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Today was a day for the Odonoata or dragonflies to really start to show up. In my local area are some ponds, part of a flood relief scheme, and over the last few years they have sprouted, like a developing beard, the tall stems and fluffy heads of reedmace (called bullrush when I was young) and the sharp, spiked points of rushes. These shallow, warm pools are the perfect habitat for dragonflies, and I have watched over the years as the number of species has slowly increased. Today was the turn of the broad-bodied chaser, a corpulent dragonfly that looks rather unfortunately as though its back end has been run over by a car. But when recently emerged, as this one was, they are the colour of freshly poured gold.

Also emergent were some large red damselflies, which as the name suggests are larger than most damselflies and also… well, red. But then I spotted one which intrigued me. Now I should explain that damselflies are hugely challenging to identify because:

a) there are lot of different species often found flying together

b) A lot of the species look very similar indeed, and often come in colour variants – so exactly the same species can come in different colours. A bit like people, when you think about it.

c) young damselflies (called “tenerals”) change colour, sometimes dramatically so.

So a young damselfly of one species may look very much like a youngster or an adult from a different species. In some cases a correct identification may depend on a microscopic check on the shape of very small parts of this very small insect. In this case, the blue eye spots are like a common blue. The markings on the side probably rule out the Azure. I’m fairly sure it is a teneral female blue-tailed damselfly. But it could be a teneral emerald. Or perhaps something else. I’ll let you decide

No sign if the kingfisher on my walk today, and I was beginning to worry until I heard the familiar “peep-purrp” sound flashing down the river, chasing the bird itself. You don’t always have to see a kingfisher to know it’s there. The hand-buzzer rasping of a whitethroat  entertained me, as it flew from bramble stand to bramble stand, always keeping fifteen or so feet ahead of me as I walked. And then, joyously, it did a skylark-like display flight, floating up perhaps fifty feet into the sky, trilling its heart out. I hope I don’t diminish the whitethroat by saying that it is not a patch on the skylark, that evocative angel of summer days, but it was a creditable effort. I rounded my day off with my first view this year of a four-spotetd chaser dragonfly, absolutely pristine, as if it had been freshly cast in pure gold. A beautiful end to a shorter than usual walk.

I went for a walk in the rain today. It was generally a beautiful day, with blue skies and scudding white clouds. But a low pressure anchored off Scotland’s east coast brought a steady westerly gale, driving a series of intense rainstorms across Wiltshire like bullets from a stuttering gun. “April showers” sounds such a wonderful phrase, but “May downpours” is far nearer the truth, albeit less poetic. Most of the wildlife today was smarter than me and was keeping to the depth of the hedgerows and the bottom of the grass tussocks to stay out of the rain. A bit of grey plastic caught in a riverbank hedge resolved itself into a large grey heron, irate at being disturbed, who lofted with an indolent flap of wings and then scolded me for perhaps a quarter of a mile with its brassy, vuvuzela bugles of outrage. A few wandering whitethroat buzzed from hedgerows, and in between the storms, a lone buzzed circled, taking advantage of thermals caused by rain evaporating under a moderate sun.

Hawthorn flower in sunnier times

With little else to do, I amused myself by trying to describe the smell of the wet landscape, and in doing so I suddenly caught a hint of a pleasant, perfume-like odour. I spent some time trying to track it down, by the simple method of sniffing everything around me – grass, tree bark, ivy – hoping that nobody else on a walk arrived to catch me doing it. In the end I tracked it down the flowers of the hawthorn. Perhaps I’m simply unobservant, but I have never noticed the smell of hawthorn before. I sniffed the flowers deeply, and came up a very faint flutter of the scent of… roses. I thought I was being foolish until I got back home and checked – and yes, the hawthorn and the rose are very distant relations, both members of the family Rosacea. And so another day closes where I have found out something new about the world around me. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

A pleasant walk today, in which my old friend the Kingfisher popped up very close to me while I was taking a brief rest from my daily walk. I was happy to see him, especially as he sat still long enough for this photo.

male kingfisher

I was puzzled for a while by what seemed to be patchy fog, in the middle of a hot and sunny afternoon. It turned out to be the downy seeds of the willow tree – the “pussy willow” –  drifting on the wind in their millions. Willow is one of the most resilient of trees, as I find out to myself once years ago when I planted a few sticks in the ground to mrk te edge of a lawn I was seeding – only to find each of the sticks growing into vigorous new willow trees.

