A Minor Breakthrough

Things have been pretty quiet still - until yesterday.

Last week I had some time on the way back from Matfen on a bike ride, so I did a diversion via Whittle Dene Reservoir in the hope of seeing a little owl, though the few minutes I spent there meant there was little realistic chance of success.  I spent longer at Wylam to check for early run salmon at the fish pass but the river was full and the current possibly too strong for them to take it on.

Then yesterday i took advantage of the next spell of reasonable weather to follow up reported sightings of a slavonian grebe at Killingworth Lake.  As ever there was plenty of activity at the car park end where the ducks get fed and as I moved round anticlockwise I got good sightings of tufted duck (always a favourite) and goldeneye (one single male and a pair) and eventually a great-crested grebe.

Tufted Duck

Great Crested Grebe

Male and female Goldeneye

Eventually, I got to the far end of the lake where the slavonian grebe was said to be, only to be told by a twitcher that I'd missed it by about two minutes...

So I started foraging along the bankside, only to find a couple of greylag geese sailing along.

Greylag Goose

Then, on doubling back to where it had been first seen, there it was again! It seemed perfectly at ease and at times came within a few yards of the bank where we were taking repeated photos, paddling strongly and diving now and again for tiddlers.  It wasn't a first sighting as we encountered several breeding on a loch near Findhorn when I was there with V&A - but I certainly would not have expected to see one at Killingworth Lake. I was also surprised that there was only one of them and still in winter plumage.

Slavonian Grebe...

...in close-up

The above shots were taken when it got close to.  You can even see the drops of water on its back from diving.

Buoyed by success, I decided to try my luck at Clara Vale hide, where a green woodpecker had been seen a few days back.  A young lad was there already and said that though he had occasionally seen the green woodpecker, it had been an extremely quiet day with no notable sightings.

But as he was speaking, he caught a partial view of a little egret the other side of the island. Sure enough, it emerged briefly to allow a few photos before being frightened off, probably by some playing squirrels.

Little Egret

I think you can just about still see a fish in its beak.

Then it began to rain and we downed tools.

Meanwhile, there have been sightings of a white-tailed eagle at East Chevington. I ignored them at first, thinking it was probably a juvenile seeking territory and would move on quickly.  However it seems it has stayed on for at least a few days...

Where are the Nymphalidae?

It was perturbing to note, while writing up my notes on the Butterflies of Slovenia, that the carefully encouraged buddleia in the pots in the front garden have been in and past full bloom without a single sign of a small tortoiseshell (normally the first to appear), red admiral or peacock.  Entries I'm seeing on social media suggest that others are having the same experience. Since I returned from Slovenia over two weeks ago, I have literally seen two butterflies in the back garden.

In order to improve the situation and record at least some data for the Big Butterfly Count I went with Malcolm to Branton Lakes near Powburn in North Northumberland.

After a quiet start checking out some puzzling tree foliage on the East Lake, we started seeing plenty of butterflies on a circuit of West Lake, though once again no Nymphalidae.  At some points there was quite good coverage of bird's foot trefoil and I hoped in vain for common blue but we did get a number of burnet moths.

The grand tally of sightings was: Ringlet - 20, Six-spot Burnet 12, Meadow Brown 10, Green-veined White 2, Small Skipper 2.

Ringlet	Six-spot Burnet
Meadow Brown	Small Skipper

Green-veined White

Now I'd be the first to admit that I'm not the world's greatest expert in identifying burnet moths but close investigation of the photos I took (which didn't include all twelve) do suggest a separation of the uppermost marking into two spots.

Azure Damselfly

It was also interesting that the ringlets were all of a muddy brown rather than chocolate brown colour. Plus the green-veined white seemed a shade or two greener than the ones in Slovenia.

Other encounters were with several damselflies and one unidentified dragonfly. 

Interestingly again the damselflies were clearly the azure damselfly, said by one website 'not to be found' in the uplands of Northern England. 

