Poppies to Pollies

There's been a mass of poppies this year, possibly because all the rain in the spring washed some of the herbicide away before it could do its work. The harvest looks good at the moment, though, as the sun came out nicely to ripen the corn. Unusually the oil-ssed rape and corn are being cut at the same time, meaning long hours for the contractors.

99.99999% of the poppies seem to be the common variety, but just occasionally a sharp eye might spot something different, generally from an unusual seedpod.


Last year I found a few rough poppies beside a crop near Maydensole and was pleased to see them again this year:

And this year an even sharper eye found prickly poppies on the road to Sandwich Bay......

..... near a line of long-headed poppies which are apparently more frequent than the above-mentioned, but it's still good to find them.

Apparently, prickly poppies have been found in Kingsdown, but where..........?    Nobody knows.

A brown hare has been nibbling around the fields nearby, apparently quite tame as it only makes the effort to lollop off when disturbed, no doubt delighting the longlenses who travel that road.

The little owl standing sentinel at the barn has now gone, after giving pleasure to many passers-by during the spring.

Other good sights in the Sandwich Bay area have been hundreds of southern marsh orchids in a depression between the sea wall and RCB golf course and a good show of marsh helleborines in the usual gully.  Sand catchflies were later but larger than usual, and a nice crop of 32 were seen beside a sandy track.

On an even smaller scale, a few plants of bur medick.

Wild clary was another plant to do well earlier in the year, while over at the point the Deptford pinks look strong, and each plant is accompanied by its count-tag - loads of them.

I look forward to hearing the score from KWT. I would guess there must be about 1,000 plants, while across the flatlands at Foulmead the grass-poly population has grown from about 110 last year to at least 500 now.

No pics of Pic-mar in Picardie

 Another quick trip to the Somme estuary is search of foreign butterflies and Mediterranean heat was scotched by unrelenting cloud and cool winds. But never mind, always look on the bright side of life...... there were some interesting bugs in Crecy forest. Top prize goes to bee chafers, above, closely followed by the spectacularly iridescent chafers below.

 In the leaf mould, it was good to find wood crickets (a true cricket, I'm told).

 A few butterflies braved the weather, including some energetically mating white admirals, and a cool green-veined white.

 Floral highlights were limited to strange thistles, of which the lettuce thistle was the strangest, and a fine verge near Saillay Bray of poppies, corn marigolds and a host of other relicts.

 As for birds, well, we saw a middle-spotted woodpecker (pic-mar as the French would say) which flew off when it saw the camera, after reasonable views of it at the edge of the wood. Mel had seen one drinking at a pool earlier, but had not managed to convince me of the ID until we saw this one nearby.

A few marsh warblers gave loud song, but bluethroats were not going to be so easy.

Kittiwakes by the hundred were fledging in Bolougne harbour, on the ferry terminal.

Eel met by sunlight

On a rare warm evening, we did some rock-pooling at Kingsdown, followed by fish and chips in the setting sun. The tide was going out, leaving pools in the chalk platform and among the flint pebbles.

Streams of cold fresh water from the chalk hills flow from the shingle beach, and this had confused an eel that was trying to swim inland.

After a brief discussion on the principles of helping old ladies back across a busy road that they have just crossed (i.e. did the eel actually want to be helped?) it was decided to return it to the sea as otherwise it would have been stranded and left to the mercy of nearby herring gulls.



It's not easy to pick up an eel, by the way.


Browsing the usual Wiki-thing, I see that European eels are declining because of environmental factors, overconsumption and the introduction of parasites from farming stocks [that oft-repeated litany - sigh] and that IUCN have included them in their Red list.

From a personal point of view, I find their taste when jellied to be quite revolting and they may be reassured that I shall never touch them again.

Thanks guys!

There were also some starfish slowly slithering along in the shallows .....

..... and small dogfish dashed; whelks and winkles wandered, while sea anemones ...um... angled for food?     

Lovely evening.     Do not take living by the sea for granted.

Wot, no flies to catch?

We visited the three sites where spotted flycatchers have been known to breed in the area, but only one pair was found. More evidence of population crash, as these lovely birds are hard to find these days.

 

 There's precious little for them to feed their chicks this year as the weather has been cool, damp and decidedly unclement for insects. The records tell us that we've had the wettest (on average across the country) late spring/early summer and to that can be added an almost constant cool north-easterly wind in this corner of the country, so the long-term trends that have done for so much of the insect life have been reinforced by short-term damage.

A comment that I've heard frequently recently is "when was the last time you had to scrape insects off the windscreen?". Perhaps modern cars' improved Cd designs have an effect, but the numbers of insects that peppered our car in the seventies are absent now. How do the birds and other animals that depend on the seasonal harvest of flying protein cope when it doesn't appear?
Or even the plants that need them for pollination?