Today I also saw my first banded demoiselles of the year – these beautiful small damselflies come in two striking metallic colours, blue for the boys and green for the girls. Watching them dance over the water made me feel that summer (hopefully a lockdown-free summer) is fast approaching.

Today’s walk was a joy. Partly because I’m now regularly seeing a kingfisher, one of two pairs that are local to me. I searched for kingfishers for many years before I realised that they are actually to be found near my home, on the same lake where the grebes hang out. I strongly suspect that they are nesting, which means that I have to be extremely careful not to inadvertently disturb them close to the nest – it’s an offence, and can harm their chances of breeding. So I’m being careful. But I did manage to see this beautiful male deep in the shade of a willow.

But there was better to come. As I returned home, there was a furious squabbling in a hedge to my right, and a small bird burst out. It landed on a nearby branch and started to sing furiously, powerfully. I’m not good at sorting out the many members of the warbler family (there are many of them, and they all look very similar) but I think this is a reed warbler. It is only when I got home that I realised that the warbler still had feathers clinging to its beak, plucked (I assume) from its rival.

Today also saw the first of the year’s damselflies for me – a large red, and a number of banded demoiselles. Hedgerows bursting with lead and song, warm sunshine on my back, and baby moorhen, looking like balls of black cotton-wool which some child has iced with coloured blobs to represent a face. Many blessings to count today.

For someone who loves the outdoors, Lockdown is a trial. But it’s a small price to pay to save the lives of others. As the situation has gone on, I am starting to learn from friends that their loved ones have died. It’s a tide, gradually getting closer to home, and inconvenience is a small price to pay.

But I am fortunate to have a number of really wonderful walks I can take. Today’s was around my local lake. The Great crested grebes are there, although they have not mated this year – storm Dennis came in and literally seemed to blow the grebes out of the water.  But two lone grebes returned, and I suspect that both are female, although it’s really hard to tell. But on today’s walk one of the grebes caught a perch and swallowed it.  How grebes don’t rip their throats open swallowing a fish with sharp, erect spines is one of the mysteries of life.

great crested grebe swallowing perchBut then, just as we were returning home, a furious burst of song caught my attention. I don’t know what had made the female blackcap so indignant, but she was clearly furious with something. I just hope it wasn’t me.

female blackcap

All in all, I’d call that a decent set of wildlife encounters for a local walk

Let me be clear –  I am NOT saying that Coronavirus is a good thing. But it does offer us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to find out what the world would be like if we stepped back. I woke this morning to a dawn chorus that seemed exceptionally loud and detailed, full of notes and tones I can’t recall hearing before. And then the penny dropped. Those sounds had always been there, but they were normally drowned out by the sound of normal rush-hour traffic. On an essential journey to collect a prescription, I saw less road kill than usual. This year, which is so desperately bad and frightening for so many people, may give some of our wildlife an unexpected breathing space. It is just a shame that it takes a tragedy of this scale to let it happen.

This time last year, the large lake near my home had five great crested grebes on it. Four formed pairs, one of which successfully raised young. A smaller local lake had one pair on it, which also raised young. The same was true for most of the lakes I could reach in a hour’s drive from my home.

This year, my local lake has one solitary, despondent grebe. The smaller lake has none. I’ve walked five local lakes, and there isn’t a singe great crested grebe to be seen. Great crested grebes are one of the joys of spring, with their elaborate displays of devotion to each other. This year feels empty. Where have all the grebes gone?

I care more about elephants than I do about pigeons. As a naturalist that feels wrong, but it’s a fact. It’s a natural tendency to be more interested in the things that are exotic than those which we see every day. Elephants bring images of far-off lands. They are unusual, something outside the run of the everyday.

But not every rare or exotic animal lives far away. For several years now I’ve been tracking down an animal which lives only on one small, isolated island. Not Madagascar, but Skomer, a small island off the West coast of Wales. It’s managed by the wildlife trusts, and most people go there for the utterly adorable puffins. At Skomer, you can get closer to puffins than pretty much anywhere else on Earth. Lie down and they will stand on you.

