Autumn is a great time to enjoy a walk around Minsmere with a different perspective. Instead of focussing the attention on birds, it's well worth taking a wider perspective and enjoying the wonderful colours and varied fungi, especially on a beautiful sunny day like today.
Before I show you some examples of this autumn splendour, and a summary of sightings from the last few days, here's a heads up for some important news of habitat management work that's coming up, or ongoing.
East Hide is now closed to visitors for the next couple of weeks whilst the new accessible path is finished as the old path is now blocked. The new path is expected to be completed by the end of October.
North Wall will be closed for a short time on Friday, and possibly at other times, whilst concrete is laid to install the viewing platform at the start of the new accessible path.
East Scrape remains dry while our digger drivers continue to reprofile the Scrape, creating new islands and improving the topography. This main wildlife highlights on East Scrape at the moment are pied wagtails, goldfinches and a lone Canada goose - all of which can also be seen from the Public Viewpoint - so the closure of East Hide will cause limited disruption.
At Island Mere, our wardens and volunteers have been busy cutting the reeds in front of the hide today, which will improve viewing for visitors. This work, including some burning of the cut reed, will resume on Thursday. The similar work at Bittern Hide was completed last week.
Right, onto wildlife news, and there have been exciting birds seen over the last few days, starting with two common cranes over the reedbed on Sunday. They were followed shortly afterwards by two ravens, with one of the latter also seen yesterday and today. Then today our wardens have a spoonbill fly over them while they were working at Island Mere. Equally as exciting was news that a couple of Dartford warblers have returned to the gorse in the dunes.
Of course, most of other star birds remain too: bitterns, marsh harriers, bearded tits, great egrets and hobbies in the reedbed, ducks and gulls moving between South Scrape and Island Mere, nuthatch and great spotted woodpecker on the feeders, flocks of tits in the woods. Waders remain thin on the ground, but over the last few days there have been sightings of redshank, spotted redshank, ruff and grey plover, while gulls have included both Caspian and yellow-legged.
At the start of this blog I promised some autumn colour, and where better to start than with possibly the most popular of all fungi: fly agaric. This one was just inside the rhododendron tunnel.
A less colourful, but equally visible fungus is the parasol, and this one provided a perfect perch for a lovely male ruddy darter.
Of all the stunning colours of autumn leaves, I particularly like the way some bramble leaves turn a variegated red, like these.
They also match the vivid scarlet berries of this hawthorn bush in the North Bushes, which always appears much brighter than any of the other hawthorns.
Another familiar plant that takes on a whole new appearance in the autumn is bracken, whose leaves turn from green through yellow to brown, often displaying all three colours together.
And, of course, the trees themselves take on myriad of colours at this of year.
Finally, it's that time of year when I can start kicking my feet through piles of fallen leaves - though I might wait until I moult into winter plumage and switch from sandals to boots!