Wednesday, August 28, 2013
I spent an absorbing half-hour this afternoon at the ponds in the grounds of Dorney Rowing Lake. The smaller pond has shrunk, leaving lots of wet mud at the end. There were at least three different species of dragonfly, one damselfly, and several kinds of hoverfly.
This segmented creature hauled itself out of the water and moved rapidly across the mud, poking its nose into all sorts of nooks and crannies. I haven't a clue what it is; I'll have to look it up. (Later: it's the larva of a soldier fly: Stratiomys longicornis. The Observer's Book of Pond Life gave me the genus, and on googling this I found photos on Wikipedia and a Czech site called biolib.cz that looked identical to my find.)
The picture below probably shows a leech, given the way the creature was moving.
Best of all was a family of reed warblers. The birds flew from the small pond to the patch of Phragmites on the main pond; they were lovely to see and also gave me a site tick.
Walking back to my car on the common along the road I only glanced over at the hedgerow where a whinchat was reported yesterday as I didn't really want to twitch. As luck would have it, the whinchat was in the rose bush near my car, next to the dried-up stream. Never one to look a gift-horse in the mouth I got a distant shot. I reclined on the ground to use my rucksack as support for the camera, thereby attracting raucous laughter from a small passing hatchback full of idiot boys and an audible rude comment from a Land Rover containing two idiot men.
Back in September 2008 I cycled down to Dorney on a similarly hot day, and digiscoped a stonechat in the very same rosebush. Since then I've scanned the bush on every visit.
A walk on the downs yesterday produced a few sightings. We stopped for lunch on the bridleway to West Ilsley, hoping for a redstart in hawthorns along the sheep field. We'd just sat down on the bank when a small grey-blue bird hurtled low over our heads from behind, just cleared the fence, and streaked away low across the field and out of sight. Greger noted rather pointed wings and a stiff wing action. I hardly noticed anything. Might have been a sparrowhawk, but equally might have been a merlin.
The weedy field behind and above us held at least two wheatears and a whinchat, but with the gallops between it was difficult to see them.
A redstart was seen briefly on Old Down and a yellow wagtail flew over as we rejoined the Ridgeway west of Scutchamer Knob. We enjoyed the walk but came home with no pictures.
// posted by Christine @ 8:54 AM 
