Must be winter...

Third bird from the front... please come forward.

There are Black-headed Gulls with proper foreign rings on , down by the Exe. A morning of bread-chucking produced 3 adult Swedish-ringed birds: 2 of which are returning birds from last winter, a Belgian-ringed adult, frustratingly with a bit of dead plant stuck to it's ring and obscuring a number, and a bird of the year from Finland. Some grotty cut & paste-work below for a couple of the rings.

ST241875 and T86?02: Finland and Brussels, respectively. Hopefully will get some data back on them at some point. With any luck...

Other bird life knocking around the river was generally much as expected: a Kingfisher whizzed past early on, Grey Wagtails 'zizzicked' along the banks at regular intervals and a steady trickle of migrant Redwings tseeped along overhead. Bird of the day though, had to be a group of five (count 'em!) Black-tailed Godwit feeding busily in the overflow between the Exe and the ship canal, effectively in the city centre. A nice record, if you ask me!

In the time-honoured tradition of going backwards in time, some recent ringing - last weekend at my parents' house we managed to catch a couple of these streaky little beasts:

Meadow Pipit

And the weekend before that, we finished up at Slapton. Not the most prolific end to the season, but a nice female Stonechat (bird of the year - you can just make out the new greater coverts lurking under the edge of the scapulars) - and all in all, a very productive season, with numbers of most species caught showing a healthy improvement on last year.

Stonechat

And the weekend before that, we had our Polterabend. More pictures to come in the fullness of time, but a brief look into the barn from about 10 at night for you here...:

Barking, unplugged

A shameless bit of self-promotion to begin with: I've been interviewed (scary) by Nick Hand, on his journey round the UK's coast - have a look at http://www.slowcoast.co.uk for what he's up to, and follow the link through to the soundslides for yours truly... Under Slapton Bird Ringers... It's for a cracking good cause, and the photos on there are great.

So. Above and beyond some mumbling for the dictaphones, have been out and about taking some pics and generally keeping myself busy: here, in chronological order...

Scumbag ducks at Slapton. The bunch of ganky farmyard escapes at Torcross has recently been augmented by this delightful group (har har) of Rouén Mallards - great for feeding bread to - let's face it, fattening them up for Christmas on fresh bread is no bad idea - but not much cop for anything else. Sorry.

Osprey, Erme estuary. This is one of this year's birds, presumably born in Scotland. No colour-rings though to give any clue as to origin. Pity. Becoming a traditional sight on South Devon estuaries in September now; instead of getting excited about Ospreys, we seem to be agitated when we don't see them!

To my shame, I have forgotten what these are. I know they're the fruiting bodies of a seaweed, sorry, marine alga, but I don't know which one. Just as you get an autumn flush of fungi, you seem to get a marine copycat version

Snakelocks anemone growing in kelp.

Bryozoans growing on kelp.

Yacht heading up the Kingsbridge. Just nice and photogenic, really.

After a bit of low-tide learning on the Kingsbridge, it was time to do some more Dormouse training. Clearly, they've never read the books. In the wake of the very terrestrial dormouse I nearly squashed on a road in Slovakia, here's an example of the species demonsrating it's highly nocturnal habits:

We found two Dormouse nests (with three animals in 'em) in the specially-sited, designed and attended boxes placed low in their favoured habitat. After that, we cleaned out the specially designed, placed and attended boxes that have been erected for Pied Flycatchers, where we found no fewer than six (count 'em) Dormouse nests, containing at least eight Dormice... One of the nests was even built on top of a Pied Flcatcher nest, so we hope the birds got away first!

Following that, we headed off to East Sussex, where Na and Judith spent some time avoiding the Weever-fish of the south coast. Either that or swimming to France. Or doing a Reggie Perrin.


Here you can see the effects of the dangerously dehydrating Crassula helmsii, the Australian (or New Zealand) Pigmyweed, a plant so water-hungry that it leaves the entire Australian conitnent teetering on the brink of drought. The only solution is to cover it in gravel and allow deer in to nibble away the growing shoots - clearly impractical on a landmass as large as Australia. Or something.
In fact, the valley has a problem with invasive Crassula, as a result of which the scrapes have been drained and dried, to try and prevent it blanketing everything. Nasty invasive stuff.

