Bird

All of us who work on Norfolk Wildlife Trust's education team believe that contact with nature has the power to help anyone and everyone. We work with schools, we work with families, we work with adults, we work with people with severe mental illness, and today Gemma and I worked with prisoners at Wayland Prison.

Things began well. As Gemma opened the door of her posh, liveried NWT vehicle I heard crossbills flying by. In fact the whole day, the first of three we're spending there this week, was great. Today we were talking bugs. We pitfall-trapped, we pond-dipped, we sweep-netted, we made solitary bee nestboxes, we identified and we laughed.

It's a cheap point to make but what touched us most was the concern these tough blokes, all of whom have fallen foul of the law, showed for even the tiniest wild animals. Each bug was gently studied and returned to its habitat. When a dopey young hedgehog was found in the long grass it was lovingly picked up and put in a quiet corner in a box.

So it was that, at the end of the day, I found myself heading west towards King's Lynn to take the hapless hedgepig to the RSPCA's East Winch Wildlife Centre. The NWT education team has a great relationship with the wildlife hospital and we've often worked together at events, including several behind-the-scenes tours, with a chance to feed seal pups, for our junior members and our volunteers. The hedgehog, not the first sickly specimen I've taken there, was duly weighed and admitted and, in response to a request from the prisoners, I kept his case number so that we can find out how the little fellow fares. So much for hard men.

The A47 between Swaffham and Lynn was ablaze with flower: stands of delicate pink musk mallow and tussocks of brasher common mallow, fields of sharp mustardy wild parsnip and - a perfect chromatic foil - clumps of dusky grey-blue field scabious.

Reaching home, as every day through the high summer, I saw turtle doves outside Morisson's: this evening a male parachuting in display from a street lamp and another flicking across the bypass. It's rumoured that the founders of this colony were released by a local breeding project. I'm not a fan of unplanned releases but, released or otherwise, I count myself lucky to see turtle doves every day of the summer.

I added a new vertebrate to my list today, illegally. Dipping the wildlife pond at Wayland Prison we caught a splendid smooth newt, plus many newtpoles. Then one of the prisoners yelled that he'd caught a crocodile. It was a great crested newt, a first for the pond. Not having a licence to handle GCNs we quickly returned this spectacular animal to its habitat and beat a hasty - legally required - retreat.

It doesn't do to fall foul of the law, especially in a prison.

New at Wayland Prison today

	Amphibians
7	great crested newt	Triturus cristatus

2012 Totals

Mammals: 79

Birds: 843

Reptiles: 19

Amphibians: 7

Fish: 6

Weed tweets

On Thursday and today I taught beginners' wildflower (a.k.a. weed) courses for Norfolk Wildlife Trust in Thetford and King's Lynn. How chuffed I was to see on Twitter that one of my Thetford victims had enjoyed herself. Thank you Sarah for coming, for contributing, for tweeting, and for allowing me to retweet you here. We look forward to seeing you at more NWT workshops.

Sarah's first weed tweet (a quiver of anticipation in her tweeting fingers)

Sarah's second weed tweet (the thrill of conquest, of mastery of the Lamiaceae, coursing through her tweet-digit)

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Later:

Sarah's response to her marsh tit immortalisation

Of falcons and tiercels

These two nights past, Rebecca and I have seen two plays enacted in our cathedral's cloister: The Tempest and The Taming of the Shrew. In the sky above these dramas another drama: the shrieking, hurling, shouting, sky-rending of our welcome peregrines. The male, the female, their daughter and their son.

Petruchio (Act IV scene i):
My falcon now is sharp and passing empty.
And till she stoop she must not be full-gorg’d,
For then she never looks upon her lure.

William Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew

Since last we spoke

1)    On Saturday morning – briefly and unwontedly – I saw a sky-blue-sky. Westwards as I drove, I came upon a flowering flax-field on a hill and for a moment it seemed as though the blue had come to earth to ask forgiveness for its absence.

2)    I was driving west to King’s Lynn to teach a workshop on grasshoppers and bush-crickets for Norfolk Wildlife Trust. Of all the workshops I teach in the UK, this one on Orthoptera (sometimes taught with my good friend DTH) is the most fun. Orthoptera are cute, Orthoptera are ignored by most naturalists (so you always sound really clever if you know them), there are manageably few species of them, and – best of all – most of them make identifiable noises; so if you’re a birder, accustomed to finding or surveying birds by sound, they’re a slam dunk. (Did the basketball reference there make me sound like a hip orthopterist?) We had a great time on our workshop and, despite a diluvian burst of rain and the fact that ‘hoppers are all weeks behind schedule, thanks to this dreadful summer, we saw early instars of three species: dark bush-cricket, lesser marsh grasshopper and a conehead (by habitat – coastal grasses – most likely short-winged but with such youngsters it’s impossible to be sure).

3)    Yesterday the grasshopper warbler was still singing outside my house.

4)    As I drove to the Brecks this morning, I saw, for the first time this year, some of nature's startling colours, intensified by the tin-grey sky: the mulled-wine blooms of musk thistle; the not-green-not-yellow umbels of wild parsnip; the lent-from-heaven blue of viper’s bugloss; and the joyful scarlet of common poppy.

5)    I pulled in at NWT Weeting Heath to see whether I could spot a stone curlew. These wonderful weirdos are often tricky to find but, opening the slats of the hide, I saw ten gathered before me on the bunny-scuffed breck. Superb! (A note on taxonomy: earlier in the year I saw Indian stone curlews in, well, India. These used to be considered the same species as ours but are now generally regarded as a beast in their own right. So 842 birds for the year.)

