Tuesday 19 February 2013

Slip slidin away

The Safari reckons you can't beat a bit of Mr Simon.
We looked at Patch 2 for no more than 30 seconds today - total haze with no hint of horizon and in the absence of waves and/or ripples we couldn't tell what was sky and what was wet water.
To infinity and beyondddddd
We were on the beach to see if we could see the Limpet. we asked DB where it was found to narrow down the search area. She said it was somewhere here.
We slithered around on the extremely (dangerously) slippery slope with absolutely no success what so ever. The slipperiness is provided by this little Hydroid. It's an animal (or at least a colony of tiny animals)

How hard can it be to find one of the most common shoreline species in the country?
We asked again if it was a small immature animal but no apparently it's an adult. Narrowing the search area further led us here.
Tomorrow we'll find it even if we need help from DB. We'll be on the beach anyway as it's our second Love my Beach beach clean between 1 and 2pm when we'll be heading northwards towards the pier this time. Please join us if you can.
After our slip slidin session we headed off to the nature reserve to add our support to the Public Consultation Event for the lottery bid we are helping develop. Good to see a decent turnout on a weekday afternoon. The next one is tomorrow evening after work so no excuses for not putting your four-penneth worth in - see link on right for details.
After the event ended we met up with some of the birders and had a mooch round. We'd just missed the Bittern and there weren't many gulls on. To be honest we spent more time chatting about the future of the reserve than doing any serious birding. The weather was superb, the afternoon light making the ducks positively glow. The Coot were good value, starting their territorial disputes and have a right old do at each other, sharp clawed yellow feet flying everywhere!
A wander up the top end had Young Un AB beckoning us to hurry. we didn't and saw the briefest bit of a Bittern drop into the reeds at the far end from where we'd just come from. 
Again we hung around and chatted and would you believe it a second Bittern popped up out of the reeds and flew across the mere not far from where we were stood! Very nice to have more than one on site again.
Great to see everyone out enjoying the birds and the sunshine; not so nice to see the handiwork of an unknown number of drunken yobs who had totally trashed the Feeding Station and its hide - arsewipes the lot of em.
Where to next? Some gardening jobs with the Young Uns in the works garden for the first time this year and then back on the beach tomorrow.
In the meantime let us know if summer snuck in to your outback today.
Talking of summer two reports of Small Tortoiseshell butterflies came in today...must be summer!

1 comment:

Warren Baker said...

Nice post today Davyman,
Great to hear about those Bitterns :-)