Oldcrest and carr

Back out to do some ringing - it seems like forever since the last session, though in fact it's only (only!) a month. My glamorous assistant cried off late on Saturday evening, so I had the site to myself - and as wife and child are living it up in Germany for a couple of days, I had the luxury of no guilty conscience at work by the end of the session...

Having only filled feeders the morning before, I had little expectation of being overrun by birds and this proved to be the case. Sure, Blue Tit and Coal Tit made up the bulk of the catch, but there was plenty to appreciate. For instance: a Song Thrush. We only catch one or two each year on site, and have as yet had no recaptures or recoveries. The site is very edge-of-range - on the fringe of the high moors - but there are always a few pairs breeding in the adjacent conifers. What will happen when the conifers are felled and replaced by (presumably) native broadleaves? That will be interesting!

Old Coal Tit. Given the text in the Helm family guide (Tits, Nuthatches and Treecreepers), this ought to be a male, with such an extensive bib. We just don't catch them in the breeding season to be able to confirm!

For the first time, a Sparrowhawk managed to stay in the net. We've had a couple of near-misses with this species in the past: a male low in the net last autumn managed to extricate himself before we could reach the net, and the year before that one left its dinner in the bottom of a net, in the shape of a freshly-plucked and trimmed Woodpigeon pullus. Yesterday, however, I turned the corner to a net and there was a male Sparrowhawk, neatly cushioned in the bottom shelf and glaring balefully up at me. I carefully disentangled him and took him back to the car to be ringed, measured and weighed - I wonder if he's the same bird as previously escaped?

Sparrowhawk. Talons safely the other side of my mitt.

The Willow Tits at the southern end of the site appear to have paired up. Both were in the net together and flew off together when weighed and released. It would be nice if they managed to breed successfully this year - last year's nest failed. The male was originally caught in October 2010, so is now a very experienced bird within his territory.

Yesterday produced a handful of experienced individuals: two Coal Tits which were originally caught in January 2011 and a Goldcrest first caught in September 2011. The latter is always somewhat impressive: that a bird which weighs in the same as a sheet of A4 paper, or a 2p piece should survive year-round on Dartmoor is somewhat admirable. The longevity record for Goldcrest in the UK is a whole 4 years, 2 months 24 days, so this one's got a while to go before he reaches the record, but he's doing well nonetheless!

With it being a quiet day, there was also opportunity to admire the lichens and mosses on the trees around the car, to seek out the tiny red stars of Hazel flowers and to relish the willow carr - such an under-appreciated habitat. There are patches of carr woodland on site which are breathtakingly rainforest-like. Walk into them and the air is redolent with the fresh damp greenness of the carr. Old fallen willow stems snake across the ground, starring out from the original tree's base with linear thickets of young poles growing vertically from them. The old stems are felted with a luxuriance of mosses and lichens, whilst the young stems remain grey and smooth. The boggy ground between the wood is a verdant carpet of plants bewildering in its complexity of form and colour so that the eye just sees green at first, but has to then pull back, refocus and concentrate to appreciate the subtle beauty. Drips and drops fall all around and everything seems to pulse with moistness: whatever you touch, wherever you step, wherever your hand lands...

Hazel flower.

Masses of elf-cups, Cladonia pyxidata (I think) reach up from old willow stems in the carr

Another Cladonia lichen, this time coniocraea amidst a mat of Hypnum mosses

Drips and drops - decomposition is rife within the carr. This seemed a better picture than the remains of the frog.

Peltigera lichens and the moss Kindbergia praelonga grow over one another on the ground.

Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain...

You could be forgiven for thinking the Atlantic had tired of sweeping the shores and decided to reclaim the land by air-drop. It's been pretty soggy here for the past month or so. Not, I'll grant you, as bad as Somerset, Dorset or further east still, but still relentlessly soggy. The skies have been grey and weepy, the ground growing increasingly squelchy, and the river Bovey has been up and down like a back-bencher in a lively parliamentary debate. We're fortunate to live a couple of house-heights above the river, so flooding is the least of our worries, but there are a few buildings in town which tread a delicate line along the river's edge and are a salutary lesson not to buy property in a flood-plain (as if the lesson were needed)!

