Clevedon Wildlife

 Sometimes the word dipping just cannot convey the experience of what, for many, is the ultimate in dips. I am talking about that special occasion which may only come once in a lifetime, You do not see the rarity you have travelled for                         " so what  !"   you say; that's common enough You do not see it even though it is there in front of you                           OK, that's a lot less common You cannot see it even though your friends are pointing out where it is to you for 4 minutes                         We are in Megadip territory now. You are uniquivocally   THE ONLY PERSON ON SITE WHO DOES NOT SEE THE BIRD                          Now this is ARMAGEDDIPPING And it happened...

 August is a great month for the waders to start to move South so, this morning, I took myself down to the seawall to have a look. We don't get big numbers but the birds can be relatively relaxed, especially after high tide and sometimes allow me to get close enough to get pictures with my bridge camera. Typically this also enables me to be pretty certain that no rarities are hiding among them. A drawback of having the world's second largest tides is that low tides mean waders are often too far away to actually see;  let alone check. A typical group of Ringed Plovers and Dunlin on the seawall Today, these happened to include a Sanderling, which is pretty uncommon here Later many of them hid in the grass and rocks inside the path For good measure today I got close to the Sanderling and a young Dunlin was more obliging than usual too Whilst trying to get a picture of the flock in flight I noticed two Knot among them, For once I was happy with my flight pictures which try to capt...

I read an article by Andy Mears a few days ago. In it, he mused about the chance of seeing 7 species of herons in a day on or around the Somerset levels. With the levels only a 40 min drive away and a place I visit every fortnight or so it seemed worth a try.  Its even trickier than I expected ! I naively thought that 5 or 6 would be very feasible as I knew that a purple heron could, with patience, be seen at Durleigh. I chose to leave that as a final bonus once I had seen all the regular 5 species and found my own rarity at ham wall. Things did not quite go to plan and I gave up after failing to see a bittern in about 6 straight hours of searching. In the end I only, actually connected with 3 species, Grey Heron, Little Egret and Great White Egret. The latter though put on a super display with my closest ever views. At Ham wall I spent an hour or two at the second platform where this flock of, mostly, Great Whites lounged about all morning They determinedly kept behind rushes and ...

 A visit to Priddy Mineries last week was ostensibly in search of dragonflies but the overcast weather put paid to that plan. Fortunately I was fortunate enough to bump into a couple of common lizards which allowed photos, though were a bit shy to show really well. The difference in colour  between them was striking. First this typically brownish individual. And then this wonderful green one Back home I have continued to run the moth trap, sporadically. I am still concerned about rain so choose dry nights. Highlights have been Oak Eggar Drinker And only the third Old Lady Moth I have ever seen I have genuinely tried to get more interested in the micros but have found it a bit of a struggle as I seem to only catch particularly dull ones.

 Paraphrasing Steve Hillage slightly but I did experience two wonderful sightings recently The first was Comet Neowise. I went out several times with mixed success for this and struggled to get an image with my camera any better than this Then my, more tech savvy, daughter told me how to use my phone for this. I was much happier with this picture taken to show the plough and the lights of Newport across the Severn with the comet above it.   The other sight was on a flying ant day. As normal on these occasions hundreds of ants were leaving the garden nests and disappearing into the sky. What was unique today though was that the sun's angle meant that swarms high in the air showed up as white patches. Each swarm was, presumable, a few queens surrounded by males while they flew higher and higher to test the fitness before choosing a mate. The swarms can be seen to be drifting from right to left way beyond the closer specks which are newly emerged  ants seeking height still. ...

For about 15 years I have regularly searched Willows and Sallows on the patch for emergence holes or, better still adult Lunar Hornet Clearwings. 15 years and not a sniff.... If only someone had produced the pheromone ?? And then suddenly word spread that a new pheromone lure had appeared and was being sold by ALS. Within an hour a friend of mine, Paul, had ordered one and plans were made. Two days later he received it, borrowed a trap from another patch entomologist and hung it in his garden. 40 minutes later the first patch record was under the belt.  Because of Covid we are not meeting at houses so the plan was to try the Gordano Valley the next morning where 3 of us could keep safely distanced. The first two spots we tried drew a blank along the main tracks so we headed to a likely looking tree. Bearing in mind that we had checked this very tree many times we still thought it a likely site and so Paul hung up the trap. Within 20 mins we had seen three different, individual, mot...

A decent South Westerly blow in summer always has the potential to produce a few manx shearwaters off Clevedon and my favourite watching point is Ladye Bay. The only problem is the extreme distance that they usually pass at. This shot shows the problem:  Look closely and you can just make out the green and yellow bouys that mark the deep channel which is typically what birds follow. Here is a close up of the closer buoy, the green one, Looking closely you can just make out a couple of manxies passing behind this bouy Once you get used to this range it is actually quite difficult to adjust to the much closer birds of the South Western coasts as they seem to go through the scope too quickly at first News of a probable Yelkouan shearwater off Portland was too good an oportunity to miss though and offered the first chance of the year to see numbers of Balearics. The superzoom came in handy and I tried to photograph every shearwater flying in the scrum just o...