Better Luck at Cambois

 First of all though I've been forgetting to take photos of what has been a very frequent visitor to the garden - the early bumblebee.  I've always thought I'd do it 'sooner or later' but finally did a week ago. 

Early Bumblebee

Numbers have definitely been up this year.  I'm not sure what plant it's on, possibly marjoram, but it's attracted a few others as well, including honey bee.

Another landmark this year has been the appearance of the first butterfly on the potted buddleia in the front garden - as ever a small tortoiseshell.

Small Tortoiseshell

It nearly didn't happen though as the first flowers were already dying off in the hot, dry conditions by the time it arrived.

Meanwhile my main trip was a revisit to Cambois Beach last Tuesday, hoping to have better luck than a couple of weeks ago.  Conditions were distinctly unpromising though, as there was no sun and temperatures were down to 18C in a Northerly breeze.

Of course there were nevertheless a good number of meadow brown, notably some females settling flirtily on the paths:

Female Meadow Brown

Following the undergrowth close to the railway track, I did get lucky when a grayling flew in and landed directly in front of me.  It was even more lucky that I accidently snapped it with wings open as it flew off.

Grayling

Grayling in flight

One further sighting some moments later may or may not have been the same one.

Otherwise there were repeat sightings of a few small skippers and burnet moths, plus some other moths that my tentative identification skills suggest were common but nevertheless nice to see:

Yellow Shell

Shaded Broad Bar

Silver Y

Yesterday I made a quick visit to Chopwell East Field to see how the nature reserve is progressing.  Frankly it was a bit of a shock to see how little vegetation had survived the conditions, and notably there was very little sign of bird's foot trefoil or field vetch making progress.

So it was a similar pattern of some meadow brown, burnet moths and occasional small skipper.  Several of the bees seen were very faded, in one case unrecognisably so.  However one did catch my eye as I think this may be a white-tailed bumblebee.

White-tailed Bumblebee?

Also in good condition was the red-tailed bumblebee, offering a slightly better view of itself than is sometime the case.

Red-tailed Bumblebee

Some Hits and Some Misses - Part 1

Not for the first time, I've fallen rather behind with my nature record keeping. It's difficult keeping up with lots happening and the various distractions of the  World Cup, Wimbledon and the Tour de France.

Where to start?

Well I did do a couple of Large Heath surveys at Muckle Moss near Hadrian's Wall but the first on a windy day produced none and the second in slightly better conditions last Thursday only one definite and one suspected sighting. On the first occasion there was at least a possible sighting of the Manchester Treble Bar moth and there was a plump specimen of the oak eggar moth.

Oak Eggar Moth

It seems the season for Large Heath in the Hadrian's Wall area is pretty much over.  On the way back from the second trip, I made a bit of a detour to Bywell to see if I could find the white-letter hairstreak, only to discover that the tree where I saw it before was completely dead - presumably a victim of Dutch Elm Disease.

There was a similar disappointment a couple of days earlier when I took a bike ride to the Big Waters Reserve to see if the farmland nearby where the clouded yellow turned up was still under set-aside. It wasn't. At least on a fairly brief stay I managed to see two small skipper, a few dragonflies, a red admiral and two small tortoiseshell.

At the weekend I travelled West to link up with V&A and baby.  On the Saturday afternoon we went to Broughtonknowe Wood near Biggar, an impressive and large area of grassland.  I was quickly pleased to note a number of ringlet around. In fact there must have been over a hundred of them, considerably outnumbering meadow brown and all others.  The whites all proved to be green-veined white, a change from the mainly large whites I've been seeing at home.

Ringlet

Green-veined White

There were a couple of small skipper and a large number of burnet moths but bees were largely overshadowed by drone flies. Apart from a couple of azure damselflies, dragonflies weren't settling.

Azure Damselfly	Blotch-winged Hoverfly
Eoseristalis	Furry Dronefly

In the evening we took a walk along the old railway line near Leadhills.  The objective here was a pair of hen harriers with chicks that had been observed by V&A as recently as last Thursday.

As it happened they weren't to be seen and we speculated that they may have left the area - perhaps wisely as this is a known shooting area.

So the main birds we saw perched on posts were a very distant buzzard and a juvenile wheatear.

