Railway Land Live 2016

Apologies for the low number of wildlife observations posted for 2015, which usually focus on my garden and the surrounding area.
I have been heavily involved in a fantastic project called Railway Land Live based on the Lewes Railway Land Nature Reserve in East Sussex.

 

As part of the project we installed 4 webcams in the reserve, two above water and two underwater - streaming live images. The cams captured some amazing wildlife from grass snake and newt courtship to tench, heron and we also followed a family of moorhen.

As apart of the project we worked with local schools I also write regular updates on sightings for the website.

You can still see library clips and lots of other information on the website from 2016.


The project was funded by Heritage Lottery and the project has now started its second (and final in regards to funding) year.

We only have two of the live cams (because of essential winter maintenance) working at the moment but we will soon have all four cams working.


So while there might not be as many sightings reported on this weblog - there will be lots of exciting stuff to see through the Railway Land Live website. http://www.railwaylandlive.org/

Christmas Frogs

The sound of  a couple of croaking frogs in my garden, probably underneath the decking, near our pond.

Comma butterfly sunbathing

A very warm Sunday afternoon and I spotted this comma butterfly sunning itself on our flint wall.

The reason its called a comma is the small white comma shaped mark on the underside of its wings, but it looks a bit like a tatty battered tortoiseshell.

This butterfly overwinters as an adult and must build up their fat reserves to survive the winter. Idea site includes underneath the bark or a tree truck, log pile or maybe a garden shed.
tree trunk, log piles.

swallows

Large numbers of swallows and a few house martins flying low and fast over our garden. They came through in twos and threes.

This continued for about 10 minutes and then it poured with rain, so the swallows must have been racing ahead of the storm.

I often see house martins and swifts locally but swallows no longer appear to nest locally but I often see them on their return migration.

Juvenile slow worm

The pavement outside out garden had become quite overgrown with grass and other vegetation. 

I decided to clear the pavement and to my surprise found a very small slow worm curled up in one of the small clumps of grass I pulled up.

 

I carefully placed the clump of grass plus slow worm into a overgrown corner of the garden. My wife found a juvenile slow worm in the garden a few days ago and adult slow worms turn up every now and again.

Yellow field ant nuptial flight

Yellow field ant nuptial flight started at just after 6.00pm. I had noticed over the last couple of weeks that there were two very small soil piles made by any in the front garden and two on the grass verge outside of the garden.

I knew we had a small yellow field ant colony in our front garden, but far out numbered by the black ants. I first noticed the nuptial flight when a flying ant landed on the book I was reading.


I looked up and noticed a few more ants in the air.

The yellow ant flight was much smaller than the black ant nuptial flights reported earlier.

Fox and Pipistelle Bat

Just before 9.00am I noticed a fox hunting in the track. It traveled nose to the ground crossing the track and looking in the vegetation, slowly making its way towards our house. I quickly went inside to get my camera.

I knew the flash would probably cause the fox to head back up teh track so I waited until it was near enough to take a photo. 

The flash caused the fox to freeze and it looked in my direction, but not sure if it could see me as I kept myself in front of our brick wall. It turned slowly and trotted back up the track.

Foxes were quite common around our way and in previous years I have watched a couple of foxes on their nightly rounds, but I have not seen them for a couple of years, so great to see this fox.

Just after the fox had gone, I noticed the pipistrelle bats were also now on the wing. Again, I have been watching these bats hunting along the track for the last few years. There are lots of insects in the track and the bats may hunt for a 20 minutes or more before moving on. I watched them for a while then went inside.  

A short while later I went back out to check and as I suspected, the fox was back hunting again. I knew that my presence would only cause it to go away temporarily