It's been a nice week here at Langford with plenty of late winter (or early spring?) sunshine and some pretty warm temperatures adding to the feeling that spring is indeed on it’s way! This week we have finally finished off some willow scrub cutting around silt lagoon 7. This will make our reedbed creation work a lot easier when the lagoon is converted to reedbed later this year. On Friday we spent a productive day up at Beckingham, removing an old fence line and tidying up some brash. The landscape has certainly changed up there in the last few months and the wetter areas are looking great!
So, it has felt really spring like recently and as I walked out to the containers on Tuesday morning there were birds singing all over the place – song thrush, dunnock, great tit, cetti’s warbler and chaffinch. We added reed bunting to the list on Wednesday morning. Immature male and female marsh harriers were seen regularly throughout the week, as were peregrine, up to 5 little egrets, sparrowhawk, great spotted and green woodpecker, whooper swans, goldeneye and shelduck. With the week's star birds being the sparrows - both species! (see previous blogs).
Spring plants appearing in the woodland include flowering snowdrops and the first leaves of lesser celandine pushing their way up thróugh the soil. This is a pretty little yellow flower, with round shaped leaves and is one of the first native plants to flower in spring.
And the insects are stirring once again! I was really pleased to see a bumblebee flying around Beckingham on Friday – this will be a queen insect, stirring from hibernation. She will be busy looking for somewhere to start a nest in the coming weeks as the temperatures pick up. Also on Friday I spotted a pale brindled beauty moth that had been attracted to the security light at the office. This is a fairly common spring flying moth, the males can be seen from January to March. As with many winter flying species, the females are completely wingless! Interestingly, the specimen I saw here was of the melanistic form (dark coloured form), or Phigalia pilosaria f. monacharia, to be technical, which are in fact commoner than the normal coloured form in some parts of the UK. Time to get the moth trap out again perhaps!?