A lovely weekend of wildlife watching on the nature reserve. Visitors have been reporting a lovely mixture of birds, butterflies, dragonflies and reptiles around the trails.
It seems that autumn is on its way as far as the birds are concerned with wheatear, whinchat and spotted flycatcher all putting in an appearance of the weekend. There's also been a nice selection of waders over the last few days - little stint (Sunday), greenshank, little ringed plover, common and green sandpiper, dunlin and ruff. It's worth checking out the pools from Hail's View as well as on North Brooks. Look too for raptors with buzzards, red kite, marsh harrier, hobby and kestrel putting in regular fly-bys.
Perhaps the star of our butterfly show is the brown hairstreak and many of our visitors made successful attempts to see one over the weekend. This stunning photo was taken by Ron Packham (Thank you Ron and well done!)
Also on show are purple hairstreak, small copper, common blue, gatekeepers, painted lady, clouded yellow, small tortoiseshell and silver washed fritillary.
For me, the highlight is the fleabane on the zig zag path which is positively buzzing with insects - just look at the bright orange pollen baskets on this honey bee.
I would also recommend a walk on the heathland trail. It is looking at its best now with the heather in flower - there's more heather growing now than I've seen there before which is fantastic news! Keeping on top of the bracken and birch growth is always a bit of a battle, but our Highland cows have been doing a grand job.
There is plenty of dragonfly activity on the heathland pools - stunning brown hawkers with their bronzed wings, southern hawkers who will come and 'buzz' you as your wander along their patrol route, black, common and ruddy darters perching in the sunny spots and delicate emerald damselflies flitting daintily about the rushes.
Black darter by Ron Packham.
Evenings are busy too with barn owls hunting along the river banks and bats hunting over the ponds and around the trees. Right now on the nature reserve we’re getting pretty excited about bats. Over the summer we’ve been carrying out our first ever proper bat surveys, finding and identifying these fascinating creatures as they fly and feed.
Now if you need a little nudge to help convince you that bats are brilliant I’ve got a question...when did you last eat chocolate, or a banana, or a mango? Well if you like eating all or any of these then you need to say ‘thank you’ to bats! Over 500 species including cocoa, mango and banana plants rely on bats to pollinate them.
You might be feeling a little warmer towards them now, or you might be asking what do the bats living in this country do for me? The answer is pest control – they’ll be feeding on the pesky midges who try to bite you whilst you’re out enjoying a stroll on a summer’s evening!
All of our bats are insect eaters so there are no vampire bats lurking in spooky old castles here. Our smallest bats, the Pipistrelles, which you could fit inside a match box if you folded in their wings, will eat around 3000 midges in just one night. Here at Pulborough Brooks we’ve recorded at least 7 species of bats. I say ‘at least’ as there are a few species that are very tricky to tell apart without looking at their teeth or their nether regions – I’ve not been tempted to do either! The latest addition to our bat species list is the Barbastelle bat – a rare bat that’s said to resemble a pug!
Our thanks go to Crispin from the National Trust and to Brigitte for helping us to get the bat discoveries underway!
Despite the saying, bats are not blind, but their sense of hearing is far more important. They use echolocation to find their prey and to manoeuvre around in the dark. The bats shout and then listen for the echo which has bounced back – it could tell them that there is a tree trunk ahead, a group of people below, or that a tasty moth is close. As they get closer to the object they will shout more frequently to give them pinpoint accuracy.
If bats go around shouting at night-time why don’t we hear them more often? It’s because the sounds they make are too high pitched for our ears. But we can use a bat detector to listen to them and help to identify them. Different bats will shout differently – at a different frequency and with a different rhythm.
To give a couple of examples, the Serotine – a large furry bat – echolocates around 28 kHz and sounds a bit like a tap dancer – but a tap dancer who can’t quite get the rhythm right. The tiny Pipistrelles echolocate ay 45 or 55 kHz and have a combination of clicks and slaps and something that sounds like blowing a raspberry. This is a feeding buzz, or a feeding fart!
For some species we have to analyse recordings of the bats producing sonograms of their calls - this one shows the 'hockey-stick' shape calls of both common and soprano pipistrelles.
We've a couple of night-time safaris coming up where we'll be heading out with bat detectors to see what we can find - to book a place just contact us at the visitor centre on 01798 875851.
Whilst the bats like eating the moths, I enjoy looking at live ones and we had some lovely ones in our moth trap on Sunday morning. This female oak eggar moth was the most popular with the families who joined me to play 'Find a moth who....'. This one won the award for looking most like a highland cow!