Winter is coming

What with the cold, the wind and the hour change this weekend, I reckon we’re all of the same mind: time to get out the winter layers. The wildlife activity on the reserve over the last couple of weeks confirms that we’re drawing into the final stage of the year. Now my fingers have warmed up enough to type, here’s what’s been going on...

The starlings are building in number locally. Last weekend our Wildlife Explorers club met late in the afternoon to make bird feeders and then come along to watch them roost - or that's what we hoped, without much faith in the likelihood of their cooperation! Astoundingly, the birds turned up right on cue with a flock of about 2,500-3,000 swirling round the lakes and streaming right over our heads, with a spectacular glowing orange sunset for backdrop.

Early one morning a colleague saw at least 15,000 heading north over Needingworth. Other evenings there have been groups of a few thousand birds again moving between the lakes as if undecided as to where they’ll settle. If and when they start to roost consistently we’ll update the note on our main website.

Image: Starlings by Steve Dobromylski

Meanwhile, don’t overlook the rookery in the trees north of the car park. The dark chuckling rooks which gather here at dusk from all points of the compass are a spectacle themselves, and right now more reliable than the starlings!

Fieldfares and redwings, our winter thrushes, are now gathering and feeding in flocks along hedgerows and in the fields. After their journey from the north our berry crop is a welcome feast. Listen out for the fieldfares’ loud chucking calls and the redwings’ soft, thin ‘seeip’ as they fly over.

There were also ten goldeneyes around the lakes yesterday. This is a handsome duck which has also just joined us from northern Europe, where in the spring and summer they breed in the taiga, the boreal forests you find beyond our familiar temperate forests but before you reach tundra (roughly 50-70°N).

Last weekend our first bittern of the season was spotted in a reedbed on Elney Lake; and someone more patient than me stayed in the Holywell Lake car park till dusk last night and was rewarded with one there. This is a favourite roosting spot so a good place to stake out if you’re on the hunt for this secretive bird.

Image: Bittern by Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)

A yellow-legged gull has also been seen several times around Moore Lake in the last week or so (a bird which has only recently been recognised as a species in its own right, rather than a race of herring gull).

I haven’t spotted a dragonfly since the cold snap at the end of last week, though they’re sometimes seen here as late as the first week of November. What has been sprouting all over the place are some magnificent fungi. Keep an eye out for this impressively tall one, up to a good 30 cm high, called shaggy inkcap or lawyer’s wig (they have such great names too!).

Image: Shaggy inkcap by Barry Starling

The leaves around the reserve are a riot of reds, yellows, browns, greens and every shade in between. Reflected in the lakes they’re a beautiful sight. Not to forget the flash of a kingfisher, two very late swallows passing over yesterday, and the fantastic noise of not one but a family six mute swans flying low overhead.

All in all, apart from some flooding along the riverside and quite a lot of mud, it’s been a grand start to the winter. And to make up for having to cycle home in the cold and dark last night, I met a ghostly pale barn owl in the lanes just outside the reserve - beautiful.