Local patch lockdown 2: more birds

The end of another week of coronavirus lockdown early morning exercise walks, and still seeing new birds very close to home.

The best sighting was this pair of partridges - red-listed birds. They look like they are nesting in the hedge on the edge of a pasture (that was part of an opencast coal mine 25 years ago)

This pair of magpies are always in a pasture on part of a small holding

Surprised to see this reed bunting in a roadside hedge. It was about a mile from a large pond and reed bed, created as mitigation for the coal mining, where it might be nesting.

There are small rookeries nearby, so they are always searching for small soil animals in the pastures

Carrion crow repairing an old nest in an ash tree

Greeted every morning by the song of chaffinches

Coal tits are always in the trees close to small larch and pine plantations, which were established after opencast coal mining ended here. 

Curlew in a sheep pasture. Listening to their call is a lovely way to begin the day.

Lapwing aerial courtship displays are over now. Most will have nests with eggs.

Soon after sunrise on sunny mornings the air is always full of the song of skylarks, but they also sing on the ground.

Pied wagtail on a farmyard muck heap - a profitable feeding site for a bird that hunts flies

The glorious sound of a song thrush

And the song of a wren - a lot of noise for such a small bird 

Lapwing courtship and rivalry

You know that spring has really sprung when you witness this kind of bird behaviour.

There were three lapwings in this oilseed rape field - a female (left) and two males. The male in the right foreground had just finished a brief courtship flight display, then pursued the female through the plants on foot, until they both stopped. Then he turned and started pecking at the ground, in a perfunctory display of making a nest scrape, and displayed his rump. The second male, in the background here, had similar ideas. A recipe for trouble.

They both got airborne, to settle their rivalry with some aerial jousting. 

What followed was a lively display of close-quarters intimidation and some spectacular aerobatics, with a lot of noisy calls but no actual physical contact.

No idea how they judged who was the victor and who was the vanquished but .....

.... only one of them had the privilege of mating.

Then there were three .....

I didn't really take much notice of the noisy, agitated lapwing overhead, or of the car that drove slowly past until I heard the screech of tyres on tarmac as it braked to a halt. Then I realised there we four little bumps in the road behind it; lapwing chicks that had strayed from the pasture onto the road.

The parent bird, utterly fearless, landed in the road and ushered one of the chicks away into the verge but then took to the air again as the car drove away.

One of the remaining chicks was just a patch of blood and fluffy down on the road but the two others had gone into their instinctive survival routine as we approached, pressing themselves flat against the road and staying perfectly still, hoping they wouldn't be noticed. We picked them up - fluffy, almost weightless bundles with outsized feet - and dropped them over the wall, back into the pasture where they ran for cover - peep-peeping for their parents.

To his credit, the driver turned around and came back to see if he could help and was clearly very distressed that one was dead. In all fairness, if he wasn't forewarned he would have found the birds very hard to see when they were in their defensive prone position in the road.

It was, though, an all-too-common tragedy. The parent birds would have incubated four eggs in their exposed nest for the best part of a month, defending them all day-long against crows, only for one to be flattened under the wheels of a car within hours of hatching.

We really need an awareness-raising campaign in the dales, warning drivers that from now until June they can expect to all sorts of upland juvenile animals and breeding birds straying onto roads, and advising drivers to be vigilant and slow down.

Road traffic takes a terrible toll on wildlife - hares, hedgehogs, badgers, wading bird chicks - in late spring.

Celebrating the Vernal Equinox with lapwing aerobatics

Celebrated the vernal equinox this morning by walking up Chapel fell in Weardale to watch lapwings perform their death-defying spring courtship aerobatics.

Lovely wild sounds made by their calls and wings - listen here (click on 11th. and 12th. recordings on the list).

Show-offs

Spent some of this morning watching the exhilarating, death-defying aerobatics of courting lapwings, on Chapel fell in Weardale.

When the males are displaying to the females they hurl themselves around the sky with deep, powerful strokes of their broad wings, whose primary feathers make a distinctive humming sound as they're forced through the air. Then they tumble towards earth, twisting and turning until ....

