Category: Woodland

Staghorn Sumac

The most conspicuous butterflies at the moment: fresh-looking red admirals.

Next door’s staghorn sumac might be falling to pieces as it sheds its reddening compound leaves but the birds appreciate it. A party of blue tits and great tits forage every niche on its bark and branches, while a small warbler, tagging along with them, checks out the lower branches. Starlings fly in to eat the small berries, botanically drupes.

wasp nest

In local parkland, this wasps’ nest at the foot of an oak has been raided, presumably by a badger. You can see the remaining wasps clustered on the remnants of the nest.

conker
squirrel

We’re used to seeing the grey squirrels burying acorns and collecting sweet chestnuts but this autumn they’re showing a lot of interest in conkers. Just after I’d photographed this nibbled shell, a squirrel bounded across the path with a large conker in its mouth and headed into the cover of a holly.

Dawn by Calor-gas-light

dawn
An attempt to show dawn, painted by calor-gas-light.

Monday 30/Tuesday 31 July, 1973, RSPB Loch Garten: Monday was a good night for night watch. The Moon went down behind Craigowrie, Jupiter shone over Torr Hill and Mars came up red behind the eyrie. When it became really dark at midnight there were about 5 times as many stars out as I’d see on a good night at home . . . the Milky Way a streak above the eyrie running right through the W of Cassiopeia. The Pleiades, thousand of them, blue in binoculars came up left of tree.

The dramatic dawn, blinding bright when the sun got up behind the eyrie and shone directly into the hide.

Torr Hill

lorry, Torr Hill

Thursday 9th August 1973, from my Osprey Camp, Loch Garten, sketchbook: What a wind; swaying the forest pines, bending over the birches on the moor, breaking up the bank of cloud coming up the valley. There was white water on the gullery and grey breakers on Garten when I got round. I walked on shore getting sprayed.

‘They’ll moulder away and be like other loam.’ said Edwin Muir in his poem ‘The Horses’. This lorry was mouldering away on Torr Hill.

Batman Hoverfly on Hogweed

hoverfly sketches

Batman Hoverfly, Myathropa florea, on hogweed in a clearing below Staindale Lake, Dalby Forest, North Yorks Moors. It is supposed to have a Batman logo-shaped marked on the rear of the thorax, but individuals can be variable.

The larvae of this hoverfly are ‘rat-tailed maggots’ living in wet hollows in woodland, although they’ll make use of buckets and plastic containers.

hoverfly

The Wood Wide Web

Happy birthday to Ben. And I’m glad to report that Superfast Fibre is scheduled to be rolled out to our neck of the woods in June.

High Batts

Sawfly, bee-fly and hoverfly, dame’s violet, orchid, crosswort, briar rose and goutweed, orange rust and King Alfred’s Cakes fungus, on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society field meeting at High Batts nature reserve this morning.

High Batts isn’t far from Lightwater Valley, north of Ripon. Visiting this reserve adjacent to a working quarry is normally by arrangement only but next month they’re holding an open day.

Nuthatch Nest

Nuthatch nest

We watch a pair of nuthatches feeding their chicks in a nest hole high up in a willow. They arrive with food every five or ten minutes and usually collect a faecal sack which they swoop down amongst the shrubs away from the nest to dispose of.

nuthatch

The female is noticeably lighter and more silver grey than the male which has a slate grey back. At one stage, after looking into the hole briefly, she pauses motionless on the right hand edge of the tree near the hole, facing downwards, with an item of food (perhaps a. It turns out that the male was in the nest hole and when he pops out a minute or two later with a faecal sack in his beak, she goes in.

Our friends John and Heather Gardner have been following progress on this nest watching the parent birds carefully blocking the natural cavity in the willow with beakfuls of mud. At this stage of a the process as soon as the nuthatches left the tree a blue tit would fly in the to investigate the hole. The nuthatches have seen off the competition.

Nuthatches nested in the same cavity last year but the mud barrier needed replacing after the winter.

Above the nest hole a hoof fungus projects like a canopy over a door.

Oak, red horse chestnut and wych elm seeds, Rhyhill.