We're quite high up the catchment and the rivers here are short and inclined to spate conditions, so flooding never lasts that long on any one occasion, but it can repeat over and over again if the weather gets it just so. Just before Christmas (doesn't that seem a long time ago?!) I had an hour of free time just before it got dark, and the Bovey was overtopping the banks - so I managed to shoot out and take some pictures. The river is bottle-necked where the west-bound road crosses just below the town centre. Once there was a ford there beside the old mill, now there's a neat little hump-backed bridge, and a flood-bank to protect the houses on the west side of the river. As it's quite an old bridge, there's a two-arch span, and this constrains the water perfectly, so it ponds back and spills over the adjacent playing field. By the time I got there the water was about welly-top depth across the end of the park - the brand new, newly-gravelled cyclepath only indicated by a forlorn sign asking cyclists to respect the pedestrians on the track. The gravel had been neatly swept off the path and deposited in a sweeping system of deposit bars to gladden the heart of a fluvial morphologist. To cap it all, there was a Cormorant fishing on the field.

Living here would make me nervous. But I wouldn't live here anyway!

The old mill - now home to the Devon Guild of Craftsmen - lives on the edge. You wonder how often it flooded in times past...

The road-bridge through town

No conflicts today...

Looking across the cycle path

Looking south, towards the bridge

Further upstream the field rises slightly, and then there is another narrow point where the A382 crosses the river - this time in a single-span bridge, but with a carefully-constructed underpass for cyclists and walkers to avoid the road-crossing. Not today, though.

Low and narrow, yes. I think I'd prefer to take my chances crossing the road.

By the time I reached my intended goal, the light was appalling, so most of the photos were on delayed timer and at half a second or more exposure time. The weir was a spectacular sight: the difference in water height between top and bottom of weir is usually a good 1.5m; today, more like half a metre. The water surged over the top of the path, submerging the entire woodland floor across the bend where the weir sits - normally a well-trodden sandy patch where dogs frolic and children play chase. In the gathering gloom it was a distinctly suspect proposition to venture in and take photographs, so I contented myself with some atmospheric pictures of 'the end of the path as we know it'. Given the exposure times, the tripod would no doubt have been so shaken around by the water that the photos would be even worse in any case!

The weir: normally a well-trodden relaxing spot

The weir itself is hiding under that bank of water just above and right of centre

The end of the line...

Redpoll redux

Way back in the mists of 2011, we ringed a shed-load of Lesser Redpolls up on the edge of the moors. Somewhere around 250 of them over the course of the autumn. OK, it's hardly the stuff to make an observatory staff quake in their boots, but for our first full season at the site, it was something pretty special. Within that mix were a couple of local retraps - all from round about the moor's edge and none of them from more than 10km away - and that seemed to be about that... Then, the following spring, we received news that one of our birds had been caught in someone's house in northern France - always an exciting moment when one of 'your' birds is traced to another country, and this autumn we've discovered that another of 'our' class of 2011 has been recaptured twice by a local ringer on the south-west side of the moor, this time a bird on a breeding territory. So we know that some of the birds we ringed that autumn most likely came from the local area, whilst some presumably originated elsewhere in Europe...

Since that autumn, we've caught rather fewer Lesser Redpolls: in fact fewer than 10 each season. None of those we caught in 2011 have been recaptured on site either, though there are generally a few Lesser Redpoll around throughout the year.

Then, a couple of weekends back, we caught half a dozen Lesser Redpolls on one day... and this:

It's big...

...it's got a socking great pale rump...

...(just like the linked blog above, you can see some wear on the tail and primary tips which help age it as a bird of the year)...

...no brown on the flanks...

....it's grey (this photo © Judith Read)...

...it's still got no brown on the flanks (this photo © Judith Read)...