But Skomer is also home to the Skomer vole. This close relative of the bank vole lives on Skomer,  and nowhere else in the world. Think about that for a minute. This vole lives there, and only there. It’s a unique species, larger than a bank vole and a deep russet colour. It’s not endangered, but is unique. The only place you can see it is Skomer, and that involves a boat trip.

For five years I’ve been trying to get a good photo of the Skomer vole. I’ve heard squeaks. I’ve seen rustles in the undergrowth and occasionally the tip of a tail or the top of an ear. But there are a lot of other species and places int e world so I made my mind up that this was going to be my last attempt. I had four days on the island and I devoted them to trying to find it. I succeeded, but never in front of my camera. At one point, I had a pair of voles fighting in front of me – but never where my camera was pointing.  Skomer voles move fast. It’s an article of faith amongst those who have studied the vole that it freezes when faced with danger. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? And when I explored that myth – and it is a myth – it seems to be based on the fact that when captured for research purposes, voles stay in the hand and don’t run off. But a vole on the ground, free to move? They run faster than any other vole I’ve ever seen.

The thing about Skomer is that there are no land predators. No snakes, no foxes, no stoats, rats or weasels. Skomer voles have grown up in a world dominated by brutally efficient aerial predators. Great black-backed gulls, short-eared owls, kites and others are all quite happy to eat them. I had thought that this would make the voles happy to ignore me- as a land-based threat – as long as they were under cover and protected from aerial assault. But it doesn’t. The voles are well aware that only deep, thick cover – deep inside brambles or under a thick layer of vegetation – will do. And so they scurry at speed from one safe place to another, and after days of slowly peering through gaps in the bracken that covers much of the island, I slowly realised that if I could see them, so could a predator.

And so, after five years, I gave up. It was the last day of what I had decided would be my last visit. The boat was arriving shortly. But I wandered into a location near the residence where overnight guests stay. And there, for a few minutes, the vole appeared. It scurried madly, but at least it reappeared in the same place a few times, and I finally managed the shot below. But the really telling thing was that as soon as the dawn chorus started, and the gulls started calling, the vole vanished and did not re-emerge.

And so, reader, I give you the Skomer vole. From this angle it looks exactly like any other vole. But this, I’m afraid, is the only picture you’re going to get.

Probably.

Skomer Vole – at last

Today I went to Greenham Common, the former Cold War airbase that was the subject of much controversy in the 1990s when US forces stored nuclear-tipped cruise missiles there. The weapons have long since gone, and after the US withdrew, the base was returned to nature. Where once giant bombers thundered down concrete runways, rare gorse heathland now flourishes, Linnets and Dartford Warblers sing, Adders and Common Lizards bask, and one particular butterfly, the Grayling (no relation to the fish) makes its home.

The Grayling is normally a coastal butterfly these days, and inland populations are rare. It is also one of my personal last 7 UK native butterflies to see. Since I live in North Wiltshire, which is about as far as from the sea as you can get in the UK, finding a population that doesn’t involve a 2-hour drive was most welcome.

I found the Grayling, and it immediately replaced the Adder as winner of my personal best camouflage in a land animal award. It is superbly camouflaged, and as such is relatively happy for you to get close as long as it feels it is well-matched to its background. I found the butterfly at Greenham not by looking for it, but by looking for the colour grey. At one point the runways have given way to patches of heather, and the dried stalks of old heather plants litter the ground. These are a mixture of greys, and it is against these that the Greyling likes to hide. Take a look at the photo below and you’ll see what I mean.

Spot the Grayling!

There is actually a Grayling butterfly in this shot. Its towards the top right. You can only see it at all because its wing is damaged and the brown upper side is showing through. The Graylign is a butterfly which almost never shows its upperwing, which is a light brown colour. It has come to rely so strongly on its camouflage that it only ever settles with its wings shut, showing a broken grey pattern.

Greyling nectaring on heather

The Greyling is the only other creature which, like the Adder, I’ve looked at, looked away for a second, and then not been able to see when I looked back again. Several times I thought the butterfly I was watching has flown off, only to realise it was still exactly where I had left it. I was often staring right at it, but could only see it when it moved.

Greenham Common was once home to highly camouflaged bunkers and aircraft. In a sense, the Grayling is carrying that tradition on – albeit on a much, much smaller scale.