Aug 18th RSPB Titchwell

Snail enjoying the wet weather!

What a horrible day! I wish I had called the trip to Titchwell off, as it was relentlessly raining all the while Mum, my brother and I were here today. It really was miserable weather and we ended up getting soaked to the bone (especially me). At least the slugs and snails were happy. They love wet conditions like this as it suits their slimy bodies which is sensitive to heat and they were moving a lot smoother than usual. Everywhere you look, there was a snail or a slug. It was almost hard not to step on one by accident. They really are alien looking when you stop and study them up close and are rarther fascinating creatures, well worth sparing their lives by stepping over them.

Slug

Bearded Tit

Though the snails are entertaining in their own little way, it was the birds I have come to see. Out on the pools, there were plenty of waders, especially dunlins, ruffs and avocets. We also spot ringed plovers, grey plovers, redshanks, oystercatchers, black-tailed godwits, teal, little egrets, common terns, shelducks, pied wagtails and greylag geese. From one hide, we were lucky to watch two juvenile bearded tits poping in and out the bottom of a reedbed, as if playing peek-a-boo with the waders and teal feeding in front of them. 

Curlew

Black-tailed Godwit

Ruff

Avocet

Ruff

Common Tern

Juvenile Pied Wagtail

Grey Plover

Dunlin

A murky sea view from the beach

With the rain still pouring, my companions soon had enough and left me to walk to the beach alone. I found some linnets and reed buntings in the bushes close to the dunes and sanderlings on the beach. I was the only person up this end of the reserve that I can tell and with one look out to sea, I can understand why. It was a murky horizon and soon the rain was getting to me too. My clothes were soaked through, even my waterproof stuff was getting rarther soggy. Good job I had spare trousers and socks to change into! We were all glad to be back in the dry of the car as we made our the journey home. A good day for snails and waders, but not for us!

Female Reed Bunting

Juvenile Sanderling

Ringed Plover

Little Egret

Aug 15th Mousehold Heath

Pine Hawkmoth

Its moth night again at Mousehold Heath. It wasn't the warmest night for it, but we had a few interesting things turn up in the trap for the small group that has turned up tonight. There wasn't as many moths bumping into us as the last session, but we did get our first hawkmoth at Mousehold of the year tumbling into Will's trap. It was a pine hawkmoth and even though it was faded in colour (meaning it was an old moth close to the end of its life), it was still a crowd pleaser. We also caught tonight...

Pebble Hook-tip

Setaceous Hebrew Character

Lesser Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing

Black Arches

Black Arches

Copper Underwing

Nut Tree Tussock

Canary Thorn (a favourite among us Norwich City fans)

Willow Beauty (outside my flat when I got back)

 As well as moths, a distant female tawny owl was calling away. 'Ke-wick! Ke-wick!' To attract her attention and to get her to fly over to us, I have a trick up my sleeve. I can imitate a hooting male quite well by whistling. It has worked in the past with success and it was working again tonight. The female's calls were getting closer. She was in a nearby tree somewhere. It was now a game of Blind Man's Bluff as we fumbled in the dark with torches searching for the owl using her calls to guide us to her location. I managed to find her in a tall tree before she took off with an intense chorus of 'ke-wick ke-wick ke-wick ke-wick!' She was gone, but we could still hear her from the other side of the site across the road.

How To Draw: Bats

After a great time bat watching on Wednesday night, I couldn't resist drawing them for this week's How To Draw. As the only mammal to fly, bats are amazing to watch, but their wings can make them tricky to draw. Unlike bird wings, bat wings are featherless and are instead made of a thin membrane of skin covering a frame which is the bat's arm and modified long fingers. Like birds though, they can twist their wings into a manner of different shapes, giving you a variety of poses to draw. If you want to learn how to draw a bat in these various shapes, my How To Draw: Birds In Flight post has all the information you need, just replace the birds with bats.

Stage One

Lets begin with a bat in flight. Here, I am going to draw a brown long-eared bat on the wing. To draw any bat, the basic structure is an oval for the body, a circle for the head and large round shapes for the wings, tail and ears. Don't worry about exact size of the wings at the moment, just make an estimate guess for now as we are only interested in the genral shape at this stage of the drawing.