Buzzard

Wheatear

Oh, and I did catch a view of a grey heron enjoying a scratch.

Heron

Bordeaux Day 3

With day time temperatures scheduled to hit a maximum of 36C I was a bit cautious about my plan of heading towards the sea at Lacanau and reckoned to do about half of the approximately 120km round trip.  In the event, thanks to an early start and a good day in the saddle I managed about three-quarters of it, turning back a good way past St Helene.

It was quite a long way to the National Park I wanted to suss out and the main thing I noticed meanwhile was the abundance of some yellow flowers on the outskirts of Bordeaux.

Common Evening Primrose?

Suggestions by AI favour Common Evening Primrose, though this sighting was actually timed at 8.31 a.m. Hmmm?

Meanwhile also a sign advertised the presence of a rare mammal, the 'genet commune' in the Parc des Jalles  Apparently it's totally nocturnal so i didn't look for it.

Anyway there was an early success on reaching the Park when I came across one of the target species - a pearly heath, not a great discovery but it's as near to the UK as I've ever seen one. 

Pearly Heath

Other heaths seen were decidedly common.

After that things frankly got a bit frustrating.  I stopped at a promising looking spot a few miles South of Salaunes, where there was clearly a lot of action.  A number of brown butterflies were fluttering around and arguing with some speckled wood but they refused to settle properly.  I wondered distantly about gatekeeper but could not prove my hunch.  After a while an impressive marbled white spent a long time working the path edges but without landing at all.

So the only ones things I captured on camera were small skippers and, a bit later on, some burnet moths.

Small Skipper

? spot Burnet Moth

I think all the several skippers I saw on the day were small.

From this point on it got even more frustrating.  I notice that the photos I tried to take tended to be poorly focused just as the butterflies' behaviour got extremely skittish and now wonder if these factors were the result of the increasing heat which duly exceeded the 35C mark as promised.

Having just passed Salaunes (where there was thankfully a water pump) I noticed a number of blues zooming around but couldn't manage to get anything like a decent view.  They definitely weren't commons, having a brighter shade of upper wing and dark spots on the underwing.  I wondered about nazarine blue but I think they were smaller than that.

So I rode on thinking to stop at St Helene, seeing continued brimstone, the odd clouded yellow and occasional annoying marbled white until I could smell the sea air and eventually realised I'd overshot the turnaround point.

It was worth it though as my last stop was for another group of fast-flying blues.  After much patience, 

I finally did see one settle for several minutes.  So I managed to identify it as I sat sprawled in the roadside grass with the thing virtually between my feet!  

In the end it was nothing special or new - a short-tailed blue and my only disappointment now was that I didn't get a better shot of it.

Short-tailed Blue

So mystery solved - always assuming that they were the same as the ones at Salaunes! We will never know.

Better Late than Never

Thanks to some breaks in the otherwise depressing July weather, there have been outbursts of increased activity, particularly amongst the butterflies - at last I'm tempted to say.

For it was just five days ago that the commas made their first appearance and sightings of red admiral, large and green-veined white and small tortoiseshell became more regular.  Promising additions were fleeting appearances by holly blue and humming bird hawk moth.

Comma

Large White

Around the same time a female woodpecker appeared on the peanuts, closely followed by a male and the latter has visited daily ever since. 

Female Woodpecker

Male Woodpecker

I did the Big Butterfly Count yesterday and red admiral came out in the lead with nine sightings in fifteen minutes.

On Friday I led the Prudhoe U3A Naturewatch visit to Chopwell East Field, a recently declared nature reserve, uncertain what we might see.

In the event, it was a lot. There were dozens of meadow brown and small skipper as well as a good few ringlets, green-veined white, speckled wood, red carpet and both five and six spot burnets as well as a small copper, small tortoiseshell, red admiral and peacock. We also managed to observe all four common species of bumblebee as well as a drone fly and a bumblebee hoverfly.

Birds were less in evidence but perhaps the most surprising sighting occurred on the way back to the car park at Chopwell Woods, when a jay, normally a shy bird, casually worked its way through the trees above our heads for nearly five minutes while we took photos of it.

Jay

Bishop Middleham Quarry

After a year long covid-inspired delay, a few of us from the Naturewatch group finally managed a trip to Bishop Middleham Quarry, which is one of the highlights of the Durham magnesium limestone belt.

