Birds, Butterflies and Dragons

Last weekend was a good wildlife weekend! Friday evening saw me ‘lead’ (sort of) a walk on Horsell Common for nightjar. This is a reliable site for this amazing African visitor with a song, known as churring, unlike any other. It is fair to say that the birds kept us waiting but one duly appeared to give good if brief views to the eighteen souls braving the slightly chilly evening. One landed on a branch and we managed to get some people views through a telescope.

Sunday was of course Fathers Day which seemed as good a reason as any to spend an hour or two wandering around my favourite local site of Papercourt. I have included a few landscapes this time just to give some idea of the variety of habitat to be found here.

Papercourt Marshes SWT Reserve

Papercourt Marshes SWT Reserve

A river runs through it, the Wey in this case

Papercourt Water Meadows

The best of the bird photographs was frankly a bit lucky in that this wren happened to pop up at the edge of the path by the main sailing club gravel pit. He seemed totally unworried by my presence and I spent a little while enjoying the show. Still plenty of other birds singing such as chiffchaff, reed warbler, sedge warbler/ whitethroat and blackcap in particular.

In what has been a poor year for them to date, some butterflies finally showed themselves today, meadow brown being the most common but also large skipper, small tortoiseshell and comma.

Comma

Large Skipper

Demoiselles, mostly banded, continue to be pretty common along the river and stream sides. Best dragon sighting of the day was to come across a patch of floating vegetation at the edge of the big sailing club pit in which scores of common blue damselflies were mating. A red kite drifted over as I left the damselflies to it, a good end to a quietly enjoyable visit.

Common Blue Damselfly