Little Egret

Any mention of Cleethorpes conjures up images of trippers, deck chairs, amusement arcades and candyfloss, but the seashore here is part of the Humber Estuary SSSI and includes a lot of good shore bird habitat, ranging from saltmarsh to muddy sediments that are important feeding sites for waders.

We watched this little egret catching small fish on the saltmarsh last week. They've been resident there for a few years now and it's remarkable how they have become a familiar element in the bird fauna, considering that not so long ago birders would have been jumping up and down with excitement at the sight of one of these exotic colonists. They are one of the good news stories for UK wildlife.

Fruity

It looks like being a very poor year for brambles up here in Durham but it was a different story down in North East Lincolnshire at the weekend, where the blackberry bushes at the back of the sand dunes at Cleethorpes local nature reserve were laden with fast-ripening fruits.

The scrubby vegetation at the back of the dunes here is dominated by sea buckthorn, which also carried a fine crop of ripening berries, that look particularly attractive against the shrub's silver-grey foliage. Birds never seem very interested in these berries, which often are still untouched well into winter. The same can't be said for the elder berries here, which were being consumed rapidly by large, noisy flocks of starlings.

Many of the juvenile starlings were in their transitional plumage, still bearing traces of their first set of brown feathers but rapidly moulting into their smart spotty winter attire. 

Evening primrose

We came across this patch of evening primroses when we were walking through the sand dunes at Cleethorpes local nature reserve at the weekend. There are about twenty very confusing evening primrose species and interspecific hybrids but I suspect this one is probably Oenothera glazioviana (formerly known as Oe.erythrosepala), which comes from North America. 

There are no native species of evening primrose in Britain but this is one very attractive alien species that no one seems to object to when it escapes into the wild. It seems to thrive in waste places, especially in poor, arid soils. Recently I've seen it flowering well in a supermarket car park and on the edge of a pavement in a city centre. The seeds are very small and I imagine they are easily distributed on birds' feet, and the pale yellow flowers, which seem almost luminous at dusk, attract moths which must very effective pollinators; Sir Edward Salisbury, former director of Kew Gardens and noted authority on weeds and alien plants, once calculated that these plants commongly produce around 33,000 seeds each.

One species of evening primrose, Oenothera biennis, is sometimes cultivated as a crop, on account of its herbal medicinal value. The oil extracted from the seeds contains high levels of linoleic acid, which has a variety of medicinal uses.

Sun, Sand and Orchids

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes a recent visit to the seaside at Cleethorpes. If you walk on past the pier with all its attractions, at the far end of the promenade, beyond the leisure centre and just under the sea wall near the miniature railway, you'll reach Cleethorpes Local Nature reserve. 

It's a long expanse of sand dunes, between the sea wall and the saltmarsh on the edge of the river Humber, and it hosts a fabulous display of southern marsh orchids that were in full bloom at the end of May.

There are some magnificent specimens that....

.... are packed together so densely in places that you need to be very careful where you put your feet.

While we were there I repeated Darwin's experiment for extracting the pollinia from an orchid flower, described in his book Fertilisation of Orchids, which I described in a recent post on early purple orchids. The pollinia are whole stamens that butterflies carry away in their entirety when they poke their proboscis into a nectar spur at the rear of the individual orchid flower. Darwin described how you could extract a pollinium, which is sticky at its base, by poking a sharp pencil point into the nectar spur. The paired pollinia are located where those two dark club-shaped structures are in the hood of the flower.

I didn't have a pencil so I poked this fine twig in instead - and out it came with a pollinium attached.

Darwin actually counted and calculated the number of pollen grains in one of these pollinia: there are enough to fertilise over 120,000 seeds. The survival chances of these tiny wind-born seeds, which you can see by clicking here, are minute.

Unusual Fly-past and the Wobbly World of Heat-haze

This black swan from the collection of ornamental waterfowl on the boating lake at Cleethorpes joined the local mute swans for a fly-past this morning, while ....

.... out beyond the saltmarsh a little egret, a classic sailing ship and the wind turbines on the Yorkshire coast of the River Humber all had some wind in their sails, even if everything was shimmering in a heat-haze