...and it's got white wing-bars (this photo also © Judith Read). Note also the two visible retained juvenile greater coverts. Award yourself an extra mark if you didn't have to look the feather tract up.

'It' is, of course (roll eyes and sigh, go on) a Common Redpoll, Carduelis flammea - one of those northern birds so controversially (?) split out during some taxonomic reorganisation back in the late 90s-early 2000s. You can see most everything you ought to want to to identify this one as a Common: white wing-bars, pale rump, cold brown and grey tones overall. You can't hear it, because I haven't got the kit to record it, but rest assured it even sounded a little deeper-voiced when it called.

The description's in the post to the county recorder...

In France...

It wasn't quite the Frank Zappa experience (not work-friendly lyrics, I warn you): an altogether sedate and pleasant week in Brittany with wife and child - a combination of sunshine (mainly) and warm weather - just what we needed.

The beach and the cliffs at Kerloc'h.

The trip started well, when about 40 minutes out of Plymouth on ferry, a Minke Whale surfaced a couple of times - the closest to Devon I've ever seen one. The remainder of the crossing was rather anticlimactic though, with just a few dozen Gannets and a handful of Great Skuas to see. Having left a grey and murky England, it was a pleasure to arrive in France in bright sunshine and the journey south to Camaret-sur-Mer was accomplished with the minimum of fuss. We found our house, we unpacked, we stretched out our legs and chilled out, starting as we intended to go on.

There's nothing better than a snack found in a pile of rotting Goose Barnacles, provided you're a Turnstone...

Our days quickly developed a routine: a morning's gentle walk with Bina, giving plenty of time to do such important things as pick up gravel to drop on the plants at the edge of the path, sniff flowers, try to catch grasshoppers and watch butterflies, then a break for an hour or two back at the house whilst she slept, usually followed by an afternoon on one of the local beaches, combining some sandcastle-building, football, rockpooling, sand art and splashing in the surf, as well as a short swim for Na. Not exactly high-powered, but with sufficient interest for us all to enjoy the day properly.

The beach at Kerloc'h, at low tide. The most sticky sand I've yet come across on a beach - superb for making sandcastles!

A rather phallic slab of rock at Kerloc'h, which abuts the start of the cliffs proper.

The coastal area immediately to the west of Camaret is a nice combination of coastal heath with some interesting calcareous flushes, odd scraps of scrub and some rabbit-mown fixed-dune grassland. The general impression is of scenery combining western Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, though the flora and fauna have a flavour of the exotic: not only are Choughs all over the shop, and immensely tame to boot, but Grey Bush-crickets are ten-a-penny, even in suburban gardens, Dartford Warblers wheeze their indignation from clumps of gorse, and there are Vestal Moths lurking in the heath, Swallowtail caterpillars munching Fennel, Crested Tits purring in the cypresses...

Grey Bush-cricket

Swallowtail caterpillar

The flushes are dominated by Black Bog-rush Schoenus nigricans, with a scatter of things like Yellow-wort Blackstonia perforata, Devil's-bit Scabious Succisa pratensis (I wonder if there are also Marsh Fritillaries in season? Didn't find any larval webs, though) and Carline Thistle Carlina vulgaris, gradually merging back into heather-dominated heath full of Ling Calluna vulgaris, Bell Heather Erica ciliaris and Cornish Heath E. vagans, and three (apparently) species of gorse: Common Ulex europaeus, Western U. gallii and Dwarf U. minor.

The fixed-dune grassland also holds some nice flora: Rock Stonecrop Sedum forsterianum is widespread and no doubt there are some nice winter and spring annuals to be found, in season. Even found a couple of thalli of what looked suspiciously like Scrambled-egg lichen Fulgensia fulgens. This area is a Chough playground par excellence. A dozen or so birds seem to spend the bulk of their time around here, frequently bounding over with their sneezy-wheezy calls - so distinctive that Bina quickly learned to imitate them!

Choughs, swooping and looping around me.

A bit of Sedum forsterianum

Fulgensia fulgens, I think.

