Langford Lowfields

This morning's sightings...

2013-05-22T12:58:53Z

I had a good half hour by the woodland this morning on the way back from my Breeding Bird Survey. A few insects have emerged (finally!) and in the cool of the morning, were slow enough to photograph - here are the day's images....

These are the larvae of Gastrophysa viridula - the green dock beetle. I was just thinking the other day that I hadn't seen an adult yet this spring, I must have missed them!

Panorpa germanica/communis - a scorpion fly, this is a female and so isn't identifiable to species level without microscopic examination.

The first red and black froghopper of the year, or Cercopis vulnerata to be scientific. One of the largest froghoppers in the UK and certainly one of the most colourful.

Anthophila fabriciana, the nettle-tap. Common and widespread day-flying micro moth.

This rather excellent looking creature is a weevil of the Genus Curculio - further examiniation needed to determine the species. The large rostrum is obvious in this specimen.

And finally a couple of soldier beetles (Cantharidae), the first of the year and starting with Cantharis nigricans

and Rhagonycha limbata

Also today were the first Athous haemorrhoidalis (Elateridae - click beetles), Phyllobius pomaceous/pyri (a weevil) and a stunning looking robberfly (Asilidae) and bird wise, a whimbrel was on the old silt lagoon 7, 28 reed warblers were singing, the two young oystercatchers on Phase 1 are still doing well and there are three cuckoos singing across the site.

In-flight photography course

2013-05-16T20:31:22Z

The following course has been advertised on the Derbyshire Natural History Yahoo chat group and may be of interest to some of you:

Paul Shaw is running an adult education course about taking photos of birds in flight this Sunday (10.30 to 4pm) at Carsington for DWT. There will be a falconer present with birds for people to photograph. The cost is £50 and there are still a few places left I'm told.
Booking essential: ring the DWT office 01773 881188 before the end of play (4.30 pm) on Friday (tomorrow).

Incredible insects

2013-05-16T16:11:35Z

Regular readers of this blog and of our social media feeds on Twitter and Facebook will remember the promise of some photos from last week of the day's insect finds. Well, here we go starting with the first Adela reaumurella (longhorn moth) of the year, by the woodland....

Chrysolina fastuosa, one of the leaf beetles (Chrysomelidae), there were numerous individuals on white dead-nettle around the woodland edge - beautiful insects. It is a scarce species here in Nottinghamshire.

And finally, this garden tiger moth caterpillar was in the polytunnel - what a fantastic creature! This species has declined massively in the last 30-40 years, but there is still a good population here at Langford.

Today's WeBS and more....

2013-05-16T15:44:53Z

It was Wetland Bird Survey (WeBS) time again today and many thanks to volunteer Stuart Carlton for doing the survey for us! Here are Stuart’s results –

35 tufted duck

33 mallard

9 gadwall

6 shelduck

4 pochard

2 shoveler

1 teal

20 greylag goose

19 canada goose

60 coot

3 moorhen

5 grey heron

4 little egret

19 great crested grebe

12 mute swan

11 lapwing

6 oystercatcher

6 ringed plover

2 little ringed plover

1 redshank

1 black-tailed godwit

4 cormorant

12 black-headed gull

3 common tern

Also on site today were 2 hobby’s, a male wheatear, yellow wagtail, my first blue damselfly of the year (a distant teneral, so no species ID!) and a mass emergence of Sialis lutaria (alderfly) – they were everywhere on Phase 1 this morning! It's nice to see the first chicks of the year too, with two young oystercatchers on Phase 1 and two broods of mallard ducklings on the balancing pond and Phase 1.

Who won this year?

2013-05-08T09:15:43Z

Volunteer Sunday was upon us once again last weekend and what a glorious day we had for some site maintenance tasks in the morning, followed by the annual bird race in the afternoon. 9 people arrived bright and early for some polytunnel work, car park and footpath maintenance.

It is that time of year again, when the polytunnel starts to need lots of maintenance including weeding, watering and seeding. All five propagation bays are full at the moment with growing shoots and they are looking fantastic. Whilst filling the bays with water, the group weeded more than a bay’s worth of plugs and removed all the weeds from the polytunnel itself – a great effort and the place looks so much better! Weeding is important as it reduces the competition for space, nutrients, light and water, allowing the reeds to grow healthily ready for planting or sale.

The car park area has had a bit of a make over too, with the white lining redone and the area swept and leveled out. The public footpath too requires maintenance and cutting back the over growing vegetation makes it much easier for visitors to use. A couple of great jobs – thanks to all involved.