..... they pull out of their dive at the last possible moment, skimming the grass as they climb for another display, all the while producing their distinctive 'pee-wit' squeaky calls.

You can listen to the calls of lapwings by clicking here

St.John's Chapel, Weardale

It was only a little over a fortnight since we'd taken our regular circular walk around St.John's Chapel in Weardale but, when we visited again on Saturday, the intervening period of almost dawn-to-dusk sunshine had transformed the landscape. All the early summer flowers, like the wood cranesbill, had run to seed and perfect haymaking weather meant that all the meadows had been mown. 

Even though this was only July, it seemed as though the summer is slipping by and it felt, as they say around here, 'proper back-endish'.

Harebells and crested dog's tail grass beside Harthope burn

Marsh woundwort in flower beside a ditch at the bottom of Chapel Fell

The frothy blossom of meadowsweet, once used for flavouring mead (the name has nothing to do with meadows, it refers to mead).

Monkey flower Mimulus guttatus in the gravel beside the river Wear. Thirty years ago, when I first saw it on this spot, this alien plant from the western United States was much commoner along the river than it is now - it seems to have gone into decline.

Rushes flowering on the slopes of Chapel Fell. For much of the year these are dull plants but for a brief period, when they flower, they look very attractive in the sunlight (double-click for a clearer image)

Timothy Grass Phleum pratense, flowering in corners of meadows that the mower missed. Very similar to meadow foxtail Alopecurus pratensis, but that flowers in spring and this flowers in mid-summer.

A most heartening sight - one of twelve freshly emerged small tortoiseshells on creeping thistles, on the flanks of Chapel Fell. These butterflies seem to be doing very well around here this year - we had seven at once on the Inula flowers in our front garden this weekend.

Spot the fish: a trout, keeping station in the sunlit river below a waterfall, catching whatever the river delivers and only given away by its shadow - the fish's back is a very close match for the colour of the underlying rock.

Up on Chapel Fell the lapwings have finished nesting and are now forming flocks with their juveniles.

A walk around St. John's Chapel, Weardale

These pictures were taken at the end of June, during a walk from St.John's Chapel in Weardale onto the slopes of Chapel Fell, then down into Daddry Shield and back along the river Wear to St.John's Chapel. It's a great circular walk, with splendid views, and when you get to the highest point the only sounds come from wind, water and birds.

Down in the valley, at Harthope Burn, hawthorn was still in peak blossom - incredibly late this year.

The path up onto the fell is along a wide, stony track fringed with drifts of wood cranesbill, lady's mantle and cow parsley - a natural perennial herbaceous border. Garden designers at the Chelsea Flower Show spend a fortune trying to replicate this.

In the foreground, wood cranesbill; in the background fields full of buttercups which have produced a memorable spectacle this year. Poor grass growth in the late spring prevented farmers taking an early crop, so the buttercups and cow parsley in the meadows have benefited from a stay of execution.

When we reached the highest point on the walk we were briefly surrounded by a flock of swifts that treated us to a display of aerobatics. 

The last deciduous tree on the path up - a rowan, in full bloom. Legend has it that these were planted around farm houses to ward off witches.

Meadow pipits are one of the commonest birds in the high pastures

The last flowery meadow - above this elevation the pastures are rough grass and rushes.

The views into upper Weardale from here are stunning.

The lapwings had chicks so were keen to deflect our attention.

Back down in the valley, at Daddry Shiield, burnet rose was in full bloom. This is the first wild rose species to flower here in summer and by far the most fragrant.

A haymeadow, along the footpath beside the river Wear between Daddry Shield and St. John's Chapel.

Hay rattle is the characteristic wild flower in these old meadows.

Marsh orchids, flowering on the river bank.

A young rabbit, wondering whether to stay put or bolt for cover.

Snow-in-summer Cerastium tomentosum, tumbling over stone walls in St. John's Chapel.

A perfect summer day.