We also encountered the blue-tailed damselfly a couple of times, but no photo.

Slightly strange half-light conditions made it difficult to see the plumage of the ducks on the lake apart from a cormorant, but in the distant trees on the East Lake we did make out two or three very white birds that looked rather too big to be seagulls. With some difficulty I managed to get enough of a photo to indicate that they were juvenile little egrets.

Juvenile Little Egret

I had heard of a heronry before but it appears there may be such a thing as an egretry! Notice the yellow legs, which fooled me for a while.

On the bee front the most noticeable event was the appearance of heavily sun-bleached buff-tailed (presumably) bumblebee and a tiny early bumblebee with a missing abdominal stripe.  Seemingly this can happen sometimes.

Early Bumblebee

Bleached Bumblebee

Back home in the garden there has been no very noteworthy action but I did get a nice view of a thrush on a rare visit.

Mistle Thrush

Spring What Spring?

The weather remains largely wet, notwithstanding the odd brighter day, and temperatures a variable.

Anyway I can report a first ever garden sighting following the confirmed appearance of a siskin.

The siskin is of course not an uncommon bird.  Up to now I have wondered whether it was due to elevation.

Actually it's more likely explained by the lack in this immediate vicinity of pine trees, which do of course occur at considerable height, is the causal factor.

I've also mentioned occasional appearances by male and female chaffinches lately, and a couple of days ago both turned up to feed off the ground.

It looks like chaffinches may now be a thing as one or other has reappeared recently.

Chaffinches

A recent visit to Boldon Flats also produced some quite nice sightings, notably a lot of wigeon

Shelduck Teal and Wigeon Heron and Wigeon Unfortunately it didn't produce any birds of prey or migrant rarities.  Just a little egret that, after showing well for a while, made itself more and more scarce.  I spent quite a lot of time grappling with camera technicalities. There have been some further signs of spring.  Last week a probable honey bee hovered around the open garage door.  At the tennis club, a toad was found crawling across court 4 to the river and I tried to rescue an early bumblebee queen, unfortunately on the point of dying.

Missed Opportunities

The last few days have been a series of near misses.

Last week I went looking for waxwings on a track near Killingworth and, for the second time this winter, found that I had arrived a day too late and the main flock and all the berries had disappeared.  So I decided to make a call at Gosforth Park where a bittern has been appearing.  

I managed to guess which hide it would be near and there were four of us waiting for it to poke its nose pout from the reeds.  Unfortunately it had decided not to do so until we had all disappeared, which one by one we duly did.  The only other noteworthy thing I saw was a little egret on the scrape

On Monday I took a trio to venue I hadn't previously heard of - Pow Hill Country Park near Derwent Water as there had been some crossbills sighted.  In fact there wasn't much doing apart from one female according to a twitcher, so I contented myself with some experimental photography of some mallards on the lake a couple of hundred yards away to compare different modes on the new camera. This was the declared winner:

Mallards

It was taken in bird mode.  The runner up in automatic mode was also perfectly acceptable, unlike the P mode which seems to over expose considerably.  I must be doing something wrong.

There was an area near the car park where woodland birds seemed to gather so I decided to check it out.  Prospects were initially dimmed by a bloke in a high vis jacket and leading two dogs plus wife, who decided to walk straight through the area I was surveying. 

When I went back a bit later something interesting happened.  Another family man turned up and starting stretching his hand out and the wee birds clearly knew he was offering bird food. Sure enough he soon had coal tits and chaffinches eating from his hand.  I know this can take place but had never seen it before.  It also became obvious that there was bird food on some of the old tree trunks in the same clearing and all the birds seemed to have little fear of people.

In terms of sightings, it was another period where my own garden produced more than my trips out.  Having not been seen for some time, both nuthatch and woodpecker turned up in the space of the couple of days.

