some places from the general destruction.