It was indeed a productive habitat and very easy on the eye.  The flora are probably the most outstanding, notably the helleborines and orchids, of which we saw I think four varieties.  The ones not pictured were common spotted and fragrant orchid.

Pyramidal Orchid

Dark Red Helleborine

Bee Orchid

Brown Argus

Of course a large part of my interest was the hope of seeing some less common butterflies but the conditions were rather overcast and our hopes were not high.  Fortunately we got the best of it around midday wheen a number of ringlets started to show and it wasn't too long before I saw the star of the show - my first ever brown argus in this country and it proved to be the first of several.

Distinctly small in size, I was also surprised by the amount of blue on the body.  I also found myself wondering about nomenclature as the Northern Brown Argus is supposed to occur here too. However my European Butterfly Guide talks instead of Mountain Argus but they appear to be the same thing.  As the Northern version of the northern/mountain species has a white not black upperwing spot, I'm confident it wasn't what we were seeing. Never mind the fact there are examples with black spot within a white spot!

Away from the wonderful world of terminology, further butterfly species sighted were meadow brown and small heath.  Thre was just one common blue and no appearance by (perhaps surprisingly) small copper and less surprisingly wall brown (not sunny enough) and dingy skipper.

Meadow Brown

Small Heath

Ringlet

Only two burnet moths were spotted plus one other I needed to research to discover it was a blackneck but there were surprisingly few bees.  The ones that were out were mainly carder bees and red-tailed bumblebees. 
    

Six Spot Burnet

Blackneck Moth

Red-tailed Bumblebee

It's funny how you see things again not long after you've seen them.  While helping out at the tennis club yesterday there were a couple more of the common wave moth I spotted in Cumbria.  And this morning while out for a paper there was another small bumblebee on lilac that had a red tail.  The trouble is it also had a second yellow stripe on the abdomen and I had neither camera nor mobile phone on me.  So I'll have to pass on that one.

Tuesday 18th August

Expectations are often disappointed but occasionally exceeded and sometimes you get a nice surprise.

Looking for a walk last Monday, I decided to try Whittle Dene, which is pleasant early in the summer, for butterflies.  However it was all a bit overgrown and dry and there wasn't much to see - some whites, a few peacocks and a single pair of speckled wood.  It only served to pose the question where all the speckled woods have got to this year, though I've seen a small number since.  And no meadow butterflies at all.

So on the Tuesday I decided to be more targetted and headed to the heathland area at Havannah, thinking I should easily be able to see some common blues, dingy skippers and some burnet moths plus a few others.  In fact after a single burnet it was the others that made the time worthwhile as blues and skippers were absent, leaving me without a single one this summer.

After thinking there may be no butterflies at all, I started to see some small heath and, after some foraging, three or four small copper.  The latter were particularly pleasing as I didn't see any last year when I looked and, come to think of it, I'm not too sure when I last saw a small heath either.  I was also treated to the sight of two small coppers chasing each other around crazily, presumably in some sort of mating ritual.  I hadn't seen them do that before.

Small Heath

Small Copper

The back end of the week was spent in Dumfries, where the temperature was about 6' higher.  We made a little trip out to Mossdale to walk the Paddy Line track briefly.  Unfortunately it had been rather spoiled as the Forestry Commission have put down a roughcast road on top of it and the rocks have spilled over onto the roadside vegetation.  Target was the scotch argus and there were a few about, if somewhat unsettled.  In the end we saw about six, along with a dozen more peacocks and a few red admirals. So it was one expectation achieved.  I also had an eye out for the wall butterfly and may have seen a couple but couldn't prove it.

Scotch Argus

Nothing new to report in the garden apart from a young wood pigeon but I have enjoyed watching the juvenile robin gradually acquire his red breast.  It's not quite there yet so he's more of a chaffinchy colour just now.

Young Wood Pigeon (n.b. lack of markings)

Wednesday 17th July

I did a bit of a double hit on Monday, taking advantage of a nice warm day when only a visit to the dentist was scheduled.

