Wednesday 21st August

A bitty couple of weeks from a nature point of view - nothing major to report, but odd bits of interesting sightings.

Holly Blue

 Peacocks are now easy to find while there are less red admirals. Why is it you tend to see one more than the other? Travelling around there are still plenty of painted ladies to be seen, including in the garden.

The most pleasing thing at home has been a couple of brief appearances of the holly blue.  I've often wondered if the large amount of  ivy on the trees roundabout might attract them. While they weren't hanging around, the one that settled briefly could be seen to have the right underwing pattern, which just about shows up on enlarging the rather unhelpful pose I managed to capture.

The garden has also had occasional visits from a male woodpecker and one from long-tailed tits. For the first time this year that I know of, brown rat showed up and conducted an extensive search of the ground below the bird table and nearby.

There was also another example of the young magpies' favourite game, whereby one picks up an object such as a stone chip or a twig and the other one or ones chase it around for a while.

Last Monday was the only serious outing when I lead the Naturewatch group walk along the Derwent Walk towards Hamsterley, partly in the hope of more purple hairstreaks. As I suspected it would have been better to try a week or so earlier, especially as the temperature was low and the sun only briefly apparent.

Surprisingly, we did catch a glimpse of one strong suspect briefly circling the crown of the very first oak tree we saw from the viaduct at Rowland's Gill, but that was all.  Later we did get good sightings of a couple of red kites, a pensive roe dear and there was a small-leaved lime that looked quite spectacular in its decor of yellow catkins.  Really we were happy enough to have an evening out after some dire, stormy weather over the weekend.

Red Kite
(Photo by Kathy Clegg)

Tuesday 6th August

The garden has been a little more interesting over the past fortnight.

The tactic of restricting the supply of bird food does seem to be paying off slowly and the feeders have frequently been visited by  blue tits, great tits and coal tits, often with six or eight birds present at a time.  Some are even prepared to chance their luck when I am sitting on the decking about five foot away.

Peacock

A completely chance sighting was, with reasonable certainty a holly blue butterfly that passed over the garden without visiting.  The buddleia I rescued when it was blown over in early spring has survived and produced its first butterfly two days ago, a good looking peacock and there have been numerous small whites, the odd large white and two green-veined white.  Speckled wood and painted lady have appeared on occasions and a single, battered meadow brown landed on the fir hedge at one point.

The peacock was the first I have seen here since the spring but there were some when I visited Dumfries at the end of July, along with several painted ladies, small tortoiseshells and a few red admirals.  I also saw the same orange-bordered moth in the town centre I struggled to identify a couple of weeks back.

Apart from seeing a nice bullfinch cycling back from Gosforth, the last couple of weekends have been devoted to social activities, but a spontaeneous visit to Cherryburn House produced a good number of painted ladies (definitely a painted lady year!), small tortoiseshells, peacocks, meadow browns, a couple of commas and red admirals and a single small skipper, not very clearly marked.  I wished I'd taken a count and made a second submission to the Big Butterfly Count - especially as the forecast for the coming week looks distinctly bleak.