It’s not been long since my last recent sightings blog, thanks to my last post being 3 days late (sorry about that!). Not a lot has changed bird wise but I’ve plenty of butterflies to tell you about!
Birds up first - on New Flash you can see wood sandpiper, black-tailed godwit and snipe. A barn owl has also been seen over the flashes. At Lin Dike there are both adult and juvenile little ringed plovers to look out for! Some of the raptors seen this week include sparrow hawk, kestrel and red kites.
The avocet chicks are doing well – the two at Pickup are looking almost like proper little avocets and the ones at the duck platform are still entertaining visitors!
On to the butterflies! There are loads of different ones around at this time of year; I’m a bit bonkers for butterflies so I absolutely love it! We’ve had 13 species recorded this week at Fairburn, which isn’t too bad when you think there’s only 59 resident species in the UK.
Some of this week’s highlights include ringlets, meadow browns and gatekeepers. These butterflies are often seen together, but the meadow brown dominates in terms of numbers (183 recorded yesterday!). It’s lovely to be able to go on a nice summer walk and see hundreds of butterflies flying all around you.
Ringlet - Tallulah Gullett
Gatekeeper - Tallulah Gullett
Skippers are an interesting group of butterflies which are named for their rapid flight and we have both small and large skippers out at the minute. Small skippers can be seen darting among the vegetation or basking in that distinctive skipper fashion. Large skippers can often be found taking advantage of the warm weather by perching in a nice sunny spot.
It's a terrible photo but you can kinda see how skippers rest their wings! - Tallulah Gullett
Also recorded this week, there’ve been commas (check out their ragged edges!), red admirals, speckled woods, green veined whites, large whites, common blues, brimstones and small tortoiseshells.
Brimstone - Tallulah Gullett
Comma - Grahame Madge (rspb-images.com)
Red admiral - Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)
Small tortoiseshell - Grahame Madge (rspb-images.com)
I could go on about butterflies for ages, but it's so much better to get out and see them for yourself especially while we're enjoying some lovely weather!