What a fantastic way to spend 4 hours! Walking around Northward Hill RSPB reserve.
Still only the first week in April, butterflies were on the wing alongside bee- flies and hoverflies, not forgetting bees of course.
So a walk straight down the track from the office found Green-veined White butterflies, Speckled Woods and those wonderful Beeflies, so called because they are flies that look a bit like bees or bees that look a bit like flies, you decide!
A few Hoverflies were on the wing in the dappled, leaf filtered light.
Up to Sweeney Viewpoint, Blackcap sang in the branches as did Jenny Wren, proving once again that this impossibly small bird has an equally impossibly loud voice. Not to be outdone a Dunnock sang its' heart out nearby.
A Comma butterfly landed on the nettles posing for the camera, as dark orange as the breast of a robin it flew away as my shadow caught it, but I knew it would likely return after half a minute or so. A kestrel hovered as male Mallard chased females across the sky-line.
At the viewpoint the vista, as always was breath-taking, across the Mighty Thames to Essex, all part of the iconic Thames/Medway Estuary system a unique and world class eco-system that should never be tampered with.
Just to empasize the arrival of this special season a second Swallow flew though, maybe even the same one as yesterday who knows. If one Swallow does not a summer make! Do two?
Down at Gordons' Hide there were lots of birds on the scrapes and floods, Grey Herons, Oystercatchers, Avocets, Mallards, Redshank, Little Egrets, Teals and a couple of Wigeon. Black-tailed Godwit in breeding plumage, their rufous redness contrasting with the black and whiteness of the Tufted Duck.
Further out on the marsh were Canada, Greylag and a half a dozen Egyptian Geese.
Lapwings were acrobatically vocal with their bubbling, wheezy song tumbling this way and that, giving them their other name of Pee-wit. Just as I watched their antics and wished them a successful breeding season a flash of chestnut brown on the grass below caught my attention. A Stoat inside the predator fence, a huge male at least 35 cms long, like a small ferret. Its' coat as glossy as any liberated chestnut, no match for any rabbit several times its' size let alone a ground-nesting feathered Mum and Dad!!!
Moving up to the upper veiwpoint Peacock Butterflies were everywhere and Red Admirals chasing and seeing each other off.
Wagtails and Green Woodpeckers 'chiswicked' and 'yaffled' across the newly created Nightingale scrub
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After waiting patiently for an hour hoping to hear the first Nightingales or who knows a Cuckoo I walked back down the hill to admire the cherry blossom, just as I was thinking I hadn't seen any raptors apart from the kestrel earlier I looked up and a Crow was seriously mobbing a Buzzard and another two were harassing another a few hundred metres away.
By the old Comms building a beautiful male Marsh Harrier was getting the same 'big agg'. from a pair of Lapwings, so raptors don't get it all their own way.
At the moment no Nightingales or Cuckoos, but there will be by the time I do the next blog
My thanks to A J Silverside, David and Eliza Saunders for the images.
The North Kent Marshes are a very special area and worth preserving at all cost.