What's happening in the veg patch

If you thought this was going to be about veggies, think again. I can't be bothered to take photos of inch high peas and lettuce to show you! However I do have a lot of flowers in my veg patch, and flowers attract insects....

Looking into the veg patch with kale flowering
and my lovely old cherry tree at the far end.

I decided to leave my Wildflowers for Pollinators meadow in for a third year, forgoing onions as this year it is now my Allium plot. I have garlic in here and just enough space to transplant my leeks later on in the summer. It will have to go before next year though as with my 5 year crop rotation this will be where I'm planting my spuds! 

What's still in there is Hesperis matronalis, Wallflowers (which must be perennial ones as they are flowering again), Forget Me Nots, a white Valerian, some Foxgloves, a yellow flowered Lupin, some Coreopsis lanceolata, and a few things I'm not sure what they are - could possibly be weeds that have nothing to do with this patch, but time will tell! I'm expecting the annuals to self seed to fill in the odd gaps here and there.

Year 3 for my Wildflowers for Pollinators meadow.

These are regular Forget Me Nots; elsewhere I have the smaller Alpine variety.
But they look great with the Wallflowers. There's a small fly on the Forget Me Not in the centre.

But the stars of the show right now are the purple curly kale and the PSB flowers, which are attracting bees galore. The kale is the prettiest with the purple stems and leaves, but the bees are not fussy.

A Carder Bee - I see loads of these pretty bumble bees here.
Possibly Bombus pascuorum.

Yellow-legged Mining Bee (Andrena flavipes).

Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes), male.

A closer view of the Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes).
Here he is again showing his middle leg which is really hairy!

And this is just a solitary bee of some sort, not enough info in this photo for an ID.

It's not just the Brassicas which are attracting insects, the strawberries are alive with them too!

Which is why this crab spider has been hunting and caught a little fly for dinner.

I thought this was a Grasshopper but I've discovered it's most probably a Common Groundhopper
(Tetrix undulata). Good old insect book. I'd never even heard of a Groundhopper!

It's a great spring for butterflies and I've never seen
a Small Copper (Lycaena phlaeas) early in the year before!

I found this beetle which I'm 99% sure is Malachius bipustulatus.

Malachius bipustulatus - what a sweet little face!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malachius_bipustulatus

Groovy coloured tiny weevil on a currant leaf. I saw them a number of times
on the currants last year, but they don't seem to be doing them any harm.

I will of course do a proper veg patch update when there is anything edible to talk about. :-)

More wildlife sightings

It seems to be lizard season here right now, but unfortunately that means they are easy prey for the cats. One of the rotters brought this beautiful large lizard indoors and dumped it there. My OH yelled at me to get my camera, and when I saw it I couldn't believe it! It measured 4 inches (10cm) from head to the base of its tail. Unfortunately it had lost its tail, not such a big problem as they grow back, but I also saw in some of the close up photos that I took that it had bite marks on it, and a bit of blood. 

Poor thing. We put it back by the steps to the garage under the Euphorbias and just have to hope for the best. It's a Western Green Lizard (Lacerta bilineata) and I've never seen one before, so really surprised to see one here. Apparently their head and body length can reach 5 inches, and up to 16 inches to the tip of the tail! The next day I saw a small one with green colouring under its head so assume it's a young one of this species. That one was OK, thankfully.

Western Green Lizard just after we put it back outside.

It didn't look very happy so I hope it survived.
I didn't want to share the better photos I took which show up the injuries behind the head.

And in other wildlife news:

Tadpoles! More excitement as I haven't seen any here for years.
I also got to test out how a polarising filter really works against reflection!

But to get to the tadpoles I had to pass the ducks on the
narrow path, so they went into frantic nervous preening mode!

Drinker Moth caterpillar (Euthrix potatoria).
I couldn't find the ID myself but I have just joined an excellent insect group
on facebook and I get IDs in minutes, the people there are that good.

Yet to get an ID but this is either a wasp, or a bee that looks like a wasp!
That's a tiny weevil in the background and this activity is all inside a tulip.

A male Orange Tip butterfly (Anthocharis cardamines).
They are hard to capture as they never stay still for long.

Speckled Wood butterfly (Pararge aegeria).

We went back to the Marais de Sougeal last week. By this time the water meadow has been drained although there are a few mini lakes that are permanent, and water channels, streams and ditches, so plenty of water for the water birds that stay here all year round. This time we got to walk along the new path which was no longer flooded and discovered that the hut in the distance was none other than a brand new hide! With windows that open too, shock horror! 

The birds and ducks were very distant but we did clock up yet another Lifer - two Whimbrels (Numenius phaeopus)! They are migratory waders, wintering in Africa and here they are en route to their breeding grounds in the far north. These two could end up in northern Scotland, Iceland, Scandinavia or northern Russia, who knows! 

The path to the new hide. The bank is brand new and has been planted up with shrubs and trees.
I guess eventually we won't have much of a view over the meadow except from the hide.

Rubbish photo because it was so far away but I can't see as clearly
as this through my binocs! A Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus).

I went wandering off looking for bugs amongst the stinging nettles and comfrey that covered the bank between the meadow and the path, and found my first damselfly of the year!

Blue-tailed Damselfly (Ischnura elegans), violet form.
I believe this is an immature female.

After a while it hopped to another blade of grass.
I'm not sure what the red blob is, I wonder if it is an egg of some kind?

Then got fed up with the camera in its face and flitted off further away!

What amazes me is how grass and other plants survive being under water for a month or two then spring back and carry on growing like nothing happened. In the meadow were also many Cardamine pratensis flowers, known as Cuckoo Flower or Lady's Smock. This is one of the food plants for the larvae of Orange Tip butterflies.

