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.

Mountain pansies

We made the long, steep, breathless climb up the northern fellside from St.John’s Chapel today, almost to the top of Black Hill. The views back across Weardale to Chapel Fell were stunning, we were accompanied by the bubbling calls of curlews during most of the ascent and as an added bonus heard our first cuckoo of spring in a pine plantation, about 500 metres above sea level. There are plenty of nesting meadow pipits on these fells for it to parasitise. Apart from bird song, the only sound when you reach the top is the wind. Otherwise, silence. But the purpose of the climb wasn’t to admire the views, seek solitude or listen to the birds, but to see if the first mountain pansies were in flower. And they were. It’s hard to imagine a bleaker landscape than the tops of these fells, where most of the vegetation is still brown and withered after a hard winter, but from mid-April onwards thousands of these delightful flowers decorate the short turf wherever there is a little shelter, turning it into a natural rock garden. Currently they are just about the only flowers in bloom at this altitude. Search amongst them and you can find every flower colour, from deep purple through yellow to pure white, sometimes with all three colours on different petals of a single flower. Well worth the climb.