Looking west to the end of Pointe Toulinguet, across nice maritime grassland and coastal heath.

Fixed-dune grassland near Pointe Toulinguet.

The coastal heath stretches round south and east to Kerloc'h and beyond, and north to Pointe d'Spagnol. Inland is a very Cornish-looking landscape of mixed farmland and low-canopy scrubby woodland, which looks nice for birds, but is rather difficult to work effectively. Nevertheless, we found a welcome daily trickle of Chiffchaffs and Firecrests amongst the resident Robins, Blue Tits and Great Tits, along with the odd Willow Warbler, Whitethroat and Blackcap - quite home-from-home in a way!

The two small lakes we visited were rather unexciting - the more interesting-looking Etang de Kerloc'h couldn't be approached closely, and the lake at Le Fret seemed to be covered in Coot, but I'm sure both have more interest at a better time of year. Etang de Kerloc'h in particular seemed nice: lots of swampy reedbed and a nice heathland transition area on one shore. Water Rail calling in the depths of the swamp were nice, but better were the distant calls of a Black Woodpecker: first of all the landing call, which sounds somewhat akin to the squeak you can get out of blowing grass-blade between your hands, then those 'krr-krr-krr' flight calls. Always a pleasure!

Finally, the beaches... most of them were lovely, gentle sand or sand+shingle beaches, generally with water warm enough to swim with pleasure, but the stand-out beach has to be just east of Pointe de Penn Hir: not only wide, gentle and mainly sandy, the western end has a superb selection of rock-pools, tailor-made for entertaining a toddler (and her father!) for as long as is possible. The pools range from several square metres to just a couple of hand's-widths, ankle- to knee-deep and with variously sandy, stony or weedy appearance. Some are clearly ephemeral, changing size - or even existence - tide by tide, some are more reliably configured, and there are even a few perfect aquariums where small hollows have been scooped out of the rocks to be left with their own microcosms as each tide departs.

The beach at Pointe de Penn Hir.

Looking seaward from Pointe de Penn Hir

Within each there seems to be a cohort of prawns, translucent creatures with chocolate bands, stalked eyeballs and immensely long antennae, picking their way fastidiously through the sand and the seaweed with tiny pincer-like claws. They move rather deliberately across the pool until they meet something they're not keen on, at which point they curl their tails under their abdomens and pulse backwards away from the threat with little darting jerks.

One of the omnipresent cohort of prawns, delicately sifting the detritus of the last tide for tasty snacks.

A large and colourful starfish is always a good start to the rockpooling session, and persuades one's daughter that her father is not quite insane yet.

The other very mobile feature of the pools is the fish: approach a rocky or sandy pool and almost certainly you will see a flurry of movement as various blennies dart away to the shelter of rocky overhangs. Wait patiently (or for the younger, capture one and temporarily house it in a bucket of seawater) and you can see that there are a couple of species (at least) involved: one rather dark brown with an array of pale-blue spots down the body, the other mainly transparent, but with a freckling of salt-and-pepper dots down it. Unsurprisingly, the darker species tend to be found in the rockier areas and the paler ones on the sandy parts of the pools. There are also occasional shoals of small sprat-like silvery fish engaged in what look like complex courtship rituals over the sandbanks of some of the largest pools.

A blenny of one or another species. This is the darker of the two abundant ones, which seem to prefer the rockier areas.

Now you see me...

...now you don't. Almost. The paler species of blenny, showing how well it's adapted for a life on a sandy substrate!

Surrounding all this activity are the more sedate denizens of the shore: a black rippling carpet of mussels, crusted with barnacles and garnished with multicoloured periwinkles and stripy top shells all sat tight, awaiting the return of the sea, dotted here and there with the tenacious cones of limpets. Here and there lie jelly-like red blobs of Beadlet Anemones, turned in on themselves where they've been abandoned by the water, or tentatively waving a tentacle or two if still submerged - and in the more permanent rocky pools the beautiful, yet somehow faintly threatening-looking, tangles of Snakelocks Anemones gently swirl their tentacles around. We did find a couple of anemones which appeared somewhat different: one a large bright orange species with an electric-blue fringe around the base of the body (it never opened up to show us its tentacles); the other a translucent species with banded tentacles - maybe more detail if I ever get them identified.

