No wonder most toads return to their breeding ponds at night!

This toad crossed our path when we were walking in the Derwent Country Park near Gateshead on Easter Monday.

When I knelt down to take a photo and put the camera on the ground he attacked it, presumably because he could see his reflection in the lens. Luckily I had a lens filter attached, otherwise he would have made a mess of an expensive piece of glass.

As we walked around the lake we found several more toads, which we helpfully carried across the path and pointed in the general direction of the water. In retrospect, maybe that wasn't such a good idea because when we walked back ........

......... this heron was having the time of his life at an all-you-can-eat banquet of toads and newts.

I guess this is one reason why big migrations of toads, from their hibernation sites to their breeding ponds, tend to take place at night, when herons are roosting.

Small Ermine Moth

Small ermine moth infestations on bird cherry Prunus padus trees reach plague proportions around here every few years - and this looks like being a small ermine plague-year. I hadn't really noticed them until last weekend - I walked past these trees in the Derwent valley two weeks ago and didn't notice any webs then, but a week later the tree was festooned with them

Once the caterpillars begin to grow they feed voraciously - a watched this group strip away half a leaf - and they are constantly moving to new leaves, spinning more protective webbing as they go, until whole branches are sheathed in silk.

Derwent Valley

I've posted quite a few items on this blog about plants or animals that we've come across in the valley of the river Derwent, on the Durham/Northumberland border - and today's Guardian Country Diary also comes from this delightful spot - so I thought I might post a few pictures of the location. The stretch of the valley that we often walk starts at Blanchland ....

... which is a great spot to photograph swallows, sand martins and house martins skimming over the shallow water.

Some hay meadows, with mature oaks,ashes and sycamores on their boundaries, lie in the valley bottom at the Blanchland end, with hawthorn hedges and ..... 

...drystone walls a little higher up the valley sides, currently sheltering some fine displays of wood crane'sbill and cow parsley and also home to some rather less common plants.

The older trees often have holes that are good nest sites for redstarts and the oldest trees are hosts to some interesting fungi.

Across the valley on the north and south sides the land quickly rises to open moorland but....

...the shelter of the valley bottom makes for very lush growth in summer.

As you head towards the Derwent reservoir, a couple of miles down the valley, the pastures become wetter and offer some ......

........very fine yellow and blue displays of buttercups and germander speedwell at this time of year.

If you make your way down to the river this is usually an excellent place to look for goosander, dippers, grey wagtails, sandpipers and - if you're lucky - a kingfisher.

Follow the river downstream from here and you pass through alder woodland most of the way until you each the reservoir. Here, and in the rough pastures away from the river, we've sometimes watched roe deer and often heard cuckoos.

In spring this stretch of woodland is full of bluebells but just now they're fading and giving way to summer flowers, like this bistort Persicaria bistorta.

House Martins

In my youth I used to be keen on motor racing and went to quite a few grand prix to photograph the heroes of the day at speed, but I have to say that photographing a racing car was a whole lot easier than photographing swifts, swallows, sand martins and house martins in flight. The path of a speeding racing car is predictable - these house martins just appeared like a bolt from the blue and streaked past, almost touching the surface of the river Derwent then, usually, just as I was about to press the shutter button, turned in their own length and dashed off in a different direction. Wonderful birds, though....

This picture is better if you double-click to enlarge it a bit...

Redstarts and Cuckoos

When we walked down the Derwent valley yesterday, from Blanchland down towards the reservoir, the hedgerow seemed to be alive with redstarts ..............

... with females outnumbering cock birds.....

This valley, with its hay meadows that provide plenty of insects and mature old trees with nest holes seems to be excellent redstart habitat.

It also seems to be favoured territory for cuckoos. We've heard a male calling on three successive visits over the last couple of weeks and even had this distant view of him. Given their relative scarcity, I'm guessing it might have been the same bird on each occasion, although there's no way of knowing.

The area down towards the reservoir, where there has been a lot of tree felling and where there's rough grassland that provides good meadow pipit habitat, must provide plenty of nests to parasitise ........ provided that he's found a mate.

Lilium pyrenaicum

Here's a sight that brightened up a dull day at a bleak spot - a large patch of Lilium pyrenaicum, growing on a road verge near the Derwent reservoir (in the background of the photo) on the Durham-Northumberland border.

According to the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora this handsome lily (which, as the name suggests, is native to the Pyrenees) was introduced into British gardens before 1596 and was first recorded in the wild in 1853. These plants were well away from the nearest gardens and looked like they'd been established for quite a while..... perhaps dumped with garden rubbish or maybe deliberately planted? I've seen this plant growing along the banks of the River Wear near Wolsingham for over 35 years and there are records of it from the Derwentside area in Gordon Graham's Flora and Vegetation of County Durham.

The orange anthers are particularly striking, as are ...

... the reflexed tepals and very pungent smell.

The Fly that saw a Ghost

We found this newly-emerged ghost moth (a.k.a. ghost swift moth) Hepialis  humuli yesterday on the banks of the River Derwent, downstream from Blanchland. You can see the remains of the pupal case sticking up through the dead grass just below and to the right of the moth which, judging by the wing damage, had a bit of a struggle to hatch out. Initially I though that little metallic green fly that's standing on the moth might have something to do with the tattered state of the moth and its generally sluggish behaviour (maybe a parasite?) but ........

my suspicions were unfounded - it's Microchrysa polita, which breeds in rotting vegetation and dung and was entirely innocent.  

Slippery, even when not wet...

This is one of the easier toadstools to identify - porcelaiine fungus Oudsmansiella mucida. Conveniently, it's almost always found growing in only one place, on dying beech trees Fagus sylvatica, which narrows down the identification possibilities somewhat.

The other defining characteristic is a permanently wet-look cap, covered in a layer of slippery mucilage that gives it the appearance of the finest quality porcelaine - for a day or two, anyway.

The young, developing toadstool produces so much mucilage that it sometimes drips off, as it's doing on the two lower specimens here. Photographed on a fallen beech tree near Blanchland in Northumberland, earlier this week...

An Unusual Late-Summer Succulent

This attractive late summer wild flower is orpine Sedum telephium, which is a rather uncommon native here in North East England. Like all Sedum species it has succulent, water retentive leaves and looks more adapted to life in Mediterranean regions than at these latitudes but, unusually for the genus, it’s also quite at home in shady places. This plant was growing at the base of a hedgerow in the Derwent valley, where I have known it for over 20 years. Orpine is closely related to the garden ‘ice plant’ Sedum spectabile from China and Japan and sometimes forms hybrids with it. Most records for the plant tend to be close to habitation and it’s difficult to be sure whether the plants in question are genuinely wild or whether they are descended from plants that were dug up, cultivated and have since escaped back into the wild and are establishing new populations, perhaps even carrying S.spectabile genes if they have hybridised in gardens. It’s probably one of a number of native species, like primroses and columbine, where there has been regular interchange between gardens and the wider countryside.

Roe Deer Shedding Velvet

Luck was with us this morning, when we were out walking in the Derwent Valley hear Edmundbyers. We managed to get within about 50 metres of this roe buck that was sitting on the hillside enjoying the sunshine. He didn’t seem to notice us approaching downwind, with our silhouettes below the skyline. His coat looks a bit mangy but I think that’s because he’s shedding his long winter coast and acquiring his shorter summer pelage, but the really interesting features are his antlers. He would have shed the old antlers by Christmas and has now grown a new set. One is still covered in skin (‘velvet’) but he’s very recently rubbed the skin off the other, against the bark of the tree probably, and it’s still covered with fresh blood (double click the top image for a larger image, that makes this clearer).