I mentioned last time that a blue tit was feeding on the mahonia bush.  This has continued and early one morning I noticed a bird that wasn't a blue tit doing the same, though often in the depths of the bush.  I eventually caught a glimpse of a reddish head and thought it must be a redpoll.  On closer inspection though it proved to be an overwintering female blackcap, as had happened to or three years back.  I wonder if it was the same bird...

Female Blackcap

Mission Accomplished

It's a pity the weather in the middle weeks of October was so rubbish as one of my junior buddleia bushes actually produced a couple of decent sprigs during that period that could potentially have attracted a late butterfly or two.

Buddleia - the last blooms

Anyway persistent rain meant it wasn't to be.  The last butterfly I saw passed over the car park at Washington Sports Centre on 20th October.  It was brown so presumably a small tortoiseshell or comma, I couldn't tell.

One nice surprise was however a visit from a tree sparrow to the reduced offerings in the feeders.  Not a rare but nevertheless an infrequent occurrence.

Tree Sparrow

As you can maybe tell, it proved to be a bit of a poser.

After various postponements, we decided that the monsoon season was finally over at the weekend and I drove over to Alex and Vicki's for a visit to the massive reed bed on the River Tay between Port Allen and Errol.  The key target, the bearded tit, is supposed to inhabit the area but we didn't really rate the chances of success.  In particular I reckoned bearded tits might not fancy the extreme cold that can be experienced north of the Firth of Forth.  In fact it turned out to be a lovely day.  The trees were at their most colourful and bathed in sunshine.

After a fleeting encounter with a red squirrel, Vicki thought she heard some bearded tits. Then, on a pathway out through the reeds, we hit gold.  I saw one straight away but wasn't totally sure.  A twitcher turned up, himself sporting a magnificent russet beard, and soon they - the tits - were all over the place, at least a good few dozen of them.

We were snapping away busily as they mostly didn't stay in the same place for long.  And I was quite pleased that I even managed a couple of videos with my fancy new camera.

Bearded Tits

I realise there may have been some unconscious gender bias going on there as I seem to have zoomed in on the males, so here in the interests of balance are a couple of shots of the females.

Female Bearded Tit

Female Bearded Tit?

As you can see and maybe would have expected, they are clean shaven.  We did wonder though whether the second one might be a juvenile.  It was the first time I have seen bearded tits since I visited Minsmere 12 years ago.

After a most pleasant session and no sign of a marsh harrier, we gave ourselves the 'job done' sticker,  and spurning the chance to pursue a mandarin duck at Scone, we headed south for Loch Leven.

This was actually a good deal less rewarding as there wasn't too much going on in the first hide we visited and by the time we got to the second hide, the light was getting tricky so that I, at least found it tricky to see the colouration of the ducks.

In fact the best shots I got weren't of ducks at all:

Stonechat

Little Egret

The others we observed were a lot of coots, some teal, wigeon and a few goldeneye.  

I was a bit disappointed not to see any pink footed geese as there had been plenty around but days earlier and, on trying to perform alchemy on some distant greylags with the camera, I can now see that I actually captured a few whooper swans even further away.  The shot is unfortunately too blurry to publish - even on here!

Otherwise I did dryly remark that there was more wildlife on the steps going down to the trails - which you actually can't see on descending them.

The wildlife steps

Another visual did however catch my interest though.  It was a sign on the butterflies and moths present, which included a picture of a small blue.  Clearly a strong case for a revisit one summer...

There's an interesting sequel to our trip of a non-nature variety.  As we got ready to go home from Loch Leven, I wanted to check a couple of sightings on my mobile phone and discovered to my horror that I no longer had it. Vicki and Alex phoned it several times and got a ringing tone and I realised I had probably lost it somewhere on the woodland trail by the Tay earlier.

As we drove back there frantically to beat the dusk, Vicki got a call from Mr Huang, a (we think) Chinese tourist who'd picked it up and were able to meet him as he reached his airbnb in Errol.  Apparently he'd heard the alarm going off that I had set to remind me to text a friend.  

Bearded tits AND getting a phone back you lost on a woodland trail!  How much luckier can I get?

