Spring Flowers along the Cotswold Way

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While taking some holiday last week, we did some of the Cotswold Way from Chipping Camden to Dowdeswell Reservoir. As well as beautiful scenery, lots of cute lambs, birds such as bramblings, redstart and a first cuckoo of the year on Cleeve Hill, one of the highlights were the carpets of spring flowers, especially celandines, violets and the first bluebells along the path. Walking was a lovely way to spend several sunny Spring days, and I’m looking forward to doing the next legs of the walk South towards Stroud over the coming weeks.

Belas Knapp

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Belas Knapp above Winchcombe makes a great walk, listening to the skylarks and visiting the Bronze Age burial mound with its excavated burial chambers. Not that I really want it as a weed in the garden, but the candy coloured flowers of Field Bindweed really are sweet. Plants loving calcareous soil included Quaking Grass and Wild Thyme growing on the long barrow itself.

Two Years of MicroEden

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So we’re celebrating two years of this blog and the garden list. The list stands just short of 600 species and is still growing fairly fast, at least in the spring & summer seasons. As a result I’m still learning plenty about the nature in my garden, which after all was the driver for doing this blog in the first place. I’m not sure how many posts I’ve written as I can’t find that statistic on the Squarespace analytics, but it is quite a lot, and I hope the visitors from UK and 61 other countries who have been to the site have found some of it interesting/useful. It’s fun to think of people in places as different as Papua New Guinea, Bhutan, Moldova, Ethiopia and El Salvador reading about the wildlife in my Gloucestershire garden.

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Plenty of Weather

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It’s a schizophrenic season. When the sun shines and the wind drops the birds are soon singing and bumble bees buzzing. A song thrush, robin, wren and greenfinches are all taking up territories, a noisy pair of Canada geese fly over most mornings and magpies are making a nest in the Beech tree. A calling little owl one still evening during the week, was new for the garden. But the rest of the time with gales, endless rain and the temperature dropping this week so we even had snow, the smaller species like tits, finches and sparrows have disappeared and the garden feeders are deathly quiet.

One excitement has been birds of prey with Sparrowhawk and Red Kite overhead, and even a passing Peregrine one day. I remember as a kid going whole years where I only saw three or four raptor species, so seeing three species on one day out of my window reflects a massive turnaround in their fortunes. I’m also lucky that my commute passes over the Cotswolds, so as well as enjoying some snowy scenes, I regularly see kites and owls along the road - this week I got great views from the car of Barn and Short-eared Owls around Hawling & Salperton.

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Alstone & Dixton Hill

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We were back exploring the Cotswold hills around Winchcombe again this weekend, this time above Alstone in some flower-rich meadows. As well as the beautiful views there was plenty of wildlife to enjoy, especially butterflies and flowers. I find the over-sized Goat’s Beard seed heads and the Woolly Thistle flower buds both pretty impressive and it was great to see so many grasshoppers and butterflies. So far I’ve only seen the odd butterfly visiting the garden, and moths are not very numerous either, but in the wilder meadows there were very many meadow browns, ringlets, marbled whites and skippers..

Alderton Hill & Dumbleton

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This weekend we enjoyed a lovely walk over Alderton Hill to Dumbleton and back. There were plenty of butterflies, including many Marbled Whites and these, easier to photograph, Large Skippers hanging out on brambles next to a field of uncut wild grass. The Ragwort flowers were covered in Red Soldier Beetles, mostly busy making baby beetles. This Robin’s Pincushion, on a wild rose in the hedge, is caused by the larvae of a small gall wasp (Diplolepis rosae), which secrete a chemical that causes the rose bud to grow abnormally. Each gall contains many larvae living in separate compartments inside the gall. Birding-wise, I was happy to see a little owl and my first spotted flycatcher this summer.

Bredon Hill & Cleeve Hill

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Thanks to some really lovely weather this weekend, I had a couple of beautiful walks up the local hills enjoying the butterflies and wild flowers. I was very happy to find Bee Orchids on Cleeve Hill and many Pyramidal Orchids on Bredon Hill. No photos, but a calling Quail at the top of Bredon Hill was also a good find.

