Hennock

As it's manking with rain today, I'm posting a couple of pictures of the local area and its wildlife.

First of all, however, a very, very manky picture of the 2w drake King Eider in North Devon - partly just to 'prove I was there', partly to show he's a far better-looking bloke than he was at the beginning of this year, bless him. At the start of the year he looked very much like this (links to Birdguides website). Now he looks like this:

Or, if you want to see something that doesn't look like it was taken through a milk bottle by a myopic woodlouse, try this lot... Anyway. That's enough about top shelf birds. On to some local info. This is the sort of countryside we're living in:



As you can see, fairly pastoral and green. At the moment we're seeing a lot of corvids (Rook, Jackdaw, Carrion Crow and Jay in order of abundance), Woodpigeon and Herring Gull. As far as the smaller stuff goes, there seem to be plenty of Blackbird and Redwing around at the moment, with the usual common garden birds like Blue, Great and Coal Tit, House Sparrow, Robin, Dunnock, blah, blah, blah... We're also getting regular Grey and Pied Wagtail around the cattle in the field below us, with occasional Meadow Pipit dropping in. I'll have to start a patch list at this rate! This is the -already famous, har har - sewage works down the road:


Which holds pretty much what you'd expect: Blackbird, Robin, Wren, Dunnock, Blue, Great and Long-tailed Tit, Bullfinch, these chaps:

...and the Yellow-browed. I spent a while at the gate yesterday watching it, making sure it wasn't a Hume's YBW (no luck, more's the pity). I suppose my next task will be to try and get some pictures. Totally failed to pick up Firecrest as well - but there must be one around here somewhere, I'm sure. New for my new site yesterday were a Kestrel and a Jay.

And just for Mark, cos I'm sure he misses them, this was outside the front door about 10 minutes ago:

(Eurasian) Nuthatch Sitta europaea - it's blurred because I was photographing at 1/40th of a second through our front door glass.

Settling in...

Finally we have a working house - the bed, freezer and washing machine all arrived safe and sound yesterday. As we've both come down with a heavy cold, we're both lurking at home most of the time. The garden bird list has increased gradually to a grand 22 species, with the addition of (Eurasian) Jay and Grey Wagtail today - still only four species visiting the feeders though - two common parids - Blue and Great T., House Sparrow and (European) Robin.

Na dragged me out for a short walk today, down the hill to the sewage works - where we duly found bird of the year for Hennock, I would imagine: a Yellow-browed Warbler. Not a bad way to christen the place really. We'll be waiting for it to turn up in the garden, as we're only a short hop up the hill for a Phyllosc...

Back to work now, I suppose...

Movin' house

Well, it's happened. Aside from delivery of a new bed (Monday) and washing machine & freezer (today, I hope!), we're in and settled. Oh, and we need a dining table & chairs and a kettle, but that's incidental... We're on the edge of Dartmoor in a 2-bed cottage (you can stay over now, should you be passing through, Mark!) with our own garden...

The celebratory welcome-to-your-new-house dinner was provided by an unfortunate Snipe I found on the road - still warm, I hasten to add. (Some of the pics below contain a wee bit of real-life guts - you have been warned!)

Nice innocuous view of the back of the bird. Note the kitchen knives ready & waiting...

Spreading the wing to view the upperwing. Knives getting closer...

...and some detail of the upperwing. Gore up next...

Overall view of the underside of the prospective dinner.

Bit of underwing action: looks pretty dark, but not Wilson's Snipe - but imagine that bombing past you in dull winter light and you might be forgiven for thinking it had darker underwings than it actually does.

A closer view of the underwing. The barring is nearly, nearly, as nice as that on Green Sandpiper.

And a bit more detail of that underwing.

Some information about ageing Common Snipe can be found in Ringing & Migration (a pdf web link here: http://blx1.bto.org/pdf/ringmigration/23_4/kaczmarek-colour.pdf). It would appear that this could be a young bird, but equally it might also be an adult which has finished moulting! As it's the first Snipe I've seen in the hand, I would be cautious about putting an age to it...

Some more pics below - Na's sister Jo, her husband Arturo and the children on their first visit to our place. Top pic is me apparently putting in some practice for future fatherhood (*cough!* *splutter!*)

Autumn days & fungi...

