30 Days Wild – Day 19 – Back on the Road

On Tuesday morning I was in Manchester, not a wildlife hotspot compared to the New Forest but like many cities a great place for swifts. Area with lots of Victorian housing are especially good as there are usually lots of gaps into roof spaces where the swifts love to nest. I did not see many birds, but I did hear quite a few.

I was awoken by a singing blackbird at 03:42, then heard the distinctive screech of a ring-necked parakeet. It turned out there were several parakeets int he the nearby park. I knew they were well established in SW London but was unaware they were in Manchester. These parakeets originally come from South Asia and arrived here in the pet trade and having escaped or been let free are now doing well in urban areas, not just in the UK, but across a wide area of the world. They are very adaptable, quiet aggressive and will exploit new food sources easily, all very useful traits for survival in new environments.

I then hit the road again to make my return journey, wildlife was limited to the usual travellers sightings of fly over buzzard, red kite and just a couple of kestrel. This last species used to be regarded as the classic roadside bird, exploiting the rodents that thrived in the long grass of the verges. They seem to have declined in recent years, just as the fortunes of buzzard and red kite have been improving.

I got home in time to take a late look at the meadow………..

What’s in My Meadow Today?

Not all the tall yellow flowering plants you see in fields at this time of year are ragwort, quite often it is St.John’s-wort.

perforate St John’s-wort

There are several species of St, John’s-wort, is named because if you look very closely at the leaves against the light they have tiny, pin-prick holes through them. I have a number of plants of it growing in my meadow, where it tops out at just about the same height as the seeding grasses.

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30 Days Wild – Day 19: Too Hot for Walking

I was down to do a guided walk at Blashford in the morning, but it was so hot that two of the walkers cried off and all we managed was a short amble along the Dockens Water to Goosander hide. At least going through the trees by the river was a bit cooler and the Goosander hide was quite busy with a fair few sand martin coming into the nesting wall. There are also now hundreds of greylag and Canada geese on Ibsley Water, come to moult their flight feathers on the relative safety of the open water. Unlike ducks, geese become completely flightless for quite a while when they moult so they have to seek out somewhere safe, but also with accessible food.

On the way to the hide we saw a few bee orchid and several butterflies, including a couple of summer brood comma, my first small skipper of the year and a few marbled white. One of the participants on the walk told me that they are also known as “Half-mourning”, something I had not heard before.

marbled white on ox-eye daisy

Sometime ago I posted that we had some puss moth caterpillars, they were quite small then, but now they have grown a lot and today I was dividing them up into three groups to make it easier to keep up with feeding them. They are very fine caterpillars and get ever more so with age.

puss moth caterpillar