Kittiwake cacophony

The Tyne Bridge in Newcastle, and the buildings around it, are famous for hosting the largest inland breeding colony of kittiwakes in the world, offering unrivalled opportunities to watch the behaviour of these birds. The noise can be deafening. These two were exchanging greetings today. 

Click here for more about the Tyne Bridge kittiwake colony - and watch a film about these wonderful birds by Cain Scrimgeour

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is about this male common darter dragonfly - surely the last of the year - that we saw a few days ago on the banks of the river Tyne near Wylam. 

It settled amongst the fallen autumn leaves and seemed very reluctant to move away from the large patch of flowering ivy that still attracted flies that it was probably feeding on.

Since then we've had some hard frosts. It will be eight months before we see the next generation hatching out.

Fog on the Tyne

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is about a sudden change in the weather in Tynemouth.

We were visiting for a walk along the north bank of the river Tyne to North Shields, destination the Waterfront for their outstanding fish and chips, with the added incentive of a bit of botanising on the way. The headland at Tynemouth is a popular place for birders - and it also has some interesting plants, including this....

........... black horehound Ballota nigra

....... some very attractive field bindweed Convolvulus arvensis

...... and restharrow Ononis repens

This kestrel, looking a little worse-for-wear with missing wing and tail feathers, was hovering above us on the slopes of the headland below Tynemouth Priory. As we watched it there was an incredibly sudden change in the weather, as the wind direction shifted and a sea fret blew inshore, blanketing the mouth of the Tyne, the headland and the kestrel in fog that reduced visibility to just a few metres, where just a minute or two before we had been in bright sunshine. Even kestrels can't hunt in such conditions.

I grew up on the coast and spent much of my youth messing about in boats, so I was well aware of how fast conditions can change on the coast but this sudden fog was astonishing.

We'd watched the Tyne Pilot head out of the river in bright sunshine to meet an incoming vessel, the ferry City of Barcelona, but she had disappeared into the fog. We could hear her engines and foghorn as she ghosted past us and then, about fifteen minutes after the fog closed in ....

...... the wind direction changed and visibility improved, so the  ferry loomed up out of the fog just as she approached North Shields fish quay. Within another five minutes the sea fret had blown away, dazzling sunshine returned and the kestrel was hunting again.

Stonefly

I found this stonefly crawling on the footpath on Wylam bridge across the river Tyne yesterday.

Key identification features of stoneflies are their flattened profile, paired tail filaments and a strong propensity to scuttle along rather than fly.

Stoneflies, which are important food for fish and birds like dippers and wagtails. They're very sensitive to water pollution so their presence is a reassuring sign of good water quality in the river.

Click here for more on stoneflies.

Nice weather for ducks....

While we were sheltering under our umbrellas recently, dodging the puddles, someone remarked that it was 'nice weather for ducks'.

Which reminded me of this photo that I took several years ago in the car park of the Sage concert hall in Gateshead. These ducklings were about as far removed from their natural element as it was possible to be.

The mallard duck had nested on waste ground on the far side of the car park and led her ducklings all the way across. This kerb presented a bit of a challenge but with a lot of quacking from her and some help for anxious spectators they eventually overcame it. Then she led them down a steep bank, across another car park, down another steep bank and across a road, across a stretch of quayside and into the river Tyne. 

In comparison, my journey into work through today's floods this morning should be a doddle! 

Brief Encounter

This grey seal popped its head above water when we were walking along the sea wall footpath between Tynemouth and North Shields yesterday, when we were on our way to lunch at the excellent Waterfront fish and chip restaurant on the fish quay. No doubt the seal had fish on its mind too.

The seal appeared just a few yards from the sea wall and what was so delightful about the encounter was that there were families with small children walking along the wall too, who were absolutely thrilled when it popped its head above water to have a look at them. That's the wonder of nature I suppose - always apt to surprise, delight and thrill when you least expect it.

Amazing sea conditions yesterday - almost a flat calm, hardly a breath of wind.

Waiting for the tide to turn (2) .....

Rock pipits Anthus petrosus on the parapet of Tynemouth north pier, waiting for the tide to fall and uncover their normal feeding ground on the rocks below. They have a very distinctive white circle around their eye.

Natural Ice Sculptures

Yesterday, when we were walking near Corbridge along the Devil's Water, a tributary of the River Tyne, we found these natural ice sculptures in mid-stream. The water level had dropped overnight and left them suspended from the rocks. With today's rain and thaw their ephemeral beauty will have dissolved away,

Essence of Goldcrest

We spotted this little goldcrest feeding in the gorse bushes today, when we were out walking in the Tyne valley near Corbridge on a bitterly cold morning. It allowed me to get quite close but turned out to be difficult to photograph because it flitted from branch to branch so fast and I was shivering in the cold. Image stabilisation systems are all very well for damping down the shivers, but they can't cope with a hyperactive goldcrest in shadow at close range. This picture isn't really sharp, though it shows the golden crest quite nicely ...