Nature Walk at Greystones Farm

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This was my first visit of the season around the reserve at Greystones. Spring seems always a bit slow to arrive up there, but the meadows were starting to come alive. The Cow Parsley was in full bloom on the Iron Age ramparts; meanwhile orchids (Spotted, Southern Marsh and Early Marsh) were all in bloom, as were some nice patches of blue Vipers Bugloss. It was a bit windy, but even so very few butterflies and dragonflies to be seen.

Winter Bird Survey

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Last weekend saw my final survey visit for the new BTO English Winter Bird Survey. This survey covers my regular Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) km square just outside Broadway, Worcestershire. Due to the recent warm weather it was more like an early Breeding Bird Survey, with resident birds like song thrush, robin, wren, chaffinch, linnet and skylarks singing everywhere. There were some winter redwings still around and a fly-over siskin, but due to the lack of leaves I saw more of the resident birds than I often do when I visit in April. Bullfinch, marsh tit and treecreeper are some of the less common residents on this square that were showing well. Lesser-spotted Woodpeckers are easiest seen at this time of year, but one seen calling and drumming on a dead tree is a rare sighting here or in indeed most other places in UK.

I liked doing the survey on my regular square and seeing different birds there, but doing the expected 4 visits was a problem as short winter days make it hard to do the survey around other weekend activities, especially in the pre-Christmas period. As it was I only managed the two visits in December and February, but I do think this was enough to accurately survey the wintering bird population on the site.

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust Small Mammals Course

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Attended a really interesting GWT course on Small Mammals and their ecology at Greystones Farm. After some background on British small mammals, we learned how to set Longworth traps and run surveys and also recognise small mammal bones from Barn Owl pellets. On a wet day our traps looked inviting, lined with bedding hay and furnished with a variety of different foods - for vegetarian voles, omnivorous mice and carnivorous voles - but placing them for a couple of hours in the afternoon we didn’t catch anything. However, some traps lines that had been set early in the morning were more successful, and we caught 2 Common Shrews, a Bank Vole and (very exciting!) a Water Shrew that had been foraging quite far from its normal riverside habitat. The mammals were sexed, weighed and returned back, none the worse for the experience. I thoroughly recommend the course and will definitely go on some more GWT courses. It was really good to see these mammals alive and close up.

Check out GWT courses at https://www.gloucestershirewildlifetrust.co.uk/courses

Butterflies at Greystones Farm

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Back at Greystones today for a walk. Despite the windy day there were still some butterflies about in the sheltered spots. Several Commas around the brambles, Small Coppers and also some Speckled Wood butterflies. The meadows are growing back a bit after their July hay harvest haircut, allowing some flowering of Devils Bit Scabious, Silverweed and hawkbit. Four Little Egrets on the nearby gravel pit were a sign of the season.

A morning of birds

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A beautiful sunny, still and cool morning, starting to feel even a bit autumnal.  There were lots of birds around, especially in the neighbours' large birch trees at the foot of the garden.  Family groups of blue tits, great tits, goldfinches, greenfinches, blackbirds and house sparrows were more apparent than usual.  A singing willow warbler and a lesser whitethoat (new for the garden and species #313 for the microEden list) were not locals. They are migrant warblers slowly moving south & west, feeding up for the long migration to Africa as they go.  Families of swallows, house martins and swifts were overhead - the swifts will be gone any day now, heading South.  By 10.00 am the birds are almost silent - you'd never know they were there.

It seems a good time to mention the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and their Garden Birdwatch survey that collects data - weekly maximum counts - of the bird species in your garden.  You can also optionally record other wildlife like mammals, butterflies, etc.  This is great as everyone's records build up a very representative dataset of changes in bird populations in gardens across the UK.  The website it interesting.  Consider signing up - It's not too much of a commitment (https://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/gbw)

 

 

The MicroEden backyard on an August morning

The MicroEden backyard on an August morning

Leaf Miners

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I like the crazy patterns leaf miners make in the leaves. The traces are made by larvae, mostly of flies or moths, that live between the top and bottom surfaces of the leaf, eating their way around the interior in different ways until they eventually are ready to transform.  By the plant species involved and the pattern left by the larvae you can mostly identify which the species.  I've recorded mines on sugar snap peas, chard and aquilegia; also on weeds such as sow thistles, herb bennett & willowherb.  Mostly they're fairly harmless, though I'm not so happy about the damage to my chard - not that I can do much about it, if I don't want to use insecticide.