Wryneck

It's Wryneck time again, one of the highlights of the birding year. They are always such a fantastic bird to see and to photograph. There may not be many of them but when they are feeding up, before crossing the channel, they do tend be loyal to a patch and so can be relatively easy to find.

This year there looked to be a good candidate at Farlington Marsh. We gave the Bank Holiday weekend a miss but were along there early on Tuesday morning. Unfortunately so where a lot of other people. 

My best pictures have always come from watching the birds feeding pattern and sitting down in the open where you expect it to get to in about ten minutes time. My experience is that if you stay seated and move slowly the bird will ignore you and come close. See here for some examples.

Today was a bit different. As soon as the bird was sighted there was a bit of a scrum. It's understandable, everyone wants  to see the bird and that includes me but all I got were a couple of rather distant shots before the bird took fright and disappeared.

Wryneck

Wryneck

If it's still there in a weeks time I might have another go.


There have been a lot of other migrants through over the past few days. They mostly seem to be juveniles but I am still hoping for a some better pictures and I still haven't seen a Spotted Flycatcher.

Whinchat

Pied Flycatcher

Pied Flycatcher

Yellow Wagtail

Wheatear

And from a trip over to Anchor Bottom to look for Clouded Yellows, no pictures of said butterfly, although we did see two brightly coloured males and one female. It was just too hot to chase after them up and down the slopes.


Worth going though, as there were still Adonis Blue on the wing and I needed Autumn Lady's Tresses to complete my Orchid year.

Adonis Blue

Autumn Lady's Tresses

Autumn Lady's Tresses

Thirty six species of orchid seen this year plus a number of variants and hybrids. It could have been more but it would have needed a few trips to Scotland and the north of England to find them. I am not going to do long distance twitching for single targets but combine birds, orchids, dragonflies and butterflies and the trips look more acceptable.

Autumn Lady's Tresses

When Dave and I went over to Anchor Bottom a couple of weeks ago, to look for the Autumn Lady's Tresses, it didn't look very promising. This is one of the premier sites in Sussex and we couldn't find a single specimen. The ground was baked dry and it looked impossible for anything to break through the rock hard surface.

Two weeks on, a few days rain and everything looks so different. Green grass, fresh growth everywhere and best of all, thousands of specimens of the Autumn Lady's Tresses.

They were growing on the south facing shoulder of the site in a strip around 400 metres long and up to 10 metres wide.

There may well have been more growing elsewhere on the site but this strip was more than enough to keep us occupied.

In places you could count twenty or more to a square metre and you had to be very careful where you placed your feet.

The botanical name spiranthes spiralis is derived from the ancient Greek σπεῖρα (speira) "spiral" and ἄνθος (anthos) "flower". The species name spiralis also refers to the placement of the flowers in a spiral.

The stems were mostly in the range 6 to 12cm tall. They are small and delicate and easy to miss until you get your eye in to looking for them, then they were everywhere.

All credit to the landowner for preserving the environment in Anchor Bottom. It sustains an impressive population of insects, butterflies and wild flowers which are a joy to see but which are so dependant on his careful management of the grazing regime. Not sure he can do much about the rabbits though.