Get Close To A Pansy

Noticed these beautiful pansy’s in my garden this morning. A small flower that warranted a close up shot. I just love the vivid colours.

Badgercam

More fiddling about with the trail cam that I now have last night and this time i’m giving the video mode a go with the camera located next to a well used track baited with a handful of peanuts. The badger knew that something odd was nearby but the peanuts were worth the risk.

Nuts!

Well i’ve no idea what this moth is and the other night I caught two. So please let me know what you think cos it’s drivin me nuts!

It All Happens At Night!

Been running my actinic trap a couple of times over the last few days and on the first attempt I got totally caught out by the hard frost but unfortunately so did the dead common quaker that was the only moth in the trap. However last night was much better with a new species for me in the shape of a clouded drab. Now what did this reasonable looking moth do to deserve a name like that? Well I guess i’m in a minority to think that it really isn’t that drab, poor thing.

Clouded Drab

Double Stripe Pug Small Quaker
 
Recently I purchased a Bushnell trail cam and have been enjoying checking out photos of a hedgehog that is visiting the garden on and off during the night as well as all the local cats that seem to use my garden as a highway! I really wanted to get to know how to use this camera for getting shots of other mammals in the area and last night I setup a camera at a badger sett and was lucky enough to get some shots.

 

More Moths

Continuing to run my 40w actinic in the back garden as I don’t think the neighbours would appreciate my mv running with so little foliage available to block the light from their bedroom windows. Anyway a better night than before with 7 Hebrew characters, 6 common Quakers, 1 small Quaker and 1 early grey.

Small Quaker

Hebrew Character


Early Grey

Plume Moth, probably Emmelina monodactyla


The very variable Common Quaker

The Common Quaker above with a Hebrew Character

Sunshine Treats and Disappointments

A good day for butterflies yesterday in the sunny spells with 2 brimstones and a holly blue visiting the back garden. I thought it would also be good weather for finding basking adders so headed off to a couple of sites near the Medway towns and saw a further 3 brimstones at Meopham along with a brief glimpse of probably a peacock. At Queendown Warren the sun was still out but unfortunately the adders were not. This is a worry as I know the folks that perform regular surveys there have indicated a general decline and I don’t know how the hard weather in December may have affected them. Certainly the Kent reptile and amphibian group (KRAG) are concerned over a perceived decline and have setup a project to gather data. I did manage to see a couple of commas though, so a 4 butterfly day, not bad for early March, I think? I then moved onto a second site but by this time the sun had gone in so no real chance of finding anything.

I’m branching out into the world of motion sensor cameras and have been given one for a month to ‘have a go’. So I positioned it in a suitable place in my back garden last night, hoping that the elusive hedgehog that appeared a week back may make another appearance. Unfortunately I only managed to get pictures of the local cat population which confirms my suspicions that my garden is the local cat highway

Its March so migrate!

It’s all too easy to look at the weather and just think that nothing will be migrating cos the weather is not right. I tend to forget that the urge to migrate and move north is a strong instinct in birds in the spring and a birds understanding of the weather is luckily very different from mine. So after giving myself a pep talk I wandered around the local fields this afternoon behind Pinden quarry just on the outskirts of Longfield. I kicked up a flock of 46 corn buntings and 25 skylarks and then there in front of me was a superb male wheatear. I say superb because that is just how it looked, the bird appeared to be in its peak of breeding plumage. My spirits were lifted you would have thought I’d just found a major rarity, I was elated, it made my day and only 15 minutes from my front door.

Winter Moths

Finally managed to get a moth trap running last night just as the overnight temperatures start to drop. Given the forecast of o/night rain it was only safe to use my 40W actinic but it still managed to pull in 2 hebrew characters and a common quaker.

Common Quaker

Hebrew Character

Otter Rubbish

Otters do not exist in Kent!
It’s official, at least it is if you believe the Environment Agency, who have completed their recent survey (completed every 10 years) of the UK and based on the results have determined that Kent no longer has any otters living within the county. Hurrah, say the road, house and rail builders lets get on with destroying more of the concrete county, no need to worry about otters getting in our way.

Hang on a minute, there is just one tiny error in all this, the EA are wrong. Otters do still exist in Kent if you know where and how to look. Admittedly the population isn’t very large and some areas have lost their otters but we still have them. Does make you wonder just how hard the EA were looking in Kent? Ok, so they may not have had the local knowledge required to actually find evidence of otters but did they ask the right people? Maybe a bit too focused on where they thought otters should be rather than thinking where they might be.

So Otters are doing really well in most of the rest of the UK which is brilliant, why not in Kent? Well think about it, unless you have a boat it is quite tricky to enter Kent with 3 sides of the county bordered by water. The landward side is equally hard to enter even for us humans as most of the roads tend to get gridlocked and rail services are not too reliable. For an otter wandering from Sussex into Kent a complete nightmare with road kill and electrocution on railway lines likely to be the end result.

The good news is that there are people out there in Kent that know where the otters are and are doing everything they can to make sure they are given the best chance of survival and hopefully increase their numbers.

So what else have I been up to. Well found a flock of 32 Corn Buntings just north of Longfield which I’m pleased about and it looks as though Buzzards are starting to populate the local area i.e. 1 mile so maybe a chance of breeding who knows. Some good flocks of Lesser Redpolls as well including a couple of Mealy or Common Redpolls. Might run the moth trap tonight for the first time as I know other folks out there have been catching some good stuff. Also first common frogs in the garden last weekend.

Shocking Winter Atlas

Decided that today would be my Jan visit to the tetrad that I'm down for surveying. Must admit that I was a bit late on the scene for getting involved in the BTO and KOS winter atlas but I’ve just managed to grab one of the few remaining tetrads in the north west of Kent. A nice sunny but blustery winters day saw me stomping into the area with no real expectations except to record the common woodland and garden species found at the top of Wrotham Hill. So it was a real shock to suddenly see a Brimstone butterfly hurtling toward me, incredible to think that it had managed to survive the extreme cold weather of December but what a great flash of colour to light up the general winters gloom. The rest of the walk was generally uneventful except for a nice mobile flock of 290 Fieldfares and a further unexpected bonus in the shape of 3 waxwings giving frustratingly brief glimpses before they disappeared. Now I cannot wait for my February visit.