Stage Two

Stage Two is where we work out the size of the wings and adjust the shape of the bat. I don't actually start this stage of the drawing with the wings but with the ears. Once I have redrawn the ears (adding structure to the lobes) and adjusting the shape and size of the head and drawing in the eyes and snout, I can now use the ears as a guidance to where the shape of the wing should be. I began drawing the wing close to the ears first, starting half way down the top ear. Then draw in the frame and 'spokes' of the wing with thin lines and connect the 'spokes' with a slightly curved line for the membarane of skin at the bottom of the wing. For the other wing, begin again at the top ear and from the line where the body meets, leave a gap of roughly a couple of inches and draw the frame and 'spokes' of the wing and connecting them with a curved line just as before. The tail is done in a similar way to the wings, with thin lines for the legs and the tail between the legs. They are then connected with a 'V'-shaped edge of a membrane of skin.

Stage Three

Redraw the outlines in pen and shade in the wings and tail, but be careful not go over the wing's framework or the legs. Lightly shade in the body, creating a texture of fur by making a layer of tiny lines. The head is a slightly darker shade and the ears have lightly dark centres with light lines representing blood vessels.

Stage Four

I have a few techniques on show for this colouring stage. First, the frames of the wings and the legs are coloured pink. But I used a rubber to slightly bleach out the bold colour. The wings have a light layer of yellow along the edges as a highlight. The ears orange which were layered over in bright yellow to make them stand out. Then I used black and brown to darken parts of the ears to look concaved inwards and I used my pen to go over the blood vessel lines again. Finally, the body. I was actually having trouble making it look pale using a light yellow and white pencil crayon as it blended in with the pen ink that I used to create fur texture. So, I ended up using a white soft pastel to get the body to the level of paleness that I wanted. To apply pastel or chalk, you can either layer it on or, as I have done, create a line and brush it to where you want it with your finger. If you make a mistake when applying the pastel, don't worry, you can use your fingernail to scratch it off or a rubber to rub it off. I then scratched away at the chalk with my pen to create the fur texture once again. The head is brown and the snout is pink.

Stage One

A bat, of course, only fly at night. During the day, they famously hang upside down. For my final drawing for today, I will draw a lesser horseshoe bat at rest. The basic shape of a resting bat includes an oval for the body and a circle for the head. Then draw two pointed 'ear'-shapes for the bat's legs and on either side of the bat's body, draw some shapes representing the wings which are folded and wrapped around the sleeping bat.

Stage Two

Now draw more detail to each part of the bat. The legs are simple thin lines with small blobs for feet with the thighs looking like mini chicken thighs. The wings are thin at the top and thicker towards the head with the frame work of lines added along the edge of one side of the wing and a small claw sticking out at the bottom. The facial features includes tear-shapes for ears and a 'U'-shape under the snout (a key feature for a horseshoe bat).

Stage Three

Redraw in pen and shade in your bat. Dark shades for the wings and body with light shaded patches around the head and legs.

Stage Four

Finally, colour in your bat. Brown for the fur and pink for the wing frames, ears and snout.

And that is how to draw a bat. I hope this has helped inspire you to pick up a bat detector or join a bat walk and to enjoy these amazing nocturnal creatures for yourself. Remember, bats are protected by law and is illegal to disturb them from their roost sites. So instead of taking photographs which disturbs them when using the flash on the camera, get your sketchbook and pencil out and draw them as an alternative.

Aug 12th Burgh Castle

The church at Burgh Castle

Last week when we were at Burgh Castle, we saw a poster on the gates of the church adjacent to the car park. It was advertising a bat watch event in the church itself. It seemed quite interesting and so Dad and I decided to go check it out.

Baby Common Pipistrelle Bats

The event was run by a team of bat experts who study bats that live in churches across Norfolk. We were given a talk about bat anatomy, the species that are found in Norfolk churches and about the conflict between the bats and the churches they inhabit. The urine and droppings of bats do a lot of damage to church artifacts and architecture. It is the team's job to find out which species and how many that are living in every church in the county (there are still hundreds of churches they have yet to survey), where they are roosting, where they emerge at night and how to resolve the problems without causing any disturbance to them. Every British species of bat is protected by law and illegal to disturb a roost site in any way, you need a licence to even get near to a bat. The team also look after injured and orphaned bats and we were shown some tiny baby common pipistrelles that they rescued recently.

Almost time for bats!

