An extremely delayed look back on July 2021! I'm getting behind on these
retrospective posts but I still think they are worth writing so am going to continue, at least for now. I think this is sort of how I cope with the climate crisis, by focusing on the small and local. Because even as our world grows dangerously warmer, for now the swallows still come back in the spring. There's something comforting about that.
First, let's check in with our regular denizens of the river. Summer is the best time to watch insects, and the banded demoiselles were still zooming around throughout the month every sunny day, males chasing females up and down the patches of waterweed. In summer the butterflies at my patch are joined by a beautifully bright day flying moth called the scarlet tiger. In flight it appears to be a bright red butterfly, though no butterfly in the UK is that particular vivid scarlet so you can soon learn to tell them apart. If it lands you will see it has a series of creamy white spots on a 'black' background, that is actually a very dark green. Later in the month, the delicate damselflies are joined by one or two dragonflies, and wow is there a huge difference! Damselflies float daintily while dragonflies zoom up and down the river like they own the place, and the larger species are some of the biggest insects you'll see flying in the UK.
Though I didn't know it at the time, July would be the time I said goodbye to the three grown up goosander ducklings. Birds sadly won't tell you when they are leaving, but reviewing my notes from the future I can tell, and that's the advantage of looking back at records the next year. My last record of the little sibling group was on July 6th. They were young ducks by this point, fully feathered and sporting the handsome 'redhead' plumage worn by female and immature goosanders, complete with little punky crests on the backs of their heads. I assume they left because my part of the river becomes much shallower during the summer, and they wanted somewhere they could dive freely. I'm sure they found it, plenty of great spots around here. My admiration goes to these three little survivors, who raised themselves from tiny ducklings without a mother, and I feel I was incredibly lucky to have been able to watch even a snippet of their story. I may never know where the nest was, what happened to the mother, or where they went next, but I'm ok with that. Nature's stories are full of so many things we will never know. But I really hope the three survived the winter and perhaps spent this spring and summer with their own nests.
I tend to visit my patch less often in July because things naturally quiten down- the mid to late summer lull is well known in birdwatching. Songbirds are finished with raising their young and spend their days silently skulking around in the thickly leaved trees while they moult, leaving you realising how much you rely on sound to find them! I was still seeing the odd fledged baby being fed, and the occasional parent still busily catching flies. Watching young birds around their parents can be quite funny at this time of year because they may not realise the adult has decided to slow down or stop feedings altogether (it has to happen at some point!). I watched an adult grey wagtail catch a banded demoiselle and whack it on the ground to kill it, all the time bothered for its meal by two begging juveniles which it eventually chased away. That same visit, July 12th, an adult spotted flycatcher was seen completely ignoring two patiently waiting juveniles. The youngsters were about two weeks out of the nest at that point and were starting to look more like the adults, i.e. not spotted at all. Their parents clearly had other things on their minds now- on July 30th, I was greeted with the lovely sight of another set of streaky, furiously begging juvenile flycatchers! The second brood was here. They always have two broods, and the eggs only take a couple of weeks to hatch, but as one of the latest arriving migrants they start breeding later and are therefore one of the few birds still fledging nestlings in late July.
Now for a slightly confused story- July 22nd was the first appearance at my patch of the bird affectionately known by me as 'little bugger'. This bird was a marsh or willow tit, which are two species that are very difficult to separate by their appearance, and both resemable an American chickadee much more than they do our familiar blue and great tit. Older books will tell you the willow tit has a larger black bib and this is how you should tell them apart, but it has now been found that both species can have variably sized bibs. Little buggers, the lot of them! 'My' bird showed up in one of the mobile, roving tit flocks that form in late summer, and it was the first time I'd seen a marsh/willow tit type bird on my patch at all, so quite special no matter which it was. However, I should tell you that at this point the willow tit is quite a bit scarcer in the UK than the marsh tit. At one point I might have assumed that my visitor was a marsh tit, on the grounds of it being the commoner species, and left it at that, but this time that wasn't enough for me. For you see, I record all sighting lists I make on this site on Birdtrack, and that meant I really needed to identify my bird correctly as people would see my report.
I knew that the only reliable way to tell a marsh and willow tit apart is by their call, but not what it was exactly about the call that was distinctive. This didn't matter though, as I told myself, because I would go home right away and listen to call recordings and species comparisons. So I heard the bird calling, or at least thought I did- it was with a number of other birds and it can be hard to tell calls apart in a flock. I certainly heard something that I didn't think was a blue or great tit call. (My notes say 'a nasal, 3 note call', but they were written after I had looked up the calls, so that could have influenced how I described it.) Satisfied I had heard the bird's call, off I went home to do a comparison check. A helpful comparison video from the BTO gave the call a marsh tit makes, which wasn't at all like the sound my bird (supposedly) made. Excitedly, I waited for them to play the willow tit call. It was....a nasal, 3 note call, which the video explained was distinctive to the species. Case closed! Surely 'my' bird was a willow tit, improbable though it may seem. Stranger things have happened though- experienced birdwatchers know that really anything can turn up anywhere. But there was more to the story than that unfortunately, and I will get to that next month....
This month's flower drawings: hedge mustard, brooklime, water figwort, fragrant orchid, smooth hawk-beard, ribwort plantain, marsh woundwort, bird's-foot-trefoil, and heartsease.
