Although family matters have recently intervened to delay this post by several days, I did manage to keep an accurate memory of late butterfly appearances.
The last one in the garden was the 2nd October, whilst decapitating a huge dog rose, when a damaged small tortoiseshell landed briefly on my green wheelie bin.
On the 7th October, out cycling in cool, windy conditions, there was a single white flying through the Countryside Park at Newburn. Incidentally, I thought I glimpsed a willow warbler in the trees a bit afterwards on stopping for a break. Surely not? They should be out of the country by now.
Anyway, the latest contender for the Last Butterfly 2021 award was a red admiral seen flying into a tree
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| Cormorant |
on a brief visit to Dumfries on Friday 15th. This wasn't too surprising as the temperature reached 15C for most of the day.
A Naturewatch trip to Big Waters a week ago on Monday was an enjoyable change as I haven't been out with the group for a while. We were greeted by a large numbers of big black birds and noted that some of them seemed to have a green tinge to their plumage. We wondered if they were shags but closer investigations suggest all the ones I saw were cormorants, as I think the photo (right) confirms.
Birds I also saw included gadwall, teal, great-crested grebe and little grebe but I missed out on shoveler and, annoyingly, snipe. I didn't spend much time looking out for woodland birds, but did notice a couple of tree sparrows on one of the bird tables.
Also slightly annoying was that virtually all the photos I took that were any good were of wigeon. Interestingly all the males were in eclipse, apart from one fellow that still retained some of his summer markings.
This one bird I did manage to capture in a group of others, albeit in profile. Somewhat out of the ordinary was the appearance of ssssome sort of an exotic pheasant. I wondered if it was an escapee or an inhabitant of the Washington WWT site.
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| Fox and Geese |