Cycling slowly down cycle track 14, I kept a look out for places where there might be butterflies.  At first all I encountered was a grey wagtail and a few speckled wood.  Then right at the bottom end of the Derwent just west of the confluence of the Tyne (and very near the edge of the industrial estate) I found a flower meadow.

Here the results were very similar to those encountered at Blaydon just over a week previously - plenty of meadow brown and small skippers, several burnet moths and common blues and a few ringlet. I had a suspicion that one or two of the skippers might be large skippers but the suspect I checked was a small.

On the way back I saw a female roe deer with two foals drinking at the riverside.  They had a very reddish look and at first I thought they were red deer.  Research however shows that there are no red deer in the area.

The session was nicely capped off when I got off the bike at home to see a small tortoiseshell on the wee buddleia in the front garden.  There were three more sightings later on in the day.

Small Tortoiseshell

In the evening, I decided to go to Waldridge Fell in search of purple hairstreaks, my current number one target.  I did see three seperate willow warblers and after a longish period of staring at various oak trees, of which there are many, I did on four occasions see some buitterflies circling the oak crowns.

Unfortunately they were all speckled woods!

Saturday 14th July

Last Saturday, I took a slow cycle along the banks of the Tyne from Newcastle westwards, looking for butterflies.  Interestingly, the best area was the lower meadows alongside the cycle track just before

Shaded Broad Bar

Scotswood Bridge.  Common blues, small skippers, meadow browns, ringlets and six-spot burnet moths were all to be seen in good numbers. Once again there was no small copper but I did spot the shaded borad bar moth I previously saw at Spetchells last year.

My attempts to cut down the number of jackdaws and magpies hogging the feeders in the garden have met with a degree of success.  At least I'm making it more difficult for them but unfortunately they have not been replaced by more visits from smaller birds.

Orange moth

So there hasn't been much to see apart from a couple of red admirals and the odd speckled wood.  But one
interesting occurrence was when a moth flew into the summerhouse during a coffee break a couple of days ago. I still find moths quite puzzling.  Research suggests it should be some kind of orange underwing but there are a couple of problems with that theory.  Firstly both species of orange underwing fly much earlier in the season and secondly, the wing pattern as far as you can make it out doesn't match up to the website illustrations.  So I don't really know.

Today I took a non-nature trip to Hexham and wasn't sure for what reason I decided to take a camera with me.  However, on approaching the Wentworth Cafe, I happened to notice this tree.  Following on from earlier dicussions about types of oak tree, I'm fairly confident it is a red oak.  What struck me first was the size of the leaves.  The acorns have started to fruit and look like they will be far smaller than those of other oaks.

Red Oak

Friday 5th July

I forgot to mention last time that things have deteriorated in the garden as the larger birds are now hogging the feeders and I've had to put them on half rations to at least discourage them a bit.  The only bright spot has been the appearance of a squirrel who had a good nose around the garden and the feeders before deciding to retire to a safe distance. And there was a brief red admiral on Wednesday.

Wednesday turned out nice and I was glad to make a repeat trip to Havannah Nature Reserve while my car was getting fixed, this time together with Malcolm and Arthur the Retriever.

This time the ringlets were present in force and outnumbered the speckled woods. There were a good number of meadow browns and we managed to see a dozen or so common blues and a handful of six spot burnet moths.  A noticeboard indicates that there also narrow-winged five spot burnet moths on the site but this time I checked carefully the ones we managed to catch up with and they were definitely six spot.  There was also a couple of small tortoiseshells, a few painted ladies, two small skippers and one red admiral but only a few small heath and again no small copper.  They aren't mentioned on the noticeboard so maybe aren't present, though I would find that rather surprising.  Given the presence of Malcolm's dog, few birds came near aside from a pair of bullfinches. And again the red squirrel area looked uninhabited.

Meadow Brown	Small Tortoiseshell
Common Blue	Siz Spot Burnet

We spent some time at the West end of the reserve where we found quite a number of oak trees, but reckoned that the smaller trees I had seen near the middle car park weren't oaks at all.  So I think I have a better idea where to try for the purple hairstreak. Malcolm reckoned that one of the oaks could have been a red oak, which isn't infeasible if there has been replanting as in other former mining areas.  He also identified some clusters of loganberry in a nearby hedgerow that I wouldn't have spotted at all.

Loganberries