 I assume that Nottingham catchfly does not feed off the insects that get stuck to its stems, but it may be sticky to stop them crawling up to eat the flowers or drink the nectar, which is to attract nightflying moths. 
Whatever, the swathes of catchfly that grew on Dover cliffs last year have not reappeared, with only a sparse and short-lived growth this year.

While musing on the lack of insects while cycling along Walmer seafront this evening, we were assailed by an emergence of summer chafers, cruising and crashing around hedges and bushes along the path with their languid droning buzz. We saw a couple of hundred in a short distance, many bumping into us and catching in our hair. Examining one more closely, we could see that they have small eyes which seem to serve them poorly.

Elsewhere, an energetic grey wagtail was feeding on insects above a waterfall by Leeds Castle..... did you know that you can walk around the grounds on public footpaths after the paying punters have gone home? Idyllic.

 And near there, at The Larches...... at last I've seen my first ground-pine. And then another 80 were found, equally tiny. 

A gorgeous little plant which has eluded me for a while, probably because I've also got small eyes that serve me poorly.

Tri-Lizard event

It seems a good year for orchids, and I was pleased to receive reports of lizard orchids appearing in interesting places - a tri-lizard turn-up for the book*.
In fact the first was in its usual place, but for the first time in seven years. I can't find any other records for the species on the downs, but this one appeared in the same place that it was previously seen, much to the pleasure of the long-serving warden, Phil of White Cliffs Coutryside project. Clearly a credit to his management regime.

 

The other report was from a totally unexpected place - close to the beach between Walmer and Kingsdown, where I've certainly never seen them and there are no records from the past. My contact, the sharp-eyed Graham, tells me that he had seen one near St Margarets a few years ago, presumably near the Roy the Redeemer statue. Now there are two on the beach, some miles south of the flourishing population at Sandwich Bay.

In the grassland nearby.... 

 

Pale flax, which I couldn't find when I returned in the afternoon when the sun finally appeared - of course.

A single pyramidal orchid, and plenty of rough clover.

While on the beach the rare sea-pea seems to be doing well:

And a final piece of good news...... summer is now officially here, as the marbled whites and meadow browns have emerged into what seems like the first warm sunshine in weeks.

* I am informed that this is a witty literary pun - potty.

Subbuteo is my hobby

The football was tedious, so at half-time we drove back to Sandwich Bay  (having visited, plant-spotting, in the morning). We've spent many evenings in the new hide on the scrape, watching ....... but I digress from the main story.......

Driving home at about 9.30 in the twilight, a shape was seen on a post alongside the road. Not an owl this time, but a hobby (Falco subbuteo, but you knew that). It stayed there while cars drove by within a few feet of it, and allowed me to photograph it, only flying off when a cyclist went past.

Curiously, the Ashford Birder saw and photographed a similarly-subdued one today, presuming that it had been hit by a car. Given the windy and cold weather, I'd suggest that they could just be hungry and exhausted.

 

Anyway, back to the scrape. We've been watching the development of broods of lapwings and oystercatchers, and well as a supporting cast of mallards, coots, little grebes etc.
The oystercatchers always astound me by greeting an approaching parent loudly well in advance of its arrival - good sight or maybe good hearing.

The lapwing family seems to have reduced from four to two, unsurprisingly given the unhelpful behaviour or the parents. For some reason the chicks are persuaded to swim from the island to the bank during the day (for better cover or more food I don't know) and then called back to the island at night, a swim of about 50 yards while avoiding the attentions of aggressive coots. The sight of the parents repeatedly divebombing a dumb-looking pheasant, while a fox approached the chicks from behind, was ridiculous.

In these evening vigils, owls have often been seen, and recently a light-coloured barn owl has patrolled meadows surrounding the scrape, and sat on a fence post to survey the world.

On the subject of chicks, the high winds blew two herring gull chicks off a roof in Deal and I was delegated to defy gravity to put them back up, out of the way of cats. The parents, of course, did not recognise this civic duty and provided a further hazard. The chicks still had their egg-tooth.

And at Rye Harbour, noise and smell announced that the black-headed gull colony is in full production again.

Lush for orchids

 

Please don't get the wrong impression - this photograph was not taken on the Bank Holiday weekend, but on one of the seemingly few fine days of late spring.

It's an unassuming lane called Lynsore Bottom in the sparsely populated middle of east Kent, and as drive down it you can see not only plenty of twayblades but also lady orchids and fly orchids on the verge.

Now I expect to find lady orchids and fly orchids, if at all, on bare banks in the dappled shade of woodland, but this year's wet spring has produced a good showing of both in open downland.

There's a dozen fly orchid spikes at Park Gate Down, where the monkey orchids look healthy, replacing the early purples and twayblades that are going over.

Lady orchids are flourishing in the open grassland of Denge Wood, adding to the beauty of this place with its nightingales and butterflies.

And no description of east Kent's orchids would be complete without a few photos of smiley-face late spider orchids, also doing well in the lushness of the downland sward.