A safari across the county line

The Safari was invited to join CR and his mate, Other Dave, up on OD's patch just over the county border this morning.

It's a different world up there, totally different habitats to what we have down here.

On the way just before turning off the main road to OD's village a Swift (151) cruised alongside the car for a few moments.

We visited a variety of sites including dry flower-rich limestone grasslands 

Field of Cowslips

and peaty raised bogs with some mixed woodland some of which has been clear felled and some being flooded out by raising the water level by bunding and stopping up old drains.

And some very dry rocky areas too

We saw a plethora of wildlife including the pics below which are in no particular order

Any ideas what this might be folks?

Our first dragonfly of the year, 4-Spotted Chaser nice but not the one we really wanted which we couldn't find but might not be on the wing just yet due to the recent cold weather

Bog Hoverfly

Common Heath moth

Early Purple Orchid above and below

Forest Shieldbug

Green Veined White

Large Red Damselfly above and below

Unknown but apparently not a fungus but a fruiting body of something else

Scorpion Fly on OD's jacket

Tiny spider on limestone

We saw a Roe Deer but no Ospreys, Peregrines or Ravens.To be fair we weren't interested in the oh-so-far-away Ospreys or other birds it was more of a get down on your knees and sink into the habitat macro sort of a day. Tree Pipits (152) were singing on one of the mosses where we were looking for the White Faced Darter dragonflies.

One of the site specialities are the Slow Worms but no snakes were found.

These were under the second old tin we lifted, the first had at least 10 under it in a knot but we couldn't take a pic as we were holding the tin which was an irregular shape and couldn't be propped up against our knees.

The other is a small brightly coloured butterfly, Green Hairstreak - little jewels they are.

There's so much more to see up here as the season progresses, incredible butterflies, plenty of orchids and other wildflowers; there's two species of snakes a couple or three rare birds and more inverts than you can shake a stick at. Can't wait to go again.

Many thanks to CR for the invite and doing the driving.

Where to next? A little closer to home tomorrow we're back on the beach with a gang of youngsters - what will they find for you to enjoy?

In the meantime let us know who's too brightly coloured in your outback.

Struggled to get out on safari today

The Safari was up early with Frank, who thankfully seems a lot more chipper-dandy today, yesterday thought he wasn't  going to last the weekend poor old fella, the cheery strains of the local Chiffchaff, must be on territory chiffing and chaffing across the gardens - hope it's found/will find a mate. 

No chance of getting out other than that today but to be honest the overnight weather looked more like a migrant clear out night rather than a migrant dump night. Cloud appeared later in the day which may have brought some more birds within reach.

After Frank had had his breakfast, ancient or not there's no stopping his lust for food, we had a look in the moth trap and were very pleased to find more in there than yesterday morning's pitiful haul. Still no new species but five Hebrew Characters was a definite improvement.

Wifey left to take eh-up muvver to the shops and we pottered around in the garden for a while, sawing some wood and having a little shuffy round to see what was coming up. The path up the garden is a mass of Cowslips - best they've been.

Maybe we should have swept the bits ups before getting the camera out

Lovely to see it spring forth with lush verdantness to think it just a massive sterile concrete slab covered in geotextile this time 12 years ago.

We started a bit of weeding and were soon alerted to a raptor going over by a sudden explosion of noise from the local gulls, they'd been just about silent upto now. Looking up there were two Buzzards (Garden #26) soaring only 100 feet above Base Camp and then they did a talon locking tumble although they didn't quite lock talons. Brilliant - thanks gulls! The bins and camera were grabbed as quick as maybe from indoors but we were too late to get pictoral evidence.

Commotion and cacophony

A few minutes later there was another lesser and shorted burst of squawking when a Sparrowhawk drifted northwards.

Continuing to keep an eye and an ear open we saw our Great Tits going in and out of the House Sparrow nesting terrace - no House Sparrow has ever been near it, less likely to now as the pair that nested in the eaves of the house on the corner of the main road is nowhere to be seen this year, which begs the question will we get them on the garden list this year...maybe not which isn't good.

Over the road the Blue Tit's nest in a crack in the brickwork by the neighbours upstairs window is in use for at least the third year running which was good to see.

The garden was quiet for invertebrates despite the warm sunshine there was a cool breeze whistling through, just a few flyovers from bumble bees, n butterflies and a chunky Drone Fly, Eristalis sp, trying to maintain position in the sunniest spot.

A check of the south facing garage wall for Jumping Spiders and Solitary Bees/Wasps was a big fat negatory.

Here's a short clip of a steepish rocky decent from last Sunday's green laning adventure - best viewed full screen - not sure what YouTube is doing to us. Press escape to return here.

Where to next? Back to Patch 2 and offshore-ish winds could produce seas calm enough to spot cetaceans.

In the meantime let us know who's causing all the commotion in your outback