It was starting to get dark and was time to go outside with bat detectors (which picks up the high pitched echolocating calls that bats use to locate their insect prey) and watch the bats leave their roost sites. The first to leave were the pipistrelles. There are two species of pipistrelle bat, the common and the saprano, and they can be seperated by frequency on the bat detectors with the sapranos higher pitched than the common pipistrelles. These small bats were swooping over our heads as they patrolled the grounds of the church for the midges that were biting my hands and legs. The occassional buzzing sounds that we could hear on the detectors were the sounds of the bats catching their prey successfully.

Inside the church, brown long-eared bats were emerging from gaps in the ceiling and were gathering in the rafters. With a red filtered torch, we could see them clearly without disturbing the bats too much. As taking photographs could disturb these brilliant creatures, I was reduced to filming them instead, so I apologise for my dodgy camera work as I am not a cameraman. In the video below, you can see those incredibly large ears. These bats rely on stealth to catch their prey and use those amazing ears to detect the faintest rustle of moth wings. The echolocation calls are barely audible on the bat detector, it is no wonder that these bats are also known as the whispering bat. Dad and I are in love with them already as we watch them fly above the rafters with their huge wings.

At this time of year, all the bats that roost in this church are females giving birth. Any roost site during summer months are nurseries. The most commonest species to use churches across Norfolk as a nursery are the Natterer's bat. There happens to be a colony of 40-50 or more Natterer's roosting in this church and use the pipe sticking out of the bell tower to leave into the night. To see them better, the team point an infrared camera at the exit point and we could watch the action on a small tv monitor. Below, you can see one emerging (before I tried to film the exit point myself only to find it was too dark to see anything with my camera), but blink and you will miss it! It was a great end to one of the best bat nights that I have ever been on.

Leopard Slug (I think)

Aug 12th Strumpshaw Fen

Kingfisher

It was a day of the angler at Strumpshaw today. A day of kingfishers and herons. When I arrived to the reserve early this morning, it was raining lightly. Wearing only a fleece to protect me from the rain, it only got slightly damp. I waited under the roof of the blind beside the Reception Hide for it to ease off. While waiting, I watched common tern dive for fish in front of the hide and was distracted by a fierce piping whistled call. A kingfisher was chasing a rival off his territory in an angry dispute. For the rest of the morning, the kingfisher kept returning in a much peaceful mood as it posed on its perches around the broad and catching small fish to eat.

Male Mallard in eclipse phase

Juvenile Great Crested Grebe

Great White Egret

News came to me about a great white egret at the Tower Hide and the urge was too great not to resist a trip over there during my shift. It is a long walk there and back, but by walking as fast as I could I somehow managed to get to Tower Hide and the return journey in under an hour. It was quite a work out, but it was worth it. A great white egret is a large white heron with a yellow bill. It is another bird that is establishing itself here in the UK thanks to our warming climate. At the moment, these birds are still scarce visitors, but I reckon it won't be long until they become as common as the little egret and making the Norfolk Broads that much closer to looking like the marshes of Southern France, providing a rarther Mediterranean feel to this part of  East Anglia. For now, this individual was quite happy fishing alongside a grey heron with a little egret and some ruff watching and feeding by the shore.

Great White Egret with Grey Heron

Little Egret

Ruff

Heron catching a Pike

I returned to Reception Hide sweating and tired from the brisk long walk back. I soon recovered and the sun was beginning to break through the clouds. It was nearing lunchtime and for one heron, it had an appetite bigger than its stomach. It hauled up a massive pike that was as big as its own head! It was finding it difficult to kill and swallow it as the heron spent along time wrestling with the large fish. Eventually, the bird maneuvered the fish into postion and after a brief struggle to lift its bill up, down it went, swallowed whole! Makes you think of where it all goes!

What a whopper!!!

Time to stop playing with dinner!

Down it goes!!!!

Small Red-eyed Damselfly

The pond outside the Reception Hide has a small colony of small red-eyed damselflies at the moment. Before I left for home, I had a quick look for them. Now that the sun is out, these damselflies will be making the most of it. So it wasn't long until I had found one posing on the reed stems floating on the pond's surface. This is a smaller version of the red-eyed damselflies that I saw with Barbara earlier this summer and they look very similar. It was only thanks to Ben (a Strumpshaw warden) that I knew this was a different species.