Low Force and High Force Wind

On Saturday I joined up with Jennifer and Joe who are walking the Pennine Way in stages.

We met at Middleton-in-Teesdale to do the section to High Force.  Unfortunately I 'hit the wall' at about four miles and only made it to Low Force, the easy access to High Force from the nearby hotel having closed about 15 minutes before I got there. 

High Force

We saw surprisingly little wildlife during the couple of hours or so.  We thought there was a flock of fieldfares in some trees and there were three butterflies, one of which was a red admiral and a few buff-tailed bumblebee queens.  Birdwise there was the odd lapwing and curlew plus a few pied wagtails.

One surprise though was three completely white mallards that paddled their way across the Tees below Low Force.  Apparently this almost certainly means they were escapees as mallards held domestically are often bred to lose their natural colours.

We actually saw more birds while driving around the moors from place to place: partridge, a possible cuckoo, red grouse and short-eared owl.  And many skylarks.

A buff tailed bumblebee queen finally landed in my garden the other day.  So far they hadn't settled.

Queen Buff-tailed Bumblebee

Due to poor weather I hadn't been out on the bike for a long time apart from a couple of short refresher rides.  Again not much was seen but having got stopped at the level crossing at Wylam, I took a snap of the grey heron that frequently resides there.

Heron

Anyway, on Sunday I took advantage of what had been an excellent weather forecast for a ride up the coast to Cresswell and Druridge - except that the non-stop sunshine expected never happened and I was buffeted all day by a heavy onshore breeze that made me wish I'd taken my winter gloves!

On the Blyth estuary I got a couple of nice views of shelduck and redshank on the mudflats.

Shelduck

Redshank

I've always liked shelduck.

I did a detour around the Newbiggin area in search of Sandy Bay where rarities sometimes turn up - notably a bluethroat recently- but couldn't find it and made a quick exit to escape the Easter festivities.

At Cresswell and Druridge the most notable sighting was my first bar-tailed godwits, which turned up in both locations.  The one of Cresswell has spilled some weed on itself.

Bar-tailed godwit

I had hoped for avocets, which have recently appeared at both locations but unfortunately no luck and the spoonbill at Druridge didn't show either.  

Nevertheless there was a reasonable tally of further sightings recorded including a little egret in the corner at Cresswell, sanderling, lapwing, canada and greylag geese, shoveler, teal, wigeon, lapwing and several more shelduck

Lapwing

Shoveler

Unsurprisingly no butterflies were seen.

Festive Famine

Not much to report over the Christmas period…

Having told someone I don’t see any chaffinches in my garden, one typically turned up two days later and another, a female was in the plum tree on New Year’s Day.

I spent Christmas at my son’s, where a damaged fence has been caused by a badger breaking into their garden to get at the bird food, exciting much interest from their cats. We did a short walk up Galahill where I briefly spotted a flock of bullfinches, otherwise there were several woodpigeons. 

Last Wednesday, I did a seasonal self-guided walk at Weetslade Country Park, which was quite interesting as it covers a far larger area than you see from the cycle track. We got a good view of a kestrel hovering but a visit to the bird feeder area was disappointing as the feeders were all virtually empty. You’d have thought they’d have filled them especially.

However we did get a nice view of a little egret on one of the wee ponds.

Little Egret

Later it proved there was a pair of them. There is now a nature conservation area and it is apparently possible to find otters and water voles.

The garden has continued to be a haven for tits of all four main varieties when the jackdaws aren’t around, with occasional robins, blackbirds and dunnocks.

Tits

In fact I’ve now run out of bird nuts, so quickly have they been disappearing.

Spring In the Air

 It's gradually getting a bit warmer, in spite or because of gale force storms which have made conditions rather unpredictable.  At least there has been no snow like there was last February to March.

Just over two weeks ago I took a bike ride to Matfen.  There were a couple of clusters of bullfinches working the trees but not a great deal else.

