These last few weeks have seen amazing aerobatic displays from hundreds of swallows, martins and swifts, zooming past at head height busy feeding up on insects after their long journey back from Africa. The one benefit of all this rain is that at least it makes the displays even more spectacular - in these conditions the insects keep low and so do the birds, hawking for them sometimes only feet from the ground. Visitors to the reserve may also have noticed clouds of these birds skimming the lagoons on some days, hunting for food. So what are they eating? At this time of year, we get big emergences of the adult stage of the chironomid (non-biting) midge's life cycle, and it is probably these that the birds are picking up. If you look closely in the cobwebs in the corners of the hide windows, you'll see lots of these tiny creatures, which make ideal food for the hirundines. Their larval stage lives in the mud at the bottom of the lagoons, and ultimately it's these that we are trying to manage the lagoons for, as they're also great food for all the waders. Lots of birds on the reserve depend on this tiny overlooked creature!
Swallow photo by Alan Rogers
This time of year is all about nests and young, and we've got a few lapwing broods, Canada goose goslings and mallard ducklings about, and the great crested grebes, in contrast to previous years, actually seem to be staying with their first nest rather than making several attempts. Fingers crossed they make it first time for once! The stoats have started to become much more active too, being seen most days by the Coffee Shop or by the car park entrance. And the really exciting news is that Ceri Morris from the Mammals in a Sustainable Environment (MISE) Project, who's been working with us looking at mammal populations on the reserve, caught some footage of two otters playing on the reserve on her trail camera. We regularly see spraint (droppings) round the reserve, but seeing the actual animals is much harder, and it's thanks to her persistence that she finally caught them on camera!
We still have a few migrants passing through though, with big numbers of wheatears on the Estuary Path last week, a few white wagtails still, a cuckoo on 4th May, a grasshopper warbler on 6th May, a yellow wagtail on 10th and 11th May, and up to 27 whimbrel on the estuary. High tides have also brought sandwich terns into the estuary to look for fish - they're most easily picked up by their distinctive rasping call, wonderfully described in the Collins Field Guide as "like pressing amalgam into a tooth"! Now there's a description that will stick in the mind.