Finally, for anyone out there who likes gulls, here's a rather odd-looking thing from Prawle on Tuesday. A Lesser Black-back with pink legs? Hybrid Great Black-back and Herring? Something rare? I don't really think I care any longer.


No flight shots; sorry.

Year of the Cett'

This is the year of the Cetti at Slapton. They first turned up in the nets back in the late 1970s, about a year before I was born, to be as precise as I wish to be. Since then the number ringed each year has described the sort of upwards trend you'd associate with a profile of - well, of somewhere fairly gentle. Not Lincolnshire - that's flatline flat - but perhaps if someone really heavy sat on the western border of Lincolnshire and the eastern side rose in sympathy, that sort of incline. Anyway, this year, it's as if the north face of the Eiger has suddenly been shunted into Lincolnshire - we've had over a hundred (count 'em!) Cetti's in the nets, over 60 of which are new birds. And there's still a good month left to the season...

Otherwise, we had the pleasant surprise of a Lesser Whitethroat in the nets last weekend, along with over a hundred Chiffchaff (no less than 99 new birds, plus a handful of recaptures from previous weekends' efforts). This season has turned into a very decent year in general, Swallow roosts aside, suggesting that we've finally had a good breeding season to repair some of the damage of the last two or three. About time...

Lesser Whitethroat

Yellow Wagtail. Not the easiest to age in the hand, this bird appears to be a first-winter male

This weekend began with some promise: a Yellow Wagtail caught in the alba wagtail roost is the first we've caught for a couple of years, but Saturday brought disastrously windy weather - we managed, somehow, to open a handful of nets on Saturday morning for the paltry return of 18 birds. The day was so quiet, we ended up photographing spiders...:


The day was rescued when the wind dropped in the evening and about 40 Swallows were ringed out of a passage of a couple of thousand; still no roost, though. Fortunately the weather was more clement this morning. We opened up at a civilised 6.15 and the catch was quite steady. Nothing spectacular until a Tawny Owl decided that night-time was for wusses and dived into one of our reedbed nets mid-morning. Spectacularly, this is only the fourth Tawny to be ringed here: the last one was in 1966! Much appreciated...

Tawny Owl. What a cracking bird in the hand, or out of it... Photo courtesy of Tim Frayling

Jynx

A quiet weekend at Slapton in many ways: the weather wasn't ideal, and the continued lack of a swallow roost meant that ringing was rather slow. However, we did hit a very nice patch when a juvenile Wryneck appeared in the scrub nets - only the fourth Wryneck ringed here since 1960, yet the second in the last 10 years! Gentle entertainment whilst it did the Wryneck party trick.



And here in action (with some - interesting - commentary! That'll learn people to keep quiet when I'm filming)...

Aside from that, an ephemeral lizard graced our tent:

Cornwall. No birds here. Move along, please.

I spent the last week in Cornwall. The most interesting bird was a caterpillar:

Yellowtail moth caterpillar.

When the sun shone, the views were nice too.

Male Beautiful Demoiselle

Beautiful...

Jurassic Coast

Some pictures from a walk along part of the Jurassic Coast, between Sidmouth and Beer (yes, there's a place in Devon called Beer. Happy now?). It's geologically spectacular, as even I can see, and I've no great interest in geology, to be honest. It's an area where you can - will - find fossils as well; we found the odd fossil shell, and a few chunks of rocks that appeared to be made up almost entirely of fossilised gastropod molluscs. There's also the ammonite pavement further to the east, of which I've blogged some photos in the past.

If you're going out there to have a look at the cliffs, CHECK THE TIDE TIMES! There's nowhere to escape along many of the beach sections if you get it wrong. Tide tables are easy enough to find, although most of the local lifeboat callouts seem to be for people taking inflatables out onto the sea... Anyway, here goes with the tour.


Down at the eastern end of the site, the cliffs are well vegetated, with a wide beach below them. Older landslips and slumps have been stable for a long time, so there's a lush coastal vegetation on it. We found a number of species with somewhat interesting names here - Ploughman's Spikenard and Purple Gromwell to name just two!

