Some More Orchids and a Noisy Owlet

-

 We went for a wee walk yesterday afternoon to look for more wild orchids. We are within walking distance of the Waitby Greenrigg reserve so off we went. I have already posted on about 5 different sorts of wild orchid so here are a couple more.


Helleborines are a separate genus of the orchid family. There are lots of different ones and my inexpert guess is that this is a marsh helleborine.
The next orchid has the longest flower spike of all the orchids hereabouts and has a faint sweet smell. This one is the fragrant orchid.

Whilst we were looking at orchids we noticed a colourful day flying moth. There are a couple of moths with these distinctive keep away from me colours and people get them confused.


I am saying that this is the cinnabar moth and not the Burnet moth with which it is often confused.
Burnet moth below from the archives.



Diary
We have been coming across a tawny owl in the garden for the last couple of days. Tawneys seem to have favourite perches and we have become used to looking in a couple of perches that were well used in previous years. I suspect that we are seeing a different individual from last year with a different set of favourite perches. I set up a camera to cover the roof of a shed that I thought it was perching on and hey presto there was an owl.

Coincidentally we were woken up at about 0300hrs last night by a sound outside the window. It sounded like a rusty bike being wheeled down the road but I recognised it as the contact call of a tawny owlet which must have been perching on the roof of the house and demanding to be fed.  I tried to record it but the blog won't accept the clip for some reason.

 Lats nights moth trap produced over 50 moths.  Most of the moths were underwings of some sort. These moths look nondescript until they open up their wings and then the colour shows.










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Dunnock

-
Image
 When I was a boy my first bird book described "hedge sparrows" but at some time in the last 50 years this name has all but disappeared and these birds are now called dunnocks (as they are not closely related to House and Tree Sparrows) Its easy to miss a dunnock! They are little brown birds and they tend to feed on the ground and keep to the cover of vegetation if they can. The males are territorial and the birds pair up in the spring. The pair are not strictly monogamous and the female will mate with another male if she gets the chance. DNA testing reveals that a brood often has more than one father. The male dunnocks are alert to this possibility and can sometimes be seen pecking at the cloacal opening of the female in an attempt to get her to expel the sperm of the competitor. The sexes look alike and these birds are common and widespread in Britain. The males get involved in feeding young according to their breeding success so it is common to find two males and one femal...
Read more

Spring Gentian

-
Image
 We were a bit further afield this week. We spent a day in Teesdale at the Cow Green reservoir. On the banks of the reservoir grow a number of unusual flowers. The rarest (not found in any other part of Britain) is the Spring Gentian. I have seen this plant before in Alpine pastures and in the wonderful limestone pavements of the Burren in the West of Ireland, but this is the first time I have seen them Britain. The plant is pollinated by bees but ants are responsible for spreading the seeds.There were only a few gentian but there were hundreds of the little mountain pansies which do well in the same dry and chalky soil.  Diary There has been a sudden spurt of growth by the wild flowers this week. Our meadow is full of the white flowers of pignut, and the pinks of ragged robin. In our bog meadow today I disturbed a hen pheasant who tried to chase me away from her tiny striped chicks that were running about in the tall grass. We have been hearing cuckoos this week. One day arou...
Read more

White Clawed Crayfish

-
Image
 I went for a walk yesterday that took me along the Scandal Beck (a tributary of the River Eden). On the banks of the river was a stone that had obviously been used as a picnic table by an otter and the remains of his meal were strewn about. A recognisable part of the leftovers is shown below. It's clear that this claw comes from a white clawed crayfish. These animals are not common in the UK as they need the water to be rich in calcium. This requirement is fulfilled in the Eden valley by the limestone substrate. I think that the River Eden is as far North as theses animals get. I know that there are crayfish in this part of the system because for a number of years I have volunteered with the Eden Rivers Trust to survey them. It was not uncommon to find a couple of hundred animals in a 300m stretch of river. The following images give an indication of scale. In recent years the population of the native white clawed crayfish has been threatened by the arrival of the invasive signal (...
Read more