And to the annual bird race! Two teams competed this year, aiming to record the most bird species on site throughout the afternoon. Almost 60 species were seen in total including hobby, yellow wagtail, grey partridge, 8 species of warbler, ringed plover and dunlin. But, we are a competitive lot and as we reconvened at the end of the afternoon, the big question was….who had won? After a tense few minutes, it was revealed that the winning total was 55 species, seen by Barrington, Sue, Mark, Will and my good self!

Well done to all and thanks for a very enjoyable day.

Tumbling lapwings

2013-05-02T12:45:51Z

Each year I usually get the opportunity to go up to our reserve at Beckingham Marshes near Gainsborough to do a breeding bird survey. So, this morning I made my way up there, arriving on site for 07.00 on a beautiful, sunny spring morning – albeit with a definite chill in the air.

I don’t usually get the chance to see the reserve at this time in the morning and very pleasant it was too, with displaying lapwings, singing skylarks and tree sparrows chirping away from the hedgerows. In total I saw four pairs of lapwing on site, with their distinctive tumbling flight and ‘peewit’ call. 12 skylarks were singing and I was treated to an excellent song flight by a meadow pipit, flying up and descending back to it’s fence post perch.

Whitethroat, reed bunting, blackcap and yellowhammer were also singing away and there was a pair of shelduck and a pair of shoveler on the wet scrapes. Beckingham has a healthy population of tree sparrows and they can be heard calling from many of the boundary hedgerows – they were certainly in full voice this morning as I made my way down the visitor trail to the viewing platform.

Back at Langford, the good birds are still showing well, with a female marsh harrier over Phase 2 yesterday morning and a wood sandpiper on Phase 2 today – thanks to volunteer Graham Gamage for the record. Our lapwings and little ringed plovers are displaying too and can be seen from the viewing screen on Phase 1.

Unfortunately however, my butterfly transect wasn’t as successful yesterday, with only 15 individuals recorded, on what was a warm, sunny and still afternoon. For the 1^st May, this isn’t very good at all to say the least! Species recorded were peacock, small tortoiseshell, brimstone, green-veined white and my first orange-tip of the year, a beautiful male on the public footpath near the woodland. And I haven’t had any more joy in re-finding our potentially rare hoverfly – so please keep looking!

Hairy hoverfly

2013-04-30T14:23:38Z

After a relatively quiet start to the Breeding Bird Survey season, the warblers have finally started to descend on us in numbers and this morning’s survey was alive with song!

From the office to silt lagoon 6, we recorded 18 sedge warbler, 11 reed warbler, 3 chiffchaff, 4 willow warbler, 6 whitethroat and a lesser whitethroat. This number should increase too over the coming weeks, with a while to go to reach last year’s totals of 41 singing reed warblers and 28 sedge warblers – I hope we will get there soon!

Other bird news includes a lovely party of 10 ringed plover on Phase 1 yesterday afternoon, my first glimpse of a cuckoo along the public footpath by the viewing screen and dunlin on silt lagoon 7.

Frustratingly, insects are still rather scarce at the moment. I had my first green-veined white butterflies yesterday on the public footpath near the woodland, along with a few peacocks and a small tortoiseshell, but no speckled wood, orange-tip or holly blue, which I would expect any day now.

A new ladybird species for the site was on Cottage Lane yesterday, a pine ladybird, or Exochomus quadripustulatus to be scientific. A small species, black in colour, with usually four red spots, the front two shaped like comma’s. It is a fairly common and widespread species in England and feeds on other invertebrates.

And finally, a bit of potentially exciting news about hoverflies! I found an interesting looking specimen yesterday on the public footpath at woodland edge. Obviously a bumblebee mimic, the insect was round in shape and furry, with a black base colour, white tail and two yellow bands. On investigation, I think this is Pocota personata – a species with a very southern distribution and rare this far north, with only scattered records from Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire in recent years. I didn’t manage a photo unfortunately, so please keep your eyes open along the stretch of woodland edge on the footpath and do let us know if you see one!

Bird bonanza

2013-04-26T14:20:03Z

Spring has to be my favourite time of year, with everything coming to life and the potential for anything to turn up! It’s been rather good at Langford this week, so here are some of our recent sightings….

