The Emperors Come to Town

At last a brightish day and time for some moth sex! Clive came over with his "girls" - recently hatched Emperor moths - all ready to do their thing and get pheromoning in the hope of luring in some wild males.  We tried them out in various locations around the garden, dangling them in their net and periodically trying them out in the greenhouse to warm them up and get them in the mood. They started shaking their bits and "calling", but males came there none.... Only the captive ones that Clive had also brought, and even they didn't want to mate - perhaps just as well, as the girls are their sisters! Some nice stuff in the garden meanwhile, however - orange tip females laying their eggs on hedge mustard, and various bees going about their business. Clive spotted that blue tits are nesting in the apple tree again - that had passed me by! Anyway, we left the girls to it and scooted off to Foulden Common, where we met Sue P. Fitful sunshine didn't look great for butterflies, but speckled wood and peacock (one each) showed up and then we saw a couple of very fresh-looking grizzled skippers, nectaring on milkwort, and then another two in the old car park area near the gate - never seen them there before. Great to see them, the brave vanguard of this season's flight!

Sad Wet Spring

Spare a thought for the ground-nesting birds. All this rain and cold can't be good news for eggs and tiny chicks, nor indeed for butterflies, who cannot fly in this mess and therefore cannot feed = death. Well into May now and no change. Somehow the summer migrants are struggling in - swifts over Oxborough today, the nightingale still singing at Boughton Fen (plus cuckoo there daily), sedge, reed and grasshopper warbs all busy at Lakenheath Fen yesterday evening, where also a female garganey and pair of cranes flying into the reedbed - two two-week-old chicks tucked away in there, apparently - and a very fine hobby low over the reeds... Made a very wet trip to Sculthorpe Moor last Thurs, looked Irish and emerald-like in the rain, lovely marsh harrier male sailing about and my best ever views of bullfinches, with two pairs feeding on the seed table near one of the hides. Foulden Common also looking wonderful right now, with rafts of cowslips, cuckoo, willow warbs and a garden warb in fine voice - no turtle doves yet tho :-(. And this evening a great discovery on the edge of the very wet centre: butterworts! I've never found them there before and am hopeful that the rain will at least give us a good show of orchids there next month.

Not the best pic ever taken of bullfinches, but you get the point... 

Foulden Common - can't remember the cowslips ever being this good there.

Butterworts! Just coming out, so must go back in a day or two and 

hopefully when not so gusty. Might just get it in focus...

And the Sun Shone

Finally, after days of incessant wind and rain, a decent day came along today. Warm and bright, a completely different feel from the last week or two. Not that there hadn't been anything to see. Friday 27th  brought a nightingale singing at Boughton Fen - hurrah! - back in the traditional site of the blackthorn on the corner. Also a grasshopper warb reeling away there, Cetti's on the other side of the Cut... Plus otter spraint (located by faithful hound Roger, who rolled in it) and two common terns. Cuckoo also - again, showing well. Back at Boughton again on Sun 29th, nightingale again singing and three grasshopper warbs no less. Plus a fantastic male redstart! Nice male bullfinch too. Sun - butterflies, so off this afternoon with Sue P to Cranwich for some survey work. Plenty of butts, including speckled wood, holly blue and comma, lots of orange tips and brimstones too, and a great fox. On arrival had tumbled across Breckland special moth, the oblique striped, and towards the end had a fabulous sighting of a spider wasp (Anolius viaticus) carrying its anaesthetised spider across a sandy bank!! Amazing. A balmy (ish) evening, so back to Boughton Fen for a brief blast of nightingale (same place) and two cute wheatears on the field across the lane. Then down to Stoke Ferry and the Cut-off Channel in search of more nightingales - nothing at first, although saw first whitethroat and swift of the year, and plenty of song thrushes in fine voice. Prowled around towards what's known as Stoke Ferry Common, where the habitat didn't look quite right and we were right next to a rubbish dump, when.... Off one went! A very good songster, lots of nice lead-in whistling and machine gun effects. Then suddenly a nightingale shot across in front of us into the hedge opposite. Imagined it to be a female, attracted by the singing. Oh no - it then started singing and suddenly all hell broke out, as the two males chased each other around. Great stuff, and so good to know that we have nightingales again within 15mins of the house, after last year's blank.

Pics of the day, as below: ladybirds gettin' it on; section of Methwold Warren bank; Field mouse-ear (and NOT stitchwort); speckled wood.