Some rather - interesting - looking sponges (I think). Linnaeus would have loved them!

More sponges, looking somewhat like a bunch of yellow pigs trying to pretend they're not there...

Anemones, apparently, but not as I know 'em. Very fine but not a species I am familiar with.

Occasional clumps of eggs on the rocks - but whose are they, and are the pinker ones closer to laying, or to hatching?

One of my favourites - the lurid Snakelocks Anemone

The highlights of the trip, in no particular order, were probably the rockpools and rockpooling, the Choughs, and the pair of hornets which were wrestling on the edge of the road in Morgat, which we watched for a good 10 minutes - both apparently furiously intent on dispatching the other, but neither of them able to get the upper hand...

Hornets. Wrestling.

Mind that forkful...

Summer holidays mean family visits. My mother-in-law's a teacher, so long summer breaks mean she and her husband are able to come over and visit in what should be the nicest part of the year. The last couple of summers an old friend of Na's has also been visiting England to help her children learn English - and they've just been over. Typically, after a lovely hot summer the weather's been playing up a little whilst they visited and a couple of weekends back it was particularly foul: heavy overcast and steady rain: more like October than August... Naturally enough, having five small children in a small house together on a rainy day means that adults are constantly looking for something to occupy them and when Bina wandered into the kitchen ans started pulling pasta out of the cupboard and rattling it around, music came to mind (sort of)!

Various jars, packets and boxes were brought out which made a variety of sounds when shaken and all was going nicely when my nephew pointed out that there was 'a moth in that jar'. Sure enough, in a jar of red Camargue rice, a small moth was wriggling energetically across the grains. I'd not long put the rice into the jar (the plastic packets that the rice comes in aren't particularly baby-proof, but good jars are) and the previous occupant of the jar had been some very nice banana chutney made by our friends on the Isle of Man - so I knew the moth had to have come in the rice.

The moth itself, before its trip through the post

I gently encouraged it out of the jar and into a small box, where Basti and I took a good look at it. Seemed innocuous enough and also depressingly anonymous: fairly plain brown above and below, though with rather pointed wings. So, I enlisted the aid of the experts - why have 'em if you can't?! First of all, I took some photos and sent them on to the county moth recorder, who's been kind enough to identify some of my photos in the past. He wrote back saying that he'd in turn enlisted the aid of a national micro-moth expert who happens to live locally, who thought that the moth might possibly be Sitotroga cerealella, a.k.a. the Angoumois Grain Moth: but that this would be a first record for Devon and he couldn't tell for sure from the photos - could I perhaps post the moth on to be scrutinised in more detail?

I duly did and the species was duly confirmed, though the unfortunate moth had to be dissected to clinch the identification. Going back to the jar a couple of days later, I was interested to see that a few more had hatched out: in fact, no fewer than 63 dead moths were lurking in the jar, along with five apparently healthy larvae (carefully transferred to a small container of rice and posted on to the micro-moth expert, who particularly wanted to see them) and nine very lively weevils: their identity yet to be confirmed, though they might just be Rice Weevils Sitophilus oryzae! All in all a productive packet of rice, though not perhaps what I'd anticipated when I bought the stuff. All goes to show though - if I'd been quicker about cooking it, we'd never have known what was stowing away amongst it. All makes you think - and perhaps a good job we're not squeamish too!

Though the species is a grain pest (link takes you to a pdf), it's confined to warmer regions and so perhaps unlikely to become established here in the UK - perhaps fortunately: we have more than enough non-native problem species as it is!

Male genitalia of Sitotroga cerealella (© R. Heckford, 2013)

With many grateful thanks to Barry Henwood and Bob Heckford for taking on the identification of this specimen.