These past two days, I've been spending some time at Mousehold Heath. As both visits were short and produced very few photos, I've decided to write them up together.
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| Frogspawn |
Yesterday (April 5th), it was a fairly nice day and it seemed a shame not to go out to enjoy it. So for a couple of hours around lunch, I decided to have my sandwiches beside the Vinegar Pond at Mousehold. The pond was full of frogspawn, which was now empty as a mass of tadpoles have hatched and were clumped together on top of it. Thousands of them! High above the pond in the blue sky, 3-4 buzzards were circling just below the glare of the sun, mewing loudly as they ascended ever higher. Birdsong filled my ears from the surrounding trees. Most of which being greenfinches, chiffchaffs, wrens and robins. During a short walk around the gorse and heather, fresh-looking comma butterflies and various bee species were busy enjoying the best of the warm sunshine. And, it appears I now have a knack of finding long-tailed tit nests as I found a pair delivering feathers to it within a gorse bush.
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| Tadpoles |
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| Buzzard |
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| Greenfinch |
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| Long-tailed Tit |
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| Long-tailed Tit nest |
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| Comma |
Today, I helped Will the Mousehold Heath warden with the first butterfly survey of the year. Sadly, we didn't really find any today, but we did find a comma away from the transect route (meaning we couldn't record it). The lack of butterflies was possibly because it was more overcast with a slightly cold breeze. It was just not quite warm enough for them. Even the bees seemed to find today just a little cold for their liking as we found several looking sluggish as they cling to the tops of the gorse to warm themselves up in the little sunshine that was available. So it wasn't exactly a great start to the survey season, but there is always next time.
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| Bumblebee |
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| Lesser Celandine |
Today, I helped Will the Mousehold Heath warden with the first butterfly survey of the year. Sadly, we didn't really find any today, but we did find a comma away from the transect route (meaning we couldn't record it). The lack of butterflies was possibly because it was more overcast with a slightly cold breeze. It was just not quite warm enough for them. Even the bees seemed to find today just a little cold for their liking as we found several looking sluggish as they cling to the tops of the gorse to warm themselves up in the little sunshine that was available. So it wasn't exactly a great start to the survey season, but there is always next time.
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