Literate herring, this way.: A bit of birding.

Tuesday 8 March 2022

A bit of birding.

I do go birding most days and check the 1km patch at least. The other day I was feeling a bit rubbish and after mucking out the pony gave it a miss. I'd a good Birdtrack list for the previous day. There have been some nice low tides in the afternoon in the last week so afternoon I headed out to mooch about on the shore. More of those things later. I got home just after five, light fading, looked at the birding What'sApp. "Pale-bellied Brent Goose, The Shunan" an hour earlier. Expletive! That's a patch tick. Scooted down the track at double speed and there it was, in virtually the same place as the last patch tick, which I also didn't find (although that was by a matter of seconds).

Pale-bellied Brent Goose, with Greylags.

I was pretty sure I'd checked the geese in the fields thoroughly the previous day. And it certainly wasn't here yesterday, it had gone, so I guess I shouldn't feel too bad about it and accept the tick for the patch. Slightly irritating though as very few other folk come birding here and it was visible from the kitchen window if I'd picked up the bins and scanned the geese. Perhaps it arrived while I was out? Or not.

In the bird world spring is arriving apace. Black-headed and Lesser Black-backs are present daily. There are two pairs of Shelduck on The Shunan, at least three pairs of Pintail, a pair of Gadwall and Red-breasted Mergs and Tufted are investigating. Song Thrush has appeared and is singing. Yesterday there was a Lesser redpoll on the feeders. The Chaffinch / Brambling flock is dissapating but there are still up to 40 or so hanging around, some around the feeders and some in the hawthorn hedge or down on the Bosquoy stubble where there continue to be at least 80 Skylark, although they are spreading out and singing, they'll be gone soon. Follows gratuitous images of garden birds taken through the boiler room door window.

Brambling, male, one AL ringed months earlier I'm guessing.

Chaffinch, female.

Lesser Redpoll, male.

Starling, female.

The 365 challenge is moving along ok (to find and photograph 365 species new to me between 24/12/2021 and 23/12/2022). I have a fair bit of data to add to iRecord with folk generously helping with ID of seashore things and Bryophytes (thanks especially BH). I've also been pursuing lichen ID a bit further. I'll get my iRecord data up to date shortly and then see where I stand, bearing in mind I'm 74 days in. Sometimes when I go through photos I find things I'd not really noticed in the field or had just taken a couple of casual pix of without much thought. A few seaweeds have been added by doing that. A photo I sent off to a marine expert came back with comments about a species I hadn't noticed in the field and hadn't seen for myself in the image, I now need to go back to the site to see if I can find it again and photograph it properly.

Some of the more interesting things are pictured below.

The liverwort, Conocephalum conicum. There is another similar species that is a split that also occurs here.

A goose barnacle that might be the less common Lepas anserifera, slightly tricky ID. Note all the Hydroid strands around it. Found on a yoghurt tub that has come all the way across the Atlantic.

The yoghurt tub was in a bag of rubbish we had cleaned off the Borwick beach. Louise must have picked this one up. I went through the bag for recycle/not recycle before we went to the tip the other day (let's not get into why we don't use the refuse collection "service", and the tip is on the way for the fortnightlyish shop), and bingo.

The previous Sea Lemon (a nudibranch) Louise found was moribund, so I went back to Borwick and found another. Again it was on a rock, so following advice I popped it in the water.

Back at the Links beach a further nosy around revealed this weird and wonderful creature.

Phyllodoce mucosa or maculata, unfortunately the photo doesn't show the key ID feature.

I really had no idea what this was. However, various folk made suggestions and a paddleworm with an egg mass was suggested. Someone suggested a particular species pair and with a bit of research I thought that suggestion was correct. I'm still unsure if this is an adut worm with its eggs or a juvenile worm with its egg food source which it will injest before becoming truly independant. I needed to photograph the head to get a specific ID so it can't be counted in the 365 but a fascinating thing nonetheless.

I've found the lichen that was new for the county the other week at another site now. There is at least a third species in the genus that does occur here, I'm unsure where to look for that one, I don't think it occurs on mollusc or crustacean shells, although it might do. I might have images of it already of course, further research required.

Three species here, the barnacle Semibalanus balanoides, the lichen Collemopsidium fovealatum and the one I found new for the county the other week Collemopsidium sublitorale, with the larger black perithecia. I'm a bit like Osi Umenyiora with this 2x and 3x (NFL joke).

Here's a moss to finish off with. It lives underwater largely in fast flowing burns which is an interesting niche, and a surprising one I think.