As you head westwards, the beach slims down - the rock is harder and hasn't slumped, but is eroding gradually - you can see the lines of clays (I think!) in the sandstone, and there's a line of salmon-pink rock salt that runs along with them. In a couple of places, the rock salt appears to be the only thing holding some undercut sections onto the cliff; somewhat unnerving to wander along under those!


A closer view of some of those strata. Foolishly, I didn't take any closeups of the rock salt line. The seeps here are too steep to be colonised by much vegetation, but there are a few plants clinging grimly to their niches near the top. Tenacity embodied...

A little further westward, and you're back to softer rock - the slumping is old again... In fact, if you look carefully into the centre left of the picture, there's some tufa formations lurking on the cliffs.

Here's a closer look at the tufa. Limestone deposited from the seepage, this then colonised by the mosses you can see all over it. I know it's not the best picture, but it's reasonably interesting. If you like that kind of thing...

A little further on again, and a recent landslip. This was a real biggie. The cliff here slips and slumps on a regular basis - and this isn't even one of the biggest. One in May 2008 is described as 'the biggest in 100 years', taking a 400m stretch of cliff down. Mind you, the comment about 'destroying 400m of World Heritage coastline' is a bit excessive - the coastline's still there, after all... Interestingly, there was a cracking collection of arable 'weeds' at the base of this fall, including a nice bit of Sharp-leaved Fluellen; a new plant species for both of us.

Another look at the recent slip. Looking to the top of the cliff, there are two small points of rock sticking up there...
...and between them is still strung the fence along the now-vanished section of South West Coast Path. It's probably a good thing no-one was walking it at the time. Just goes to show that warnings about keeping well back from the edge might just - just - be worth heeding. Occasionally.

Beyond this point, the cliffs revert to a more solid stone again, with an increasingly narrow shingle beach at it's foot.


Most of the erosion on this particular section of cliff comes from water washing down it, I assume, so gullies form between outcrops of Black Bog-rush Schoenus nigricans. All nicely even along the base, where the salt influence is too great for the plants.

Towards the Sidmouth end, where the beach is very narrow - and the cliffs eroding to a more stable face - it all gets a tad precipitous. You get that uncanny feeling of something like vertigo as you look up sheer and bulging cliff faces. Awesome sight, though.

Looking to Sidmouth along the dramatic red cliff section. It's much more red in reality - honest.

If you're still awake, there's plenty more out there. Try Wikipedia for a start...

Three foot bird

On Sunday, whilst pootling around (actually cleaning, but there you go...) in the house, I was rudely brought to my senses by a series of cries of horror from the garden. On investigation, the source of the catastrophe was not, in fact, my affianced having her leg raped by the neighbour's dog, nor the discovery of a particularly large spider on her clothing; it was, in fact, a three foot Blue Tit. Lest you think that the countryside of deepest Devon is infested with giant birds, I hasten to add that it was, in fact, even more exciting - a bird with three feet... As can be seen below:

Immature Blue Tit with three legs. The inner right leg - for want of a better description - is wasted and effectively dead tissue. Doesn't seem to hamper it, though presumably it won't live all that long.

In a more traditional, yet far less exciting manner, here are some more random photos of recent sightings during work (mainly in north and west Devon these past couple of weeks):

Some species of caterpillar - yet again. Currently awaits identification, like a whole swathe of similar pictures from the summer. Perhaps I'll have more time to ID them come the winter. Or perhaps not...!

Comma.

Reed Warbler. A bird of the year at Slapton

Emperor moth caterpillar. Woodbury Common. The first of these monster caterpillars that I've found, mainly for want of searching, I suppose.

Male Keeled Skimmer. Woodbury Common.

Nightjar pullus. One of a brood ringed recently near Exeter and re-found on a repeat nest record visit. Hopefully winging it's way off towards Africa now... They are absolutely corking birds!

White hart in the making. This animal was distinctly interesting. A brief sighting one day on a soggy mid-Devon moorland was exciting enough; I've never seen a wild 'white hart', even if this is only a youngster and perhaps the wrong sex! The following day I bumped into it again, almost literally, when it showed itself in the middle of a patch of mire. Some careful stalking was entirely pointless, as it's eyesight appears to be very poor, and I ws able to walk almost to touching distance before deciding enough was enough...