Am in West Sussex close to the South Downs and this morning (Oct 1st) my garden was alive with swallow-type birds zooming about. Got a glimpse of one as it flashed by my window and it's breast looked white. I thought it was too late in the year for them to still be here. Can anybody say what they might have been? Maybe house martins? There were quite a lot of them.
We still had swifts up until a couple of weeks ago, but I've seen nothing of them since.
Wendy S said:Mike I've been contacting a neighbouring recorder and he has an old record from 1998 of Swallows fledging 0n 14th of Oct, this must have been a struggle to feed and the parents hunted a lot over the local water treatment works for fly life. It would interesting if we could have followed their fortunes when heading South
I find it incredible sometimes how resilient nature is.
There often still are insects around during the winter period, but they're obviously not as prolific to sustain a normal summertime population of birds to loosely use the definition. Ticks are quite active at temps down to and sometimes lower, than 3.5ºC!
With having Bells Palsy, most likely brought on by a tick would you believe during October 1998, I spent a lot of time getting to understand ticks and lymes disease from an outdoor perspective, how to correctly remove them and how to reduce the chances of them attaching themselves to me. Incidentally, that particular day I was wearing short sleeved shirt out on the hills, you will have seen that photo of myself with my two border collies in another post, that was taken in Snowdonia, late October 1998.
I had a quick look back at my weather data for October 1998, and while it won't be Yorkshire, we had what looked like a mild and dry October that year.
Michael B said:
Ticks are quite active at temps down to and sometimes lower, than 3.5ºC!
They are bad this year - ai keep finding the little swine on the dog and he can't have tic preventative due to thyroid issues