Last Wednesday I took the bike to St. Mary's at Whitley Bay where a few birds have been reported, notably whitethroat and sedge warbler. Although I've seen both before I fancied reacquainting myself.
Whitethroat was no problem at all as one was singing away merrily from a tree as soon as I got to Old Hartley.
There were a lot of sedge warblers around and they could be heard virtually anywhere but unfortunately i could only get shots of more whitethroats and a couple of reed buntings.
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| Reed Bunting |
I have just started using the merlin app to identify bird song and it claimed it had heard an american duck called the Common Loon. You'd think that was an error however as the hardline twitchers would no doubt have tracked that one down.
L:ast time I mentioned not managing to capture a small nomad bee. Well this week I managed to get one in a bug box and could identify it as a Flavous Nomad Bee. Although it can be confused with Panzer's Nomad Bee - and this discussion came up last year - my inclination on the strength of photos was much in favour of the former. Unfortunately the photographic evidence has been accidentally deleted.
My recently installed bug hotel is now doing a strong trade with red mason bee guests.
Unfortunately they still keep falling into buckets of water and the last one came out so black, I at first didn't think it was a red mason at all. But as it tried back the colour slowly returned from the abdomen upwards until it finally flew away.
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| Very wet red mason bee |
Today I had another brief sighting of a patchwork leafcutter bee sizing up a large leaf and recorded my first definite speckled wood butterfly of the year. Normally I would have seen 20 + by now.
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