2 whimbrel

2 common tern

2 swift

2 red kite

4 wheatear

1 tree pipit

20+ yellow wagtail

1 blue headed wagtail

2-3 white wagtail

14 sedge warbler

1 reed warbler

18 whitethroat

2 lesser whitethroat

6 blackcap

4 chiffchaff

10 willow warbler

6 ringed plover

3 dunlin

1 common sandpiper

Sparrow study

2013-04-23T09:56:50Z

Have you made an early morning visit to our viewing screen recently? If you have then you may well have come across staff and volunteers bird ringing. The concept of ringing is over 100 years old and has been in operation in the UK since 1909, when the first two schemes were started by Aberdeen University and British Birds (the well known ornithological journal, which began life in 1907). Since then, ringing has grown tremendously and now, under the expert coordination of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), there are around 2500 volunteer ringers in the UK.

Ringing involves fitting a unique numbered metal to the leg of a bird, with specific sizes available depending on the leg size of each species. The number of each bird is logged, as well as it’s species, age and sex, wing length and weight, before the bird is released unharmed. Each ringer is rigorously trained and highly skilled and is licensed to ring by Natural England under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

Originally the aim of ringing was to help us understand where migratory birds went in the winter, however now the aims are much wider and indeed ringing can provide for us information that simply could not be gained any other way. This includes details such as longevity, lifecycles, survival, mortality rates and causes, migratory routes and phenology. Valuable information such as this is then used to influence the conservation of bird species and the habitats they depend on – not just in the UK, but abroad too.

Here at Langford, we have been operating our ringing scheme since December 2012 and aim to investigate survival rates of our tree sparrow population breeding in nestboxes on Phase 1. Tree sparrows suffered a c.95% decline between the 1970’s – 1990’s, a catastrophic loss. In recent years they have begun a comeback in some areas, but are still scarce or even absent from large parts of their former range in England. They also happen to be my favourite bird!

Four years ago there were no tree sparrows at Langford, but after winter feeding and the provision of nestboxes, they have colonised and bred for the first time in 2010, followed by 9 pairs in 2012, rearing 20 young. Each nestling was ringed as a chick and it is the survival of these chicks that we are looking at, along with the retention of adult breeding birds and recruitment of new adult birds to our population. This work should provide an insight into the effectiveness of our conservation methods for tree sparrows and help us to improve what we are doing for them.

So far we have ringed two tree sparrows on Phase 1, but it is still early days and we hope to see more as the months go on. The good news is that the birds are starting to build in our nestboxes too, so fingers crossed for another successful breeding season! Keep an eye on our blog over the coming months for updates on our tree sparrow ringing scheme….

Many thanks go to volunteers John and Keith for their assistance with our tree sparrow ringing.

For more information about bird ringing, please visit www.bto.org and go to the ringing pages, or phone the office on 01636 893611 and speak to Michael or Jenny.

It's alive!

2013-04-22T15:57:00Z

After a good few days holiday in Dorset, I’ve just come back to news of more and more migrants pouring onto site. This morning the Phase 1 scrub was alive with singing birds, with willow warblers, chiffchaffs and blackcaps in full voice. After the first sedge warbler of the year on Tuesday last week, silt lagoon 6 is now full of them, posing a good challenge for the Breeding Bird Survey tomorrow morning!

And so what is new….our volunteers Julie, John, Graham and Stuart have had an excellent weekend with first records of reed warbler, grasshopper warbler, whitethroat and lesser whitethroat. That is almost our full compliment of warblers on site, with 9 out of the 10 species that breed here now in residence. Only garden warbler left to go!

Also over the weekend we were visited by Derbyshire Ornithological Society, who were given a guided walk by Warden, Paul and treated to another 2013 first, a hobby over the silt lagoons.

The sand martin bank is once again proving very popular, for the second year running. After witnessing the first holes being excavated last Monday morning, there are now well over 100 on the go, with birds swarming all over the sandy face – from a distance looking like a swarm of insects, a truly amazing sight.

However, despite all this, where are the insects? It is still very quiet in the insect world at the moment, even though temperatures are starting to rise. Two or three butterflies a day seems to be the norm, with a few species of beetles and a couple of species of hoverfly including the large and conspicuous Eristalis tenax.

I haven’t seen any Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) yet, at a time when we would be expecting the first large red and azure damsels to be flying on warm days.

After the poor breeding season last year and the prolonged flooding over winter, it will be interesting to see what happens this summer - watch this space!

And hot off the press - after an afternoon out on Phase 2 today, we have found a beautiful blue headed wagtail, or Motacilla flava flava, amongst around 20 yellow wagtails (Motacilla flava flavissima!) - excellent!