..... and this one shows the bird well lit on the only occasion when it ventured into sunlight, but the autofocus was confused by the tangle of twigs ....

...... and this one is reasonably sharp but the lighting is dull and the golden crest isn't very evident. So all things considered, the image I liked best ......

... was this one, which to me is essence of goldcrest: never still for a moment. 


Keith (of Holdingmoments) has a great quote on his web page: "Sometimes the picture doesn't have to be perfect; it's the captured moment that counts". 


I'll drink to that .....

Birch Brackets

I found two typical bracket fungi that live on silver birches this afternoon, on some trees on the banks of the river Tyne near Wylam. This is the aptly named hoof fungus Fomes fomentarius. We tend to think of toadstools as here-today-gone-tomorrow organisms that appear overnight, shed their spores over a day or two and then wither away but bracket fungi like these are perennial, adding a new layer of spore- producing tissue (the hymenium) every season until the tree that they are digesting has yielded up all its available nutrients. During their long lifetime the brackets can produce millions of spores. Each successive layer of spore-producing tissue is marked on the surface of the bracket by a ring-like indentation, rather like the annual rings of a tree but visible on the fungal outer surface. The hymenium on the underside of this specimen, formed from thousands of pores lined with spores, shows signs of damage - probably from a slug.

These two are old specimens, are probably moribund - their hyphae have exhausted the supply of nutrients they can extract from their host's wood, which by this stage has developed a crumbly texture akin to balsa wood.

 This is an old specimen of the most familiar bracket fungus growing on birch, the birch polypore Piptoporus betulinus, also known as the razor strop fungus on account of its past use for honing a keen edge on cut-throat razors. Young specimens tend to be cream-coloured but they go brown and become leathery as they age. 

Bracket fungi like these are hosts to a variety of different insects that breed inside their tissues, so this is a food chain where plant tissue is being converted into fungal tissue which in turn is being transformed into animal tissue. If you harvest one of these old bracket fungi at this time of year and keep it in a container covered in muslin (which I've just done) you can expect to see a variety of different beetles emerge in spring and early summer - and if they do I'll post pictures of them when they appear.

Oh, I-do-like-to-be-beside-the-seaside....

Tynemouth this morning: blue sky, blue sea, a bracing breeze, salty air, ships on the horizon, lapping waves, raucous gulls, fish-and-chips for lunch at the Waterfront in North Shields ..... perfect Saturday morning at the seaside.

A Stroll to the End of the Pier

It was a perfect summer afternoon, so we decided to take a stroll to the end of Tynemouth pier and discovered that it was a favourite spot for common terns to take a break and indulge in a bit of preening....

... which is necessary if you spend most of your life diving head-first into the sea every few minutes.

Only a brief respite though, and now they were in tip-tip shape time it was time to get back to work....

.... feeding the juveniles that were parked at intervals all along the pier.

Demanding work...

.. so the parent birds' feet hardly touched the ground ...

... while their were feeding their offspring, which ....

...apart from occasionally staggering to their feet for a stretch, just sunbathed.

This herrring gull had the temerity to land near a chick and the parent bird carried out relentless attacks until the gull was driven off, which is maybe why ....

... this turnstone tip-toed past PDQ, fearful that it would be in for the same treatment.

A small flock of redshanks, driven off the Black Middens rocks at the mouth of the Tyne by the rising tide, landed in the pier briefly....

... but didn't settle for long before the terns drove them off too.

The terns even had a go at this guillemot, swimming innocently by, but it showed them a clean pair of heels.

Terns

We were standing on Union Quay in North Shields this afternoon (after an excellent fish and chip lunch in the Waterfront), watching a ship move off from its mooring on the quayside. The ship's bow-thrusters churned up the water and several small, silvery fish came floating to the surface. Almost instantly, seemingly from nowhere, terns arrived .....

....spotted the fish ....

..... hovered for a second or two ...

... rolled into a dive ....

.... splashed down (pity this wasn't sharper)

... and made off with the spoils.

Sawbills on a Sunny Afternoon

This family of goosanders were enjoying the sunshine upstream from the bridge across the river Tyne at Corbridge (bottom photo) this afternoon . In the thirty five years that we’ve lived in the North East goosanders have become an increasingly frequent sight on the rivers here – something to gladden the heart of ornithologists but not quite such a welcome development for anglers, who resent the goosander’s formidable fishing skill. The serrated edge to the bird's beak is beautifully adapted for gripping a wriggling fish. This is a small family group – we once saw a duck with twelve ducklings on the Swale in Yorkshire but as many as 16 eggs have been recorded in a nest, which goes quite a long way towards explaining why this species has colonised new rivers so successfully. That mottled pattern of downy feathers on the ducklings breaks up their outline very effectively, against the rippled shadows and highlights of the river. Double-click on the images for a larger picture.