Mersehead Recent Sightings 3rd-9th June
What a difference a week makes! With last week characterised by warm, dry weather, this week has seen wet and windy weather prevail. We had hoped to finish off our breeding wader and skylark surveys but it will have to wait until next week!
Wet and windy! Photo credit: L.Blakely
Despite the unfavourable conditions there is still plenty of activity out on the reserve. Between breaks in the weather, goldfinch, blackbird, dunnock, wren and yellowhammer song filled the hedgerows whilst fledgling chaffinch, house sparrow and pied wagtail chicks could be heard and seen begging for food from their exhausted parents. Birds that have recently fledged the nest can usually be told from adult birds by having slightly different plumage details, more often than not being duller and without clearly defined markings, as well as having a slightly fluffy, more ‘puffed-up’ appearance. On the 8th there was a report of a sparrowhawk seen around the reserve, as well as a buzzard.
House sparrow fledglings. Photo credit: Ray Kennedy
Keeping to the theme of new life, a female fox with two cubs was spotted by a lucky visitor in the woodlands on the 6th. Having been born blind and deaf, the fox cubs will remain in the den (called an earth) for four weeks. They will emerge from the earth with their mother from late-April onwards. The cubs will become increasingly independent as time goes on and by August they have usually become fully self-sufficient. Interestingly, foxes can actually live in badger setts whilst they are still occupied by badgers! They are usually very respectful of one another, living at different ends of the sett. However, if the two species do come to an altercation, the badger is likely to triumph. Foxes can also dig an earth from scratch or, more usually, extend and widen rabbit burrows.
Fox with cub. Photo credit: Ben Andrew
Natterjack update: with our night time surveys now finished, our attention has turned to looking for spawn strings and then subsequently monitoring their survival until they become toadlets. We also look for common frog and toad spawn. To date we have had a peak count of c.4000 natterjack tadpoles and c.4500 common toad tadpoles. It’s been a great year for the toads, despite the pools coming worryingly close to drying out at times. Thankfully, the rain has always arrived just in the nick of time and we now have a healthy population of growing natterjack tadpoles as well as a few common toad toadlets. We’ll keep you up to date with the fortunes of these amazing amphibians.
Also this week there have been more sightings of lapwing chicks. On the 5th whilst we were monitoring natterjack spawn strings in the ‘lagoon’, we once again stumbled across two of these amazingly camouflaged wader chicks. It would have been incredibly easy to just walk straight past them. The chick will hide in response to their parents alarm calls alerting them to danger (in this case us!). The chick will make itself as flat and inconspicuous as possible in the hope of avoiding detection by predators. Three chicks have been seen from the visitor centre multiple times this week and a single chick has been seen from Bruaich Hide regularly. Now really is the best time to visit the reserve if you want to see these gorgeous chicks.
Lapwing chick trying to look inconspicuous. Photo credit: L.Blakely
Lana Blakely, Assistant Warden