Discover Langford Lowfields - Sunday 14th April

2013-04-16T08:53:30Z

Last Sunday saw 14 people attend the second of this year's 'Discover Langford Lowfields' guided walks. The weather was so bad during the March walk that only two brave souls attended that one. Therefore, I was buoyed by the weather forecast for last Sunday predicting sunshine and a temperature of 19 degrees centigrade. The forecast turned out to be accurate, however, I wasn't expecting to have to deal with gale force winds creating the most challenging conditions that I've ever had to lead a guided walk in!

I struggled to make myself heard as our visitors leant into the wind to hear me, that's if they weren't chasing after their hats or having to turn out of the wind to avoid having there faces sand blasted!

Despite all of this, we saw a nice variety of early spring migrants such as yellow wagtails, white wagtails and little ringed plovers, as well as numerous sand martins swarming all over the recently renovated sand martin bank.

'Discover Langford Lowfields' guided walks are held on the second Sunday of every month and dates can be found on our web page.

Calling all newt experts

2013-04-15T15:03:46Z

Regular readers will have read about our little newt found in the polytunnel a few weeks ago. Well, we managed to find another one (or the same one?) last Friday and this time had the camera! So, can anyone assist us with it's identification? It was around 55mm long (I suspect not fully grown) and had no spotting at all on the underside of the throat or belly. I've read that the key is in the orange line that runs down the newt's back - all the way onto the tail for palmate newt, part way for smooth newt. I suspect this is a smooth newt, Lissotriton vulgaris. Let us know your thoughts....

And safely returned to the water!

Warm weather WeBS

2013-04-15T13:26:06Z

I never stop talking about the weather! It was nice to do a WeBS (Wetland Bird Survey) in warm sunshine today though, something which hasn't happened for some time! Here are this morning's results....

122 tufted duck, 82 mallard, 15 teal, 9 gadwall, 1 pochard, 1 goldeneye, 21 mute swan, 13 canada goose, 4 greylag goose, 2 shelduck, 70 coot, 1 moorhen, 5 little egret, 3 grey heron, 6 great crested grebe, 5 little ringed plover, 1 ringed plover, 3 oystercatcher, 3 lapwing, 1 redshank, 1 green sandpiper, 2 snipe, 2 cormorant.

And some photos from this morning....

My first comma of 2013 - there were two together on the public footpath near the woodland.

Bombylius major, a bee fly, fantastic little insects - members of the Order Diptera (True Flies).

Pied shieldbug, or Tritomegas bicolor - there were lots of these among the emerging nettles by the woodland.

The green shieldbug, or Palomena prasina, this species loses it's green colouration in the winter, regaining it again in the spring - this individual is yet to turn green.

Bombus pascuorum, the common ginger bumblebee - my first of the year by the silt lagoons.

It's about time!

2013-04-15T12:38:00Z

I set off to do a Breeding Bird Survey in bright sunshine and 11C this morning, albeit with a strong south westerly blowing! I was hopeful, since this was the warmest morning this spring and I wasn’t disappointed.

My first new migrants of the year were two arctic terns flying over the public footpath just as I left the office – a brilliant start to the morning and my first arctic terns on site since May 2010! Next was a singing willow warbler on the public footpath near the woodland – the first of 8 singing on site. This was accompanied by 2 chiffchaffs, whose numbers increased to 4 by the end of the survey.

Phases 1 and 2 were full of hirundines, with all three species well represented and my first house martins of 2013. And the flood damaged sand martin bank was repaired just in time, with the birds swarming around it and about 40 holes on the go already! Phase 2 also produced my first yellow wagtails of the year this morning too, with four individuals feeding with three white wagtails.

Little ringed plovers, lapwings and oystercatchers were all present on Phase 1 and the old silt lagoon, a pair of jays flew from the woodland towards the silt lagoons and 3 lesser redpolls feeding on larch cones in the woodland provided a taste of winter still lingering.

And….some insects! My first Bombylius major (bee fly) of 2013 was flying on the woodland edge and basking in sunshine giving a brilliant view – what a fantastic looking creature. A tawny mining bee too was enjoying this warm sheltered spot, basking on an old umbellifer stem. A peacock butterfly flew out from some emerging nettles and plenty of bumblebees were on the wing, including Bombus terrestris and Bombus lapidarius. And with one flying at 06.50 this morning, it must be spring – about time!

Spot the little green beetle

2013-04-09T15:47:51Z

I found this metallic green ground beetle on Phase 2 this afternoon whilst looking for green tiger beetles. No tigers, but this little chap was a nice find. Look out for an ID later on in the week.