The Friday afterwards, I visited Gosforth Nature Reserve for the first time in ages.  Again the winds were approaching gale force and there was a remarkable lack of ducks and geese on the lake.  From the second hide I did manage a couple of possibly flirtatious herons and thought I saw some lapwings flying by in the distance.

In fact the main thing I saw in this area was actually well outside the reserve - a little egret that I managed to focus on several hundred yards away on the Gosforth Subsidence Pond.

Little Egret

On circumnavigating the western end of the lake there were some very dark shapes to be picked out that looked to be shovellers but it was impossible to pick out the colouration.

Just beyond that point, my attention was drawn to an area of undergrowth by some fallen trees.  I thought I could pick out the odd flash of red and I was wondering about brambling.  Eventually I got a clear view of a redwing through the binoculars.  When I tried to sneak nearer for a closer look, about forty or fifty of them went up where I would have guessed there to be about half a dozen.  It was quite pleasing though, as they were the first redwings I've seen all winter.

This Monday, there was supposed to be a Naturewatch trip to Big Waters, which was cancelled due to bad weather.  Noticing however that conditions were improving by lunchtime and that an Iceland Gull had been sighted there the day before, I decided to go along anyway.

Unfortunately the hides were locked but I was soon greeted by a flypast of a hundred or so lapwings, one or two of which showed signs of wanting to practice their mating display flight..

Most were sharing a nearby rock with some oystercatchers and every now and again, they would go up once more.

Lapwings

Further on there was another group of male and female bullfinches who might have been consorting but at the moment were more intent on demolishing a few buds.

Bullfinch

It's always tricky getting shots of them when they're foraging high in the bushes.  Ironically, another male showed up in the trees at the bottom of my garden the day after and posed beautifully - but I was upstairs at the time and didn't have the camera to hand.

 

At the West end of the pond I spent some time peering at the feeders behind the hide and picked up brief a sighting of a siskin, the first I've seen in a long time.  Unfortunately it didn't stay and didn't return.

On the lake there was a large squadron of greylags and another of canada geese, as well as a smaller group of wigeon, as on our last visit.

Wigeon

New Species Seen

Last Saturday I took a chance on the weather improving for a trip to Campfield Marsh in Cumbria with my son and fiancee in the hope of seeing a marsh fritillary.

Unfortunately the sun refused to shine but it was still a pleasant walk in a wetland environment with some different flora and fauna.

For a while I thought the only sign of butterfly or moth would be a drinker moth caterpillar but on coming to a woodland edge I noticed a moth that I later saw a few times - an aptly named common wave.

Drinker Moth Caterpillar

Common Wave

Further into the wood I saw a couple of light-coloured bumblebees I didn't recognise visiting foxgloves.  It was frustrating trying to identify them but I think from video evidence they were moss carder bees.

Moss Carder Bee

There were also a few birds around, notably a little egret, a single speckled wood butterfly and a strange growth on a tree.

Still after marsh fritillaries we dropped in for a shorter walk at Finglandrigg Wood with no more success but I did see the first definite meadow brown of the summer on one of many common spotted orchids and another bee imitator, this time a bumblebee hoverfly... if I've got it right.

Meadow Brown

Bumblebee Hoverfly

Back at home the day after I spotted to spot a patchwok leafcutter bee, no great rarity but a first for me.

Patchwork Leafcutter Bee

The jay is still  appearing from time to time but is very shy and disappears as soon as I move around in the house.

Jay

As you can see, s/he's about to disappear again.

I thought that the baby woodpecker was now feeding independently but there was a recent visit yesterday when the parent bird obliged, I think with some reluctance.

Woodpeckers

This Tuesday another butterfly target went unachieved as, in spite of reasonable weather, I couldn't see any sign of the white letter hairstreak at Bywell Bridge but there were a couple more first seasonal spottings when I saw a small skipper by the Tyne as well as three ringlets.  The latter may have been fresh on the wing and weren't settling but I have seen a couple since.

Small Skipper