Hm. Been busy since the last post. Wednesday was spent on a bat-finding course; all very interesting and a quartet of nice species seen in the various roosts visited: Whiskered, Brown Long-eared, Lesser Horseshoe and Common Pipistrelle. Not a lot to say about the day, beyond the fact that it was fascinating. Future visits and future updates on bat work will follow...

Quick visit to Cambridge for some work (and good GRIEF it's boring driving up and back) - enlivened by a Red Kite en route...

Today I met Na for a wander in the woods (not a euphemism, I hasten to add). Her friend Kim accompanied. A saunter around the Bovey valley woodlands produced few interesting birds, although our first Redwing (Turdus iliacus) of the autumn were pleasant sounds: always nice to hear them tseer-ing overhead. Warm enough for some inverts to still be in flight, with a colony of mining bees a pleasant diversion for a short while. The highlight of the walk, though, was the variety of fungi on the stumps, branches and soil - well into the double figures for variety of shape and form - presuming all were different species. Some photos of them below; all mercifully unidentified! We also saw another of the leaf-type lichens, similar to that from Rifton the other day...

The lichen first: had to climb the bridge over the Bovey and cling to the relevant tree to get near enough for even this shot. If you care to scroll to the Rifton picture, you can see the difference in the shape of the spore capsules - I assume this means they're different species...

The final fungus of the day, shown first - I'm being contrary. 

A bracket fungus on a treestump...

On the trunk of said tree, these were growing...

...as were these.

Weekend news...

Not a lot happened this weekend. We took advantage of a good spell of weather to ring at Slapton again, catching a whole host of Long-tailed Tit and Goldcrest in particular. The Long-tails were particularly interesting, in that we caught over 40 of them, with a good dozen retraps, which included birds ringed in ~2003, 2004 and 2005. Not a bad lifespan for such a small and apparently fragile bird. They seem to be coping admirably with the recent run of poor springs and summers.

Sunday found Na and myself wandering around Berry Head in a stiff southwest wind, searching somewhat casually for some migrants. The weather didn't help much, but we managed a brief female Merlin, which apparently came in off the sea and headed inland rapidly.

A search of the quarry and a cup of tea at the seawatch point provided prolonged views of a pale-phase adult and a very gingery juvenile Arctic Skua harassing Kittiwake offshore - the 200 or so kitts preferring to loaf in the sunshine just offshore with the skuas lurking in the midst of the flock - every so often the skuas would decide it was time to see if someone else was ripe for hassle, and roll off the sea, raising the entire flock in the process: a fine sight in yellowish autumn sunshine.

We finished off with a tour of Brixham breakwater, to see if the winter flock of Purple Sandpiper had returned, which they have - around 10 snoozing on the old fishing pier off the end of the breakwater. Cracking little birds... No pictures today though; sorry.

Moordormouses

Some pics from this morning's training session... Insert appropriate cooing and 'aaw's wherever you wish.

Dormouse Muscardinus avellanarius. A torpid male (look, you can see his bits just above the tail tip there - heh! Rodent porn!). This chap was interesting, as he appears to be re-growing his tail. Weighed a healthy 20 grams, so should see the winter through happily. The critical weight appears to be about 11-12 grams.

Cate (with dormouse) & Na (with his house in a bag) rummaging.

One of a selection of fungi we found today - perhaps a porcelain fungus?

Not an advert, but...

Heh! Looking at the Clustrmap for to see where people might be reading this (more than I expected - a whole 86 people since whenever I got the map installed! Weird...); click the wee map lower down on the right of this page & you'll see it. . Anyway, I digress. On the map page there is usually an advert, and in case it's changed when / if you look at it, here it is:

Amazing what you can do digitally now, isn't it? Cosmetic dentistry via fibreoptic cable... Maybe they strip down the wires coming through the phoneline & use them to scour your teeth down... Beats hell out of internet dating, to my mind - far more enterprising. And is it me, or does the geezer appear to have been photoshopped into a whiter smile? Skin tones seem suspiciously different...

As if anyone really cares...

I'm off to do some bird-ringing now, so don't expect me to write anything for a while.