It’s a good day for sitting inside composing our monthly sightings blog, drinking coffee, and looking forward to cake in the café. We’ve had lots of rain in the past few weeks and the lagoons, and the café scrape are looking very full, so full that the muddy margins are no longer visible. The wind is driving drizzle and rain up the Severn Estuary, past Cardiff and across the reserve. The trees and reeds on reserve are losing leaves rapidly and the overall impression is that the season is quickly changing from autumn to winter.
Image credit Josh Sankey
Late October through to late December or even mid-January is our Starling Murmuration season. For the past five or six years the Starlings have followed a consistent pattern of activities as groups arrive in late afternoon, they settle for a while on the electricity pylons, murmurate flying spectacular patterns over the fields or the reedbeds, and finally settling into the reeds to roost.
This year is turning out to be a little different as the birds have been less predictable and have shown some new behaviours.
The Murmurations began unpredictably with the birds ignoring their usual roost site at the end of what we informally call “Starling Alley” and murmurating over the reedbeds adjacent to the sea wall and anywhere from the hide to the power stations. That had the potential to make our Soup and Starlings walks much harder to guide; racing across the reserve with a group of 20 people to get close to the birds wouldn’t have worked well for us or our visitors. Thankfully, our Starlings had remembered their former behaviour and were back at the end of Starling Alley for our first guided walk.
Image credit Ieuan Evans
They have shown some new (for us, at least) behaviours. One evening, when the weather was quite good, they flew in as usual, showed every sign of dropping into the reeds but instead dropped over the hedge and spent ten minutes feeding in the fields before giving us a magnificent murmuration (a video clip is on X (formerly known as Twitter). On other evenings they’ve been much more strongly influenced by the weather, especially the winds, and murmurated briefly and in small numbers (the birds arriving first flew beautifully and then dropped into their roost with all the later birds joining the first few without any special flying).
We’re often asked about numbers, and we can only give an estimate (there are techniques for counting birds in flight, but processing the digital photos takes time). This year our estimates for a “good murmuration” are at least 70,000 Starlings. To that you can usually add one or two Marsh harriers, Peregrine falcons or Sparrowhawks.
Image credit Jeremy White
We ran a day-long workshop on understanding and identifying fungi. I made pages of notes but didn’t quite keep up with photographing and making a list of what we saw. My guestimate is about 50 species within a couple of minutes of the visitor centre … and that’s ten times the number I’d seen without the help of Emma the mycologist leading the day (she can be found online as https://www.facebook.com/people/Coal-Spoil-Fungi/100075940899517/).
The variety of shapes, sizes, colours, and habits was enormous (understandable as there are at least 17,500 species of fungi in Britain). My favourite changed with each new species we found, but by the end of the workshop I think my favourite was the oddly named and equally oddly shaped Yellow Brain Fungus. It’s also unusual in being parasitic on other fungi (that’s unusual because most fungi feed directly on decaying materials like wood).
Image credits Jeremy White
A lot of nature’s activities seem to have been a week or so later than normal this year. Our winter thrushes are no exception and our first sightings or Redwing and Fieldfares were later, and numbers were smaller than we expected. There are still plenty of Hawthorn berries and rose hips in the hedgerows for the birds to eat. Numbers of Redwing seem small er than usual. All of which suggests that they’ve been “short-stopping” – choosing to migrate no further than necessary to find the food supplies and decent weather they need to overwinter.
We’re also recording numbers of both song and mistle thrushes, redwing and fieldfare.
Song thrush - Ieuan Evans
Fieldfare - Ieuan Evans
Species seen around the reserve in the past month include:
Garden spider, Noble false widow spider, Splay-legged harvestman spider, Woodlouse spider, Barn owl, bar-tailed godwit, Bearded reedling, Bittern, Blackbird, Blackcap, Black-headed gull, Black-tailed godwit, Blue Tit, Bullfinch, Buzzard, Canada goose, Carrion crow, Cetti's warbler, chaffinch, Chiffchaff, Collared dove, Coot, Cormorant, Curlew, Dunlin, Dunnock, Fieldfare, Firecrest, Gadwall, Goldcrest, Goldfinch, Goshawk, Great black-backed gull, Great crested grebe, Great spotted woodpecker, Great Tit, Great white egret, Green woodpecker, Greenfinch, Grey heron, Greylag goose, Herring gull, Hobby, Hoopoe, House martin, House Sparrow, Jackdaw, Jay, Kestrel, Kingfisher, Lapwing, Lesser black-backed gull, Lesser redpoll, Linnet, Little egret, Little grebe, Little owl, Long-tailed tit, Magpie, Mallard, Marsh harrier, Meadow pipit, Merlin, Mistle thrush, Moorhen, Mute swan, Oystercatcher, Peregrine falcon, Pheasant, Pied wagtail, Pintail, Raven, Red kite, Redshank, Redwing, Reed bunting, Reed warbler, Robin, Sedge warbler, Shelduck, Siskin, Skylark, Snipe, Song thrush, Sparrowhawk, Starling, Stock dove, Stonechat, Swallow, Teal, Treecreeper, Water Rail, Wigeon, Woodpigeon, Wren, Shaggy ink cap fungus, Common carder bumblebee, Brown argus butterfly, Peacock butterfly, Red admiral butterfly, Small copper butterfly, Speckled wood butterfly, Common Darter Dragonfly, Emperor dragonfly, Migrant hawker dragonfly, ruddy darter dragonfly, Marmalade hoverfly, barred sallow moth, brindled green moth, December moth, feathered thorn moth, figure of eight moth, green brindled crescent moth, Green-banded crescent moth, L-album wainscot moth, large wainscot moth, Mottled umber moth, November moth agg, Pine carpet moth, Pink-barred sallow moth, red line quaker moth, Red-line Quaker moth, Sallow moth, Satellite moth, Vestal moth, Fox, Grey squirrel, Otter, Stoat, Weasel, Grass snake