In the Footsteps of John Clare

The accursed showers continued yesterday, but undaunted off I went to meet Rosa at Helpston in the land of John Clare... Whilst many of the landscapes he knew and loved have been destroyed or horribly compromised by development and intensive farming, remnants do survive and there's certainly enough to get a feel for what the great man cherished and wrote about. First stop was Barnack Hills & Holes, mentioned by him and somewhere I've been wanting to see for a long time. The quarrying was largely finished here by the early 16th century, with much of the stone carted off to build cathedrals. Now it's a national nature reserve, mainly on account of its plant and butterfly interest, and bears more than a passing physical resemblance to Grime's Graves. Main target here were pasque flowers, of which we found perhaps half a dozen, albeit rather tiny and very scattered compared to, say, those at Devil's Dyke at Newmarket... Exquisite and exciting, nonetheless, and sparkling like little amethysts on the grassy slopes. Lots of cowslips too, mostly also rather stunted and modest - doubtless thanks to the soil conditions. Birds included willow warblers, blackcaps and a smart red kite wheeling over the nearby village. A great place, but slightly marred by the large amounts of dog poo everywhere - Natural England, please do something about this. Dog bins and a few signs would be a start!

From Barnack we went to Royce Wood, just on the edge of Helpston. In JC's day this was a place of grand old oaks, which were outrageously felled in the 1960s. Some of the stumps can still be seen. Today it's regenerating secondary woodland, including some good limes and a lot of hazel - might be good for nightingales in a few years (they used to be found here, apparently). For the time being there's much beauty going on with the woodland flora, great displays of bluebells and wood anemones, plus celandines and violets just about hanging on still - late for the end of April. And some very nice early purple orchids, also yellow archangel.

Final stop was Bainton Heath, a post-industrial site that is now one of the best regional localities for nightingales with lots of good scrub and adjacent gravel pits (they seem to enjoy the proximity of water). Weather conditions did not look good, however - 7.30pm and raining, with wind as well. Never good for the  fair-weather friends from the South... But amazingly, they put on a fantastic show - first one, then a second, a third... In total we probably heard six or seven individual birds, including four simultaneously, just as the wind dropped. Quadrophonic!  Certainly one of my best-ever nightingale moments, very special indeed.

The Barnacle is Back

Horrendous day weatherwise, raining all the time.... Nipped out with R late arvo and spotted the barnacle goose again (seen two weeks ago), this time with some greylags in the field next to the house. Unerringly relaxed and tame, so hard to turn it into a wild traveller from Spitzbergen! Pensthorpe, more like. Along the river were a pair of Egyptian geese, with six goslings. Now, let's see how many of those will still be alive in a week or two....

A piebald rose between some loutish thorns: the barnacle.

New and Improved Boughton Fen

Made it to Boughton Fen on Fri, and again yesterday, having spotted the new boardwalk a few days ago. Great new circular trail there now, around the perimeter and then back along the side of the Cut. Willow warbler, chiffchaff and blackcaps all in good voice, plus a Cetti's on Fri and 3 marsh harriers (1m, 2f) and 3 buzzards! Three marsh harriers again on Sat. Heard a cuckoo today, 1st of the year, distantly from the garden, and flushed a little owl from a tree along the Gadder - the closest yet to the house!

Herons Hanging On

Down to Didlington on Monday this week to count the cormorant nests as part of a nationwide BTO survey. Numbers have certainly increased since they first bred here about eight years ago, and we counted 35 nests in total, concentrated at the southern end of the island and spreading round the corner now as more nesting sites are required. No sign of any herons as we walked along the river - seeing my first speckled wood and willow warbler of the year - but from the other side of the lake we spotted four occupied heron nests in an ivy-infested tree, discreetly tucked away from the cormorants. It seems the herons have been pushed out of their former nesting trees, but this new location looks good for them for a while at least. Didlington's heronry has been mentioned in books for many years and at its peak included 60-65 nests. It was even illustrated in the Illustrated London News in 1868 - see below.

"The Heronry at Didlington Park in Norfolk"

Dwindling herons aside, Didlington was looking as fine as ever. The history of this intriguing place is worth reading - see here for a summary. Meanwhile, photographs of the hall continue to turn up, I bought this one (posted in 1909) last week for a fiver on eBay!

Went from Didlington to the goshawk watchpoint - not a peep of one, naturally, but curlews calling and at least one woodlark singing nearby and watched parachuting down from a roadside tree. Then off to Northwold Fen, a new site for me and rather confusingly at Stoke Ferry and not at Northwold. It's real fen country and Telescope-land to boot, as the flooded area is some way off from the path and not easy to cover with bins alone. Even so, we managed to pick up some shoveler, a few wigeon, teal and several oystercatchers, plus four buzzards sailing around and a large falcon high above - almost certainly a peregrine. The showstopper came, bizarrely, in the form of a sacred ibis, which flew in and started feeding at the edge of the washes. Clive even managed a pic, bravo! Apparently this bird has been seen recently at Welney. It's unringed, so anyone's guess as to provenance... Somehow appropriate though that Thoth should put in an appearance on the same day as we'd been at Didlington, Howard Carter would have had a smile on his face!

The sickle-billed god comes into land.... captured thanks to Clive Sheppard's steady hand!