Tangled Snakes and the Tiger Path

Bird News: Ibsley Water - black-necked grebe 1, swallow 20, house martin 10, peregrine 1.

Following a rather windy and at times, wet, night I was not too surprised at the small number of moths in the trap, there was one species that I see very rarely at Blashford, a barred sallow.

Thursday today, so it was volunteer day, I was not sure what to do but took a risk on the rain holding off and the wind not getting up too much and we got the tern rafts in for the winter. I had some trouble with the amount of weed in the lake tangling the prop on the boat, but they all got to shore in the end.

Eventually the sun came out in the afternoon and the whole reserve was looking very autumnal. The wind has brought down a good few leaves, a lot of which are now being carried down the Dockens Water.

Despite undoubtedly being autumn, I did find a remembrance of spring, a few flowers of foxglove.

I was looking at the state of some of the trees near the Centre, where there are a lot of alders which have a fungal disease, they develop tell tale black marks on the trunk before dying and sadly I found several that will need felling before they fall down.

I had a speculative look under one of the tin sheets and found a group of grass snakes, I got a quick picture of two of them, the others had shot off before I managed to deploy the camera.

By the time I went to lock up the sun was already low, but it did a great job of highlighting one of the silver birch beside the path to the Ivy South hide.

Later, near the Ivy North hide the same low light produced a tiger pattern on the path, produced by the crossing shadows of the trunks of trees.