Birding around the Gulf of Morbihan

We miss going birding as there are few places near where we live, so when I discovered that the area around the Gulf of Morbihan on the south coast has some nature reserves and marshy places which are good for birding, my mind was made up. It's migratory season right now and all we needed was for the weather forecast to look good. I picked a day, packed a picnic and off we set! We visited three sites, all on the east side of the gulf - the Marais de Duer, not far from Sarzeau, the Salines de Lasné near Saint Armel, and finally the Réserve Naturelle des Marais de Séné. These places are all about 1 hour 50 mins from home which is OK for a full day out, but oh how I wish we had the same kind of sites on the north coast!

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

The first place we visited was the Marais de Duer. Here there are two hides and various pathways leading to them. From where we parked we walked through a mini pine forest and there was a board showing that Black Woodpeckers inhabit this area. This is my most want to see bird, that I have looked for from the Alps to the Pyrenees, in vain! Of course we didn't see one, but almost as good, we saw three Crested Tits - my favourite bird. They were common garden birds visiting our feeders when we lived the other side of France, and we did see a few when we first moved to Chateau Moorhen, but not a one in the last eight years, sadly!

The first hide was a high one with two flights of steps up with a great view over the lagoons. I lugged my dslr around with me just to take landscape shots (and then cursed it for the rest of the day as most of where we visited was flat and I didn't dare leave it in the car). My SX50 superzoom was of course the camera needed to get the bird shots as even a 300mm lens on the dslr is pointless with the birds often being far away.

Just a note - we were very surprised in this first hide to find that all the windows were padlocked shut and we had to shoot through the plastic, which was a nuisance. We then found the same at every single hide, including the ones at the Nature Reserve at Séné. Very annoying, and it also made them rather hot and stuffy instead of nice places to have a good sit down and spend time in. :-(

View from the tall hide at the Marais de Duer taken with my dslr.
On the island are the Spoonbills seen in the picture below.

Not a good shot obviously having seen the distance,
but it was really cool to see these Spoonbills (Platalea leucorodia).

We saw tons of Avocets (Recurvirostra avosetta) both here and later on in the day, so here are a selection of photos of them! I can't remember when I last saw any, although it must have been around the Med.

In the collage below, top left the bird is tending an egg in the nest which is just a scrape in the ground on the island.

Next stop was the Salines de Lasné. A saline is a an area where salt is made in salt pans, but we couldn't see any sign of this. All the salines looked drained and full of mud, the same for the area given over to oyster farming! There is an island very close to the salines which can be reached at low tide and the inhabitants can drive over during this time.

View out to the sea within the Gulf. The tide was coming in.

In terms of water birds there were very few seen here, but the walk along the 'digue' (sea wall) was very interesting for other species. We saw Wheatears, Linnets and for me a very exciting sighting of a Green Hairstreak butterfly (Callophrys rubi). I've only ever seen them 18 years ago in south west France. I wasn't into butterflies back then but who can forget a tiny emerald green butterfly? Unfortunately my photos were rubbish!!

We also saw (and heard!) Zitting Cisticolas and saw a Cattle Egret in a back garden! My photos of the Egret were not very good as it was very distant, but were good enough for a definite ID.

Took a while to ID this pair, but they are Linnets (Carduelis cannabina).
The male however is not in breeding plumage which is the familiar pink chest
and pink top of head. We did see a male with those colours along this walk.
The female at the bottom is collecting nesting material.

This is a male Wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe).
We saw quite a few of them (or the same bird many times!)
I think they are really handsome birds.

We then moved on to the Nature Reserve at Séné. Here there is a visitor centre, picnic tables, toilets and a rooftop observation centre. If you want to visit their hides you have to pay though, but at €5 a head that was pretty reasonable I thought. By this time it was warming up quite a lot as this area is flat and inland a little bit from the main gulf (near a tidal river) and is sheltered from any cooling breezes from the sea.

My OH. Why are those viewing holes always at the wrong height?!
At least this was one place where you can take photos without
annoying plastic windows in front of you!

There were boardwalks leading to the hides (5 in total) and the blackthorn
was in blossom, butterflies were about and it was very pleasant
strolling through these sheltered areas.

Redshank (Tringa totanus)

The next two collaged photos show the two lifers that we saw that day. (A lifer is a bird (or other species) that you see for the first time).

Spotted Redshanks (Tringa erythropus).

Black-tailed Godwits (Limosa limosa).

The most common duck was the Shelduck which was at all the sites we visited. In fact there were very few ducks at all, and we only saw a few Mallards which made a nice change!

Common Shelduck (Tadorna tadorna), a very handsome duck.

Common Shelduck (Tadorna tadorna) - the one on the left is a female.

Lastly, here is a test, dear readers. Who knows what this species is? ;-)

No prizes for guessing, though. Sorry. :-)

All in all, a fabulous day out seeing loads of migratory species. We plan to go back next month. I also found a website of the Friends of this nature reserve with a photo list of all species seen at the reserve, including butterflies, insects, spiders and Odonata (dragon and damselflies). They have such an amazing amount of butterfly species spotted here, including various Fritillaries and something I'd never even heard of which is a Mediterranean species, so I'm planning to go back in September too (once the kids are back at school and tourists gone) for the butterfies and Odonata! :-)

Species seen (not including very common birds):

1.  Shelducks
2.  Black Winged Stilts
3.  Avocets
4.  Spoonbills
5.  Little Egrets
6.  Crested Tits
7.  Blackcap
8.  Chiffchaff
9.  Zitting Cisticolas
10. Linnets
11. Wheatears
12. Cattle Egret 
13. Skylark
14. Black-tailed Godwit
15. Spotted Redshank
16. Redshank
17. Whitethroat (my OH saw it, I didn't)
18. Ringed Plover (possible, it was very distant)

Also heard many Cetti's Warblers.

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