6)    I’d agreed to meet Beth, from Discovery Quest, in the car park of the RSPB’s heartening Lakenheath Fen reserve for another day of work on the DQ workbook. All around the car park cinnabar caterpillars clung to ragwort clumps and both dove’s-foot cranesbill and common stork’s-bill flowered in profusion. The trails were lined with massive frothy stands of hemlock and everywhere, like gastropod garnet and amber, were brown-lipped banded snails. As I pointed to a poplar wood, explaining to Beth that this was among the only nesting sites in the UK for golden orioles, I saw a dazzling yellow and black bird. A male! He was closely followed by his female. With juvenile marsh harriers all around (the exact colour of Green and Black’s 85% cocoa chocolate), and a Cetti's warbler plinking cheerily, we were thoroughly delighted. Here too were cuckoos, a hobby, mating blue-tailed damselflies, a female banded demoiselle and lovely lurid spikes of purple loosestrife.

7)  In the afternoon we walked nearby at NWT East Wretham Heath. Two little owls swooped across our path, setting the long-tailed tits trilling in alarm. Small heath butterflies – my first of 2012 – fidgeted over the closely-cropped sward and mild blue bugloss flowered.

8)    At Lakenheath I spied a tiny whitish legume which I didn’t know. Never one to leave a weed unknown, I resolved to look it up. On reaching home I grabbed my flora, which fell open – mirabile dictu – at the requisite page. Page 219 of 544. The plant was rough clover Trifolium scabrum, described as mostly coastal but present in the East Anglian Brecklands (I can vouch for the latter). Last year at Lakenheath I found bur medick for the first time, so it’s clearly a great site for obscure Breckland legumes (I know, I know: I really ought to get out more).

New in the Brecks today

	Birds
842	stone curlew	Burhinus oedicnemus
843	golden oriole	Oriolus oriolus

2012 Totals

Mammals: 79

Birds: 843

Reptiles: 19

Amphibians: 6

Fish: 6

naevia

A grasshopper warbler sings outside my house tonight; and more rain comes.

Torched

This afternoon I, foolishly, drove into town just as the Olympic Torch Relay passed through. I'd forgotten all about it and, in the sweaty heat and humidity of our damp un-summer, I started to fume. Then, once the buses and the police motorcyclists had passed and the traffic again began to inch through the streets, came the people: hundreds of people, old and young, with bright smiles and Union Jacks, with dogs wagging tails and mouths telling tales of a once-in-a-lifetime event.

(All of them, incidentally, held together by the Higgs boson. Or so it seems.)

Our simple, grubby little town wore a smile today. And I thought to myself, what a wonderful world.

In the pink

Since my return from Bolivia five years ago, the most fulfilling, meaningful project on which I've worked has been Discovery Quest. This is a programme for people with severe mental health problems, which was conceived by Paul Lefever, and which has its logistical home at Julian Support. Its aim is for participants, many of whose lives are severely disrupted by their conditions, to grow in physical and mental health through a series of walks in the outdoors. I have been privileged to be involved since the start of Discovery Quest's first round of funding, as a nature enthusiast, birdsong-identifier, weed-spotter and co-walker. It has been a wonderful, rewarding experience.

A couple of years ago, in a hide at NWT Holme Dunes, Paul asked me whether I would take on a much bigger project: the writing and delivery of a course on Norfolk's wildlife and wild landscapes for Discovery Quest participants. I leapt at the chance and the result, supported by David North at Norfolk Wildlife Trust and many others, and sensitively designed by Paul Westley, was the Discovery Quest Wildlife Workbook. Of the many things I have written about wildlife in many places in the world it is the single thing of which I am proud.

I'm proud because it observably helps people: people who lead challenging, tumultuous lives, who are marginalised and misunderstood and who, in most cases, have no opportunity to get to know Norfolk's extraordinary wildlife. It was for them that Paul conceived it, it was for them I wrote it, and it was for them that Paul so beautifully designed it.

Recently Paul Lefever called to say that Discovery Quest had received a second round of funding, for a new programme with the workbook at its heart, through which people will have the opportunity to explore Norfolk's wild places and take part in simple creative activities in response to them. My role in the new project is to help my DQ colleagues, Bethan and Katie, as they prepare to deliver the workbook to participants.

Today, under a grey sky, with a promise of rain, we met on Holt Lowes to talk heaths. The Lowes have long been one of my favourite spots for watching Norfolk's wildlife. Here a family of NWT's Dartmoor ponies helps preserve the heath's flora and fauna by grazing, in exactly the way in which livestock has unwittingly managed heaths through centuries. Here were the ghastly red strings of dodder, sucking the life from gorse, and the feathery fronds of wood horsetail in shady corners. Here too were common spotted orchids, greater bird's-foot trefoil, heath bedstraw, ragged robin and round-leaved sundew in flower. A female keeled skimmer brushed her brittle wings through the gorse, a woodlark sang his tragic plaint in the clouds, and it was good to be sharing this beautiful heath with Katie and Beth.

From here we moved to Kelling Heath where silver-studded blues sprited through waves of purple moor grass and large skippers pinged around the blooms of brambles. Common blue damselflies sat in the sun, common green grasshoppers sang their sewing-machiney songs (a month late but after the summer we've had who can blame them?), and the tiny tissue-paper flowers of heath milkwort lined the dusty edges of the track.

On a verge nearby, where every year at this time I pay homage to the one maiden pink I know in North Norfolk, a single flower shone. Peru was spectacular but it's lovely to be back where I belong.

Maiden pink by Bethan Wardale