A reminder to access this Blog through the website - liddells.co.uk where you will find all the videos. They will be unlikely to play though your email, and may not even show up at all. There are some crackers this month.
Thanks to Jane E and Barbara for their suggestions for a collective noun for pond snails - ‘preponderance’ and ‘snuggle’.
1st October
Local farmer John brought 45 ewes to eat down the grass on the Top Grazing. Clare noticed two more wildflowers still in bloom that she hadn’t included last month: Field Scabious and Red Campion.
More rain has left the Big Pond within a few centimetres of being full. Water is flowing freely through the channel Clare cleared under the Alphabet Bridge.
Clare spotted a Common Puffball and an Orange Birch Bolete near the pond, and more Turkeytail fungus, this time on the trunk in front of the hide.
A badger goes through the Scrub
2nd October
A male Southern Hawker and a male Common Darter are still flying around the Big Pond and the pond level has gone up another couple of centimetres.
The trail camera shows a hare nibbling at a sapling. Hares and rabbits can damage young trees although there is often more publicity given to damage attributed to deer.
3rd October
John is interested in the varied diet of roe deer and was pleased to see a kid grazing on fungi.
Less than an hour after the kid’s browsing, a Sparrowhawk (TrogTrogBlog Chris thinks it is a juvenile), catches what looks like a Blackbird. The Sparrowhawk is mantling its prey. Mantling is hunching, crouching, or arching shoulders and spreading wings over a recent kill to conceal it from other birds and predators just as a mantle cloaks a person. In heraldry the mantling is the drapery or piece of cloth tied to the helmet above the shield in a coat of arms. In the video the sounds are coming from the captured bird. There is a ten minute gap in the footage so it is possible that the Sparrowhawk took its prey off, as Chris so vividly described, to eat it to death. A doe and kid wander through the scene of the crime and show how far their winter coats have developed. As if all the Sparrowhawk footage wasn’t striking enough, a Buzzard comes in to pick over the spoils. You can see just how much larger it is than a Sparrowhawk and it is exciting to have caught this bird on camera as well. A doe kid (who seems to end up with a feather on its nose), a hare and then a rabbit all seem to be investigating the odiferous interruption to their familiar route through the Scrub. Clare and John only saw the footage on their return on 10th October (see below) so Clare went up to see if any evidence remained. The feathers confirm the victim was indeed a Blackbird.
4th October
A stoat runs through the Scrub.
5th - 9th October
Clare and John spent a few days away visiting the RSPB reserve at Leighton Moss. Clare has had Bearded Tits, or as they are more properly called Bearded Reedlings, on her bird bucket list for some time and hoped that on her fourth visit to this reserve, she would be lucky and see them. The birds did not disappoint. Carl Linnaeus classified the birds in the genus Parus with the tits, however they were subsequently removed from this category and placed with the Parrotbills only to be recognised recently as a unique songbird with no other close relations, and placed in the monotypic family Panuridae (from the Greek panu, "exceedingly", and ουρά, "tail"). The male sports moustaches rather than a beard. Clare and John had other treats - a Great White Egret, a Bittern in flight, a Marsh Harrier hunting over and in the reeds, an otter and lots more besides. Clare decided that the time away might have been what some people call a ‘holiday’; she found the word between ‘hogwash’ and ‘holistic’ in her dictionary. Interesting concept. A selection of ‘holiday’ photography is included for Blog biodiversity.
Male Bearded Reedling on a grit tray. The birds spend the summer months feasting on insects. However, to avoid having to migrate south like the swallows and warblers, the Bearded Reedlings change their diet to reed seeds in winter. The seeds are extremely tough so the birds eat grit to make the seeds easy to digest.
10th October
The Big Pond is up to its overflow. The roadside pond is filling slowly although the shallow and deep ends have yet to join up.
A dog fox marks his territory in the Scrub.
12th October
John completed the exterior of the west wing of what he and Clare have decided to rename the Meeting Room. The new name embraces the broader use for the space that John and Clare hope will happen.
13th October
A sunny autumn day and there were several butterflies on the Michaelmas Daisies in the Meadow - a Peacock, two Commas, a Red Admiral and a Speckled Wood. The Speckled Wood proved too flighty to photograph. The flowers were also humming with bees foraging. Clare was pleased to see many honey bees adding to their stores for winter.
A large female Sparrowhawk perched briefly in an Ash tree in front of the hide before flying off. No birds were caught this time.
Clare has been waiting for the opportunity to include another crossword clue in the Blog. This time the clue was in the Guardian’s August Bank Holiday puzzle, a double-grid alphabetical crossword with no numbered lights; answers had to be filled in where they would fit. Maskarade, the setter, added a theme of given names: one of each pair of answers for a letter of the alphabet was a name, and the names beginning A-M went into one grid, and the names beginning N-Z went into the other grid. Fiendish. The clue in question is: ‘Oak’s sudden flourish mentioned by American and British Composer, Edmund, half-heartedly’ (7,5) The answer lies in the photograph (and at the end of this Blog post).
A roe doe and her kid show their gorget patches. Not all deer develop these white areas on their throat however when they do develop on an individual deer, they are most easily seen when they’re in their winter coat. ‘A gorget was originally a piece of material wrapped around a woman’s neck, during the period of time immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire. After that, it was used to describe the pieces of armour placed around the throat of a soldier, to protect them from injury during battle. Subsequently, as their effectiveness as protective amour waned, they were used as a badge to distinguish rank in the army. I’m not sure what the gorget’s functionality is on a roe deer. Unless, of course, the white patches to help with their protective camouflage, by breaking up the outline of the neck in heavy cover.’ (aboutdeer.com)
15th October
Today’s offering in Nature Writing for Every Day of the Year is all about Spindle Trees. Happily Clare had photographed the berries earlier in the week having not been wholly taken up with her house-keeping.
‘…the spindle is quite Japanese in its contortions; the boughs, with their twisted grey-green bark, seem positively to writhe, and the leaves and berries are sprinkled so sparsely that they seem to decorate rather than clothe its antiquity…the flame-coloured leaves and pink and orange berries of the spindle-wood glow like clusters of some strange exotic flower…there is something strangely unfamiliar about these berries of the spindle-wood - berries which open out into dull pink segments, like petals, and expose a bright orange centre, which is really a seed…There was a time, not so many generations ago, when even a woman who knew nothing of trees in general, and cared less, being wholly taken up with her housekeeping, would have recognised the spindle-wood at a glance. In those days when the spinning wheel flashed beside every hearth, and everything possible was made at home, the tough close-grained wood of the tree was in constant demand, and many a pair of lovers must have come to such a tree as this to choose branch and cut it, to make a spindle for the lady’s use.’
From The Peverel Papers, Flora Thompson
Today was meant to be a Green Gym day to plant trees, however it was raining substantially in the early morning so John and Clare cancelled. Then of course, the rain stopped. John and Clare decided to go up and plant some trees anyway. They planted 10 Oaks and decided on sites for more of the saplings they have waiting for the next Green Gym day in a week’s time. Clare protected the saplings with gorse, tied round the plants with Brambles.
More vulpine marking in the Scrub.
15th October
The Pit Wood camera recorded the first Fieldfares and Redwings of the winter foraging on the ground.
16th October
Clare and John saw Fieldfares flying over the Scrub and the Pit Wood.
Neighbour Chris brought his hydraulic log-splitter to Liddells and he and John worked their way through all the logs that John and Dave had brought from felling around the site. Clare indulged in one of her favourite activities, stacking the logs. Yes, she has read Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way, although she doesn’t aspire to such aesthetically pleasing log piles as the Scandinavians.
The roadside pond is filling slowly.
17th October
More Fieldfare sightings and Clare startled a Woodcock in the Scrub.
The doe with triplets spends time grooming one of the doe kids; the buck arrives, tries unsuccessfully to suckle and is subjected to a more intimate grooming.
18th - 19th October
A Tawny owl downs its prey in one and flies off; twenty minutes later it flies past the camera right to left (video not included); a minute after that the bird is on the ground again and eating something it as caught; in the early hours of the next morning it has yet again hunted successfully. The Scrub is clearly a place for small mammals. Or perhaps not, depending on whether you are an owl or a small mammal. The Barn Owl Trust has an information page about Tawny Owls. If you want to know more about their diet, click here.
21st October
Green Gym Day and the weather was on the side of planting and neighbouring farmer John had moved the sheep from the Top Grazing to the Wildflower Meadow. John and Clare were joined by six stalwart friends, one of whom brought additional trees he had grown at home, and they all set about planting 55 trees. An Apple and two Damson trees went into the Orchard, a Hazel and two Aspens were added to the Pit Wood and all the rest - Oaks, Beeches, Elm, Horse Chestnut, Willows - were planted at the east end of the Top Grazing. Each tree was given a protective circle of Gorse or Hawthorn secured round the sapling with bramble twine. Clare has devised this method after reading about how Gorse and Hawthorn scrub make perfect areas for trees to regenerate.
Walking through the Pit Wood Clare, John and Barry discovered a large area of Fly Agaric which was largely uneaten, unlike the ones in the Scrub.
The shallow and newly deep areas of the Roadside Pond have finally joined up.
After watching many hours of deer going through the Scrub, the sight of one of Texels came as a bit of a shock. Apparently it had gone awol on the trip down from the Top Grazing. It seems to have benefitted from the grazing.
22nd October
The old buck makes his way through the Pit Wood. You will see that tip of one side of his antlers has broken off.
Meanwhile in the Scrub, and much earlier than it has been seen before, the Tawny owl flies up on to a perch.
24th October
A hare and a kid browse together in the Pit Wood. Within seconds a stoat runs offstage then returns. The hare is eating apples Clare had put down in front of the camera in the hope of attracting Fieldfares and Redwings, however there are still plenty of berries on the trees for them to eat.
Later that same evening an owl is captured waiting for prey.
25th October
The Tawny Owl appears yet again in the Scrub, hunting successfully in the early hours of the morning and later in the evening.
Between the owl’s two appearances the camera captures two hares, a Jay and a high speed stoat, while in the Pit Wood a single Redwing is seen foraging in the leaf litter. Although the red under its wing is faint, the pale stripe over its eye is very clear.
30th October
Clare saw her first Goldcrest of the winter in a Hawthorn near the bee hives.
Crossword answer: Quercus rubra: Querc sounds like “quirk” = “sudden flourish” + US = “American” + RUB[b]RA = British composer Edmund.
